Thinking Tracks for Integrated Systems Design

The paper investigates systems thinking and systems engineering. After a short literature review, the paper presents, as a means for systems thinking, twelve thinking tracks. The tracks can be used as creativity starter, checklist, and as means to investigate effects of design decisions taken early in the process. Tracks include thinking about time, risk and safety, and different types of life-cycles. The thinking tracks are based on literature, teaching experience and practice as a system designer. By using the tracks a more complete picture of the system under design, the issue to be solved, the context, stakeholders and the rest of the world is created

Agile development for a multi-disciplinary bicycle stability test bench

Agile software development methods are used extensively in the software industry. This paper describes an argument to explain why these methods can be used within a multi-disciplinary project and provides a concrete description on how to implement such a method, using a case-study to support the rationale. The SOFIE (Intelligent Assisted Bicycle) project was created to develop mechatronic appliances to make bicycles more stable, i.e. safer. A bicycle stability test bench is created within this project and is used as the case study for this research. The relative complexity of the test bench development and partner structure within the SOFIE project has many similarities with large-scale complex projects found in industry. Thus it provides a good environment to research the application of Agile software methods to a multi-disciplinary project

A Data-Oriented Approach to Semantic Interpretation

In Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP), an annotated language corpus is used as a stochastic grammar. The most probable analysis of a new input sentence is constructed by combining sub-analyses from the corpus in the most probable way. This approach has been succesfully used for syntactic analysis, using corpora with syntactic annotations such as the Penn Treebank. If a corpus with semantically annotated sentences is used, the same approach can also generate the most probable semantic interpretation of an input sentence. The present paper explains this semantic interpretation method, and summarizes the results of a preliminary experiment. Semantic annotations were added to the syntactic annotations of most of the sentences of the ATIS corpus. A data-oriented semantic interpretation algorithm was succesfully tested on this semantically enriched corpus.Comment: 10 pages, Postscript; to appear in Proceedings Workshop on Corpus-Oriented Semantic Analysis, ECAI-96, Budapes

System Evolution Barriers and How to Overcome Them!

Creating complex systems from scratch is time consuming and costly, therefore a strategy often chosen by companies is to evolve existing systems. Yet evolving a system is also complicated. Complex systems are usually the result of multidisciplinary teams, therefore it is essential to understand barriers those teams face when evolving a system.\ud From the research carried at Philips Healthcare MRI, we have identified that main evolution barriers employees face are; managing system complexity,communication across disciplines and departments, finding the necessary system information, lack of system overview, and ineffective knowledge sharing. Those barriers were identified as the root cause of many development problems and bad decisions.\ud To overcome those barriers, and therefore enhance the evolution process, effective reuse of knowledge is essential. This knowledge must be presented in a fashion that can be understood by a broad set of stakeholders. In this paper system evolution barriers and a method to effectively deal with them, based on the creation of A3 Architecture Overviews, is presented

TRIZ for systems architecting

TRIZ has gained interest over the past decades, as among others expressed by this conference. It is widely used and acknowledged for dealing with technical issues on component level. However, decisions on system level have a much greater impact than those on component level. Thus it is worthwhile to investigate applying TRIZ early in the design process. The article explores the benefits of and possibilities for applying TRIZ in the architecting phase. For this, system architecting is treated in short. An architecting approach presented earlier will be treated and elaborated upon. This approach connects the customer's key drivers with functions to be performed. This approach provides leads for integrating TRIZ in the system architecting phase. These will be discussed in detail as the main subject of the paper. Examples, conclusions and ideas for future work complete the paper

Enhancing Student Learning with Brain-Based Research

This paper discusses brain-based learning and its relation to classroom instruction. A growing quantity of research currently exists regarding how the brain perceives, processes, and ultimately learns new information. In order to maximize their teaching efficacy, educators should have a basic understanding of key memory functions in the brain, and how these functions relate to student learning. In this paper, the author surveys current literature to identify foundational instructional strategies that are supported by brain-based research. A Microsoft PowerPoint© presentation is included that is intended for use at an in-service training with the goal of providing participants with (1) an overview of research findings with respect to the information processing and memory functions of the brain, and (2) overarching areas of instructional strategies that are supported by current research. The presentation is designed for use by educators and others involved in direct instruction in both primary and secondary education

The engineers’ innovation toolkit

Most engineers nowadays receive a mono-disciplinary education: Mechanical engineering, Electrical engineering etc. Contradictory, the products they have to design are ever more multidisciplinary and integrated. This requires a different mindset. This paper discusses four tools that fit in the engineers’ toolkit to approach these multidisciplinary problems: TRIZ, Systematic Inventive Thinking, Quality Function Deployment and FunKey Architecting. The tools are discussed and rated on four scales: difficulty of problems, complexity of problems, design phase and learning effort. From the characterization a set of heuristics is derived that help in choosing the appropriate tool from the toolkit.\ud \ud It is concluded that the four tools largely complement each other and should therefore be part of every engineer's toolkit.\u

System design of a litter collecting robot

Litter in public places is a serious problem. Not only because of the obvious dirtiness, but also because litter attracts more litter and can cause the winding down of an area leading to large negative financial and social consequences. To avoid this, public areas have been kept clean by humans. In this paper, we apply systems architecting and engineering techniques and among others a tool from TRIZ in a multidisciplinary student project. Goal is to develop a Litter Collecting Robot for operation in public places. Through an investigation of the litter problem and subsequent development of a product vision, we plan four scenarios for robotic cleaning. The paper treats the litter problem, the architecting phase, and will show innovative technical details, including a working integrated result: a proof of principle of the robot. The project was executed by students from various disciplines, supervised by two University staff members. On a meta-level –regarding systems design and engineering– the combination of systems architecting and engineering principles, TRIZ tools, FunKey architecting and multidisciplinary communication will be treated