Using a Requirements Modelling Language to Co-Design Intelligent Support for People Living with Dementia

Context and motivation: this research developed a new AI application to support people with dementia to maintain quality of life. Problem: the research explored methods for co-designing models of goals that users of an AI application will seek to achieve. Principal result: An effective co-design method for enabling domain experts to externalize and validate expertise about dementia care. Contribution: A co-design goal modelling method effective with dementia care workers, but still untested with experts in other domains

Performance of twin two-dimensional wedge nozzles including thrust vectoring and reversing effects at speeds up to Mach 2.20

Transonic tunnel and supersonic pressure tunnel tests were reformed to determine the performance characteristics of twin nonaxisymmetric or two-dimensional nozzles with fixed shrouds and variable-geometry wedges. The effects of thrust vectoring, reversing, and installation of various tails were also studied. The investigation was conducted statically and at flight speeds up to a Mach number of 2.20. The total pressure ratio of the simulated jet exhaust was varied up to approximately 26 depending on Mach number. The Reynolds number per meter varied up to 13.20 x 1 million. An analytical study was made to determine the effect on calculated wave drag by varying the mathematical model used to simulate nozzle jet-exhaust plume

Human Activity Modelling in the Specification of Operational Requirements: Work in Progress

This paper describes our experience of integrating HCI concepts and techniques into a concurrent requirements engineering process called RESCUE. We focus on the use of a model of current human activity to inform specification of a future system. We show how human activity descriptions, written using a specially designed template, can facilitate the authoring of use case descriptions to be used in the elicitation of requirements for complex socio-technical systems. We describe our experience of using descriptions of human activity, written using the template, to support specification of operational requirements for DMAN, a system to support air traffic controllers in managing the departure of aircraft from airports. We end with a discussion of lessons learnt from our experience and present some ideas for future development of work in this area

Creativity and conceptual modeling for requirements engineering

Creativity techniques have been applied to Requirements Engineering (RE) in order to find novel requirements, facilitating system and business innovation. Creativity has typically been applied to RE as part of an intensive, often multi-day workshop. Ideas are generated and recorded in a free-form, manual fashion, with much guidance from experienced human facilitators. Although this format has been successful, economic, time, and geographical pressures make this intensive process less feasible. The free-form representation of creative output (text and informal diagrams) provides flexibility in order to support creative thought, but the output of this form is not able to take advantage of much of the (semi-) automated analysis developed for RE, including trade-off analysis. In this work we address two major challenges 1) the limitations of existing creativity RE workshops, particularly their costliness and need for expert guidance, and 2) capturing creative output in a structured form, better amenable to (semi-) automated analysis and downstream development. We address these as part of a 2-3 year project focusing on integrating RE creativity techniques with conceptual modeling techniques such as goal modeling, with a focus on developing online, distributed creative support tools for RE

Supporting creative RE with i∗

Successful software must be both useful and innovative. Techniques for Requirements Engineering (RE) have mainly focused on utility, with a prominent body of work using goal modeling and analysis to ensure that systems meet user goals. However, these techniques are not designed to foster creativity, meaning that resulting systems may be functionally useful but not sufficiently innovative. Further work has focused on applying creativity techniques for RE through workshops. However, the free-form representation of creative workshop outputs (text and informal diagrams), although flexible, is not grounded in user goals, or able to take advantage of goal model analysis, e.g., trade-off analysis. Furthermore, successfully conducting a creative RE workshop requires much experience and soft-skills, as well as a significant economic commitment. In this work, we summarize initial progress aiming to combine goal modeling and creativity techniques for enhanced RE. We focus on methods and tools for introducing creative ideas to goal modeling, and grounding creative outputs in goal-oriented models. Our focus on tooling and methods help to alleviate the need for expert-lead, costly workshops. We outline and illustrate proposed methods

Stimulating Stakeholders’ Imagination: New Creativity Triggers for Eliciting Novel Requirements

Requirements engineering is a creative process in which stakeholders and engineers work together to create ideas for new products, services and systems. Several techniques have proved to be effective for eliciting creative requirements. Yet, most of these techniques are heavy to implement and require long periods of time to be applied correctly. Few lightweight creativity techniques have been developed for use in requirements engineering. One such lightweight technique is the creativity trigger, which provides simple guidance to stakeholders and engineers to help produce creative requirements. While easy to apply, creativity triggers were derived informally from experience of practitioners and have not been validated in a systematic way. This paper reports design and preliminary validation research, that sought to provide empirical foundations for a more complete set of lightweight creativity triggers, to be used by stakeholders and engineers to quickly and simply generate new and useful requirements on products, services and systems

Creative Goal Modeling for Innovative Requirements

Context: When determining the functions and qualities (a.k.a. requirements) for a system, creativity is key to drive innovation and foster business success. However, creative requirements must be practically operationalized, grounded in concrete functions and system interactions. Requirements Engineering (RE) has produced a wealth of methods centered around goal modeling, in order to graphically explore the space of alternative requirements, linking functions to goals and dependencies. In parallel work, creativity theories from the social sciences have been applied to the design of creative requirements workshops, pushing stakeholders to develop innovative systems. Goal models tend to focus on what is known, while creativity workshops are expensive, require a specific skill set to facilitate, and produce mainly paper-based, unstructured outputs. Objective: Our aim in this work is to explore beneficial combinations of the two areas of work in order to overcome these and other limitations, facilitating creative requirements elicitation, supported by a simple extension of a well-known and structured requirements modeling technique. Method: We take a Design Science approach, iterating over exploratory studies, design, and summative validation studies. Results: The result is the Creative Leaf tool and method supporting creative goal modeling for RE. Conclusion: We support creative RE by making creativity techniques more accessible, producing structured digital outputs which better match to existing RE methods with associated analysis procedures and transformations

Genealogical typing of Neisseria meningitidis

Despite the increasing popularity of multilocus sequence typing (MLST), the most appropriate method for characterizing bacterial variation and facilitating epidemiological investigations remains a matter of debate. Here, we propose that different typing schemes should be compared on the basis of their power to infer clonal relationships and investigate the utility of sequence data for genealogical reconstruction by exploiting new statistical tools and data from 20 housekeeping loci for 93 isolates of the bacterial pathogen Neisseria meningitidis. Our analysis demonstrated that all but one of the hyperinvasive isolates established by multilocus enzyme electrophoresis and MLST were grouped into one of six genealogical lineages, each of which contained substantial variation. Due to the confounding effect of recombination, evolutionary relationships among these lineages remained unclear, even using 20 loci. Analyses of the seven loci in the standard MLST scheme using the same methods reproduced this classification, but were unable to support finer inferences concerning the relationships between the members within each complex

Introducing creativity techniques and software apps to the care of people with dementia

This poster reports research to introduce creative problem solving techniques and software to the care for people with dementia in residential homes

Informing the specification of a large-scale socio-technical system with models of human activity

In this paper, we present our experience of using rich and detailed models of human activity in an existing socio-technical system in the domain of air traffic control to inform a use case-based specification of an enhanced future system, called DMAN. This work was carried out as part of a real project for Eurocontrol, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation. We describe, in outline, the kinds of models we used, and present some examples of the ways in which these models influenced the specification of use cases and requirements for the future system. We end with a discussion of lessons learnt