Boundary Objects and their Use in Agile Systems Engineering

Agile methods are increasingly introduced in automotive companies in the attempt to become more efficient and flexible in the system development. The adoption of agile practices influences communication between stakeholders, but also makes companies rethink the management of artifacts and documentation like requirements, safety compliance documents, and architecture models. Practitioners aim to reduce irrelevant documentation, but face a lack of guidance to determine what artifacts are needed and how they should be managed. This paper presents artifacts, challenges, guidelines, and practices for the continuous management of systems engineering artifacts in automotive based on a theoretical and empirical understanding of the topic. In collaboration with 53 practitioners from six automotive companies, we conducted a design-science study involving interviews, a questionnaire, focus groups, and practical data analysis of a systems engineering tool. The guidelines suggest the distinction between artifacts that are shared among different actors in a company (boundary objects) and those that are used within a team (locally relevant artifacts). We propose an analysis approach to identify boundary objects and three practices to manage systems engineering artifacts in industry

On Artifacts in Nonlinear Dynamics

Nonlinear oscillations are of permanent interest in the field of dynamics of mechanical and mechatronical systems. There exist several well-known semi-analytical methods like Harmonic Balance, perturbation analysis or multiple scales for such problems. We reconsider in our presentation the method of Harmonic Balance but add some additional steps in order to avoid artifacts and get information about the stability. The classical method of Harmonic Balance is therefore added by an error criterion, which considers the neglected terms. Looking on this error for increasing ansatz orders, it can be decided whether a solution exists or is an artifact of the method. For the low error solutions, a stability analysis is performed. As example, an extended Duffing oscillator with additional nonlinear damping and excitation is considered showing regions of separated island solutions. Also a nonlinear piezo-beam energy harvesting system is investigated. The described method enables to calculate solutions in a rapid manner with comparable low effort, to get an overview over regular responses of nonlinear systems.DFG, 253161314, Untersuchung des nichtlinearen dynamischen Verhaltens von stochastisch erregten Energy Harvesting Systemen mittels Lösung der Fokker-Planck-Gleichun

Exponential reduction of finite volume effects with twisted boundary conditions

Flavor-twisted boundary conditions can be used for exponential reduction of finite volume artifacts in flavor-averaged observables in lattice QCD calculations with $SU(N_f)$ light quark flavor symmetry. Finite volume artifact reduction arises from destructive interference effects in a manner closely related to the phase averaging which leads to large $N_c$ volume independence. With a particular choice of flavor-twisted boundary conditions, finite volume artifacts for flavor-singlet observables in a hypercubic spacetime volume are reduced to the size of finite volume artifacts in a spacetime volume with periodic boundary conditions that is four times larger.Comment: 18 pages, no figure