The DESARC method: an effective approach for university-industry cooperation

Achieving excellence in software development techniques is an important issue for the organizations that develop advanced software-intensive products. Within this context, software excellence is defined as the adoption of advanced software techniques and methods to cope with the complexity and the needs of modern software systems. However, this is not trivial due to the rapidly changing software technology, continuously increasing existence of large and complex software systems and difficulty in following the developments of the state-of-the-art in computer science. This paper focuses on the last aspect. To overcome this problem, it is necessary to define new ways for efficient university-software industry cooperation since advancements in computer science are largely carried out by universities. The existing university-industry cooperation methods are usually triggered after writing grant proposals to financing organizations and passing through strict selection processes. This is, in general, a very inefficient and tedious process to undertake. Even in a perfect review process, many good ideas may not go through simply because they do not fulfill the necessary procedural requirements. Moreover, industrial people may not be familiar with the methods and jargon used in the selection processes. Even if a project is approved, many times it does not result in a technology transfer to industry since accomplishing academic results is the main objective of such projects. This paper presents an overview of a pilot implementation of our approach termed as “Describe, Search and Acquire the Required Capability” (DESARC), which aims at establishing a more effective identification of research projects, allocation of these research projects to research groups and the cooperation between universities and industry. We discuss the results of the application of the method to two large IT companies in Turkey

Full-Scale Physical Simulator of All SiC Traction Motor Drive With Onboard Supercapacitor ESS for Light-Rail Public Transportation

This article deals with the design and laboratory implementation of a full-scale physical simulator of an all-silicon carbide (SiC) traction motor drive for light-rail transit systems (LRTS) with onboard supercapacitor energy storage system (ESS). It consists of a pulsewidth modulation (PWM) rectifier representing the 750 V dc catenary line, a three-phase two-level PWM traction inverter to drive a three-phase squirrel-cage traction motor, a flywheel coupled to the motor shaft to represent the dynamic behavior of the transportation vehicle, a loading generator connected to the grid via a dc-link converter with active front-end, and a supercapacitor ESS containing a bidirectional dc-dc converter supplied from the common dc link. The PWM rectifier, a traction inverter, and a bidirectional dc-dc converter are all SiC power MOSFET-based converters for high efficiency and high power density. A physical simulator is a valuable tool in the design and testing of all SiC converters. It is equipped with software programs for a catenary model, rail track model, and vehicle model, and permits the performance verification of various control, modulation, and energy-saving strategies. The physical simulator system developed in this article also allows the performance verification of a vehicle formation on a prespecified real track and evaluation of benefits of the onboard supercapacitor ESS in real time