Educating for Change

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework was adopted by every member state of the United Nations in 2015, and, albeit not legally binding, it is arguably one of the greatest steps of humanity to address the identified problems of our time, covering a wide range of topics such as environmental protection, equal opportunities, education, eradication of diseases, famine, poverty, slavery and child labour. Both in terms of its comprehensive scope and its worldwide support, this framework arguably represents one of the most significant international frameworks in human history. Using education related examples from a charity project that is concerned with the development of a local health care system in the African rain forest in Cameroon, this paper illustrates how projects can and should implement key aspects of the SDGs framework pre-emptively within their scope, i.e. at the local level, prior to and in support of the full, legally binding implementation of the framework at the national level. This not only helps to make our world a better place, but also very concretely to reduce project risks, create funding opportunities and make the project’s deliverables more sustainable. The ‘Mahola Project’ (‘Mahola’ means ‘Aid’ in the local Bassa language) was founded in 2013 – following an exploration trip to Cameroon in order to assess the real needs of the population in the deprived area around the village Siliyegue – as a response to meet these needs. The main objective of the project is the development and deployment of a sustainable, integrated, local health care system that is fully aligned with the SDGs and brings about dramatic improvements for the quality of life of the people living there; far beyond ‘just’ providing health care and work opportunities. Education is at the core of the necessary efforts to successfully deliver this system, changing minds and hearts

Educating for Change

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework was adopted by every member state of the United Nations in 2015, and, albeit not legally binding, it is arguably one of the greatest steps of humanity to address the identified problems of our time, covering a wide range of topics such as environmental protection, equal opportunities, education, eradication of diseases, famine, poverty, slavery and child labour. Both in terms of its comprehensive scope and its worldwide support, this framework arguably represents one of the most significant international frameworks in human history. Using education related examples from a charity project that is concerned with the development of a local health care system in the African rain forest in Cameroon, this paper illustrates how projects can and should implement key aspects of the SDGs framework pre-emptively within their scope, i.e. at the local level, prior to and in support of the full, legally binding implementation of the framework at the national level. This not only helps to make our world a better place, but also very concretely to reduce project risks, create funding opportunities and make the project’s deliverables more sustainable. The ‘Mahola Project’ (‘Mahola’ means ‘Aid’ in the local Bassa language) was founded in 2013 – following an exploration trip to Cameroon in order to assess the real needs of the population in the deprived area around the village Siliyegue – as a response to meet these needs. The main objective of the project is the development and deployment of a sustainable, integrated, local health care system that is fully aligned with the SDGs and brings about dramatic improvements for the quality of life of the people living there; far beyond ‘just’ providing health care and work opportunities. Education is at the core of the necessary efforts to successfully deliver this system, changing minds and hearts

The local implementation of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals by an international charity project in Africa

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG) framework was signed by virtually every nation on earth in 2015 and addresses topics ranging from environmental protection; via equal opportunities, education and the eradication of diseases; to overcoming famine, poverty, slavery and child labor. The UN SDG framework arguably represents – both in terms of its scope and its worldwide support – one of the most significant internationalframeworks in human history. International projects should not only be aware of the UN SDG in general and the intended national implementations of the framework by the different countries in which each project operates; but they should ensure that they implement themselves relevant key goals of the framework and contribute to the achievement of the national commitments by the countries they operate in. Apart from helping to improve the world we are living in, this will help to significantly reduce project risks, secure funding opportunities from both governmental and nongovernmentalorganizations, and bring about more sustainable solutions as project deliverables. Using the example of a charity project that is concerned with the development of a local health care system in a deprived region of Cameroon, this paper illustrates a pre-emptive implementation of certain key aspects of the UN SDG framework at the local level, prior to and in support of the anticipated full implementation of the framework at the national level by Cameroon

Development of OntEIR framework to support BIM clients in construction

This paper discusses an ongoing research that is conducted to develop a framework that will support employers in making informed and sound decision in defining their requirements. The aim of this research is to develop an ontology-based, BIM enabled framework for EIR (OntEIR), it will examine the ability of this framework in capturing, analysing, and translating these requirements based on an ontology model. This framework will enable the project team to capture requirements and convert them to constructional terms understood by all stakeholders. It is the contention of this research that this process will save time, effort and cost, and will provide an informed basis for delivering a successful project that satisfies both the employer and the supply chain

Replacing target setting by value models in the ‘house of quality’ for value-based requirements specifications

Setting targets for engineering characteristics (ECs) is common practice in the ‘house of quality’ for establishing requirements specifications. However, if deployed arbitrarily, this practice is prone to errors and can often yield irrational results. Three potential methodological problems have been identified, regarding the setting of independent targets for each EC, setting fixed targets, and cascading down targets from the system level to the component level have been identified. In this paper, targets are categorized as constraints and goals because of their different implications for value trade-offs. Then, a ‘multi-attribute utility theory’ based approach is proposed, in which a system value model is developed in order to replace the setting of targets for system ECs and component value models are further derived to replace the setting of targets for component ECs. These value models enhance the traditional approach to requirements specification so that value-based requirements specifications can be developed. A case study is deployed to demonstrate the applicability of the approach in the civilian aerospace context for the development of requirements for commercial aircraft. The benefits of the proposed approach are twofold: a) value becomes an explicit construct, and b) value can be rationally modelled and simulated in the ‘house of quality’ in order to establish value-based requirements specifications. Furthermore, identified methodological problems in terms of setting EC targets at any level are mitigated

OntoSoS.CM: A business process architecture driven and semantically enriched change management framework for systems of systems engineering

Abstract— The emergence of Systems of Systems (SoS)arrangements, with their high level of complexity, mainly due to the different characteristics of the individual systems and their integration into the respective SoS, has brought about new challenges in terms of Configuration Management (CM) in general, and change management in particular. Novel change management frameworks are needed to appropriately address these challenges simultaneously both at the level of individual systems and at the SoS level. To address these challenges, there has been a call for a major paradigm shift, by proposing state-of-the-artapproaches that target the investigation of new frameworks,which align various CM activities with newly proposed Systems Engineering (SE) models (i.e. SoSE models). So far, the adopted change management frameworks have been applied for managing changes to software and IT services in complex monolithic system environments only, but they have not been widely proposed to be applied on entire SoS arrangements. This paper introduces an ongoing research that aims to propose a novel approach, by investigating the potential of using ontology-driven models combined with a formal Business Process Architecture (BPA)approach and in particular, Riva, in driving the development of a generic semantically enriched change management framework for the software engineering life cycle of SoS, namely the OntoSoS.CM framework

A value-focused approach for establishing requirements specification of commercial aircraft

Although systems engineering processes and standards are widely used in aircraft development programs, traditional requirements’ engineering practice for commercial aircraft does not explicitly address value perceptions and associated information. In this paper, a value-focused approach is proposed to promote a better understanding of customer-value perceptions and their derivation among different levels for value-based requirements engineering of commercial aircraft. The approach is a four-step process starting from initial customer statements to a customer-value model and leading to a system-value model with associated component-value models. A set of theories and methods are introduced in order to resolve different aspects of the approach regarding the appropriate understanding of customer-value perceptions and the establishment of the value-based requirements’ specification. A case study is used to demonstrate the transformation of airlines’ initial expectation statements into three types of value models. There are two significant benefits of this approach: (a) perceived customer value can be explicitly modeled, simulated, and derived into different levels of the system development and (b) the value model can be subsequently utilized reactively for design evaluations and proactively for design optimization to generate creative design alternatives

Understanding airlines' value perceptions for value-based requirements engineering of commercial aircraft

Although Systems Engineering (SE) processes and standards are widely used in aircraft development programs, traditional requirements engineering practice for commercial aircraft does not explicitly address value perceptions and related, relevant information. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to promote a better understanding of customer value perceptions for value-based requirements engineering. The approach is a four-step process leading from initial customer statements to component value models. A set of theories and methods is introduced in order to resolve the different concerns regarding the appropriate understanding of customer value perceptions, and based on these, the establishment of the requirements. A case study is used that shows the transformation of airlines’ initial expectation statements into a corresponding group value model, which supports the first two steps of the approach. The benefits of this approach are that perceived customer value can be explicitly qualified and quantified; and subsequently used reactively for design evaluation, and proactively for value-driven design