1,343 research outputs found
The discipline of Natural Design
If we define design work as those cognitive and practical things to which designers give their valuable effort, then our Natural Design framework allows the recording and replaying of design work. Natural Design provides a meta-structural framework that has developed through our observations of engineering design in safety and mission critical industries, such as aircraft design. Our previous work has produced parametrisable models of design work for software intensive systems, and we now look to make an initial assessment of our natural design framework for its fit to the more creative design practices. In this paper we briefly sketch the framework and subsequently attempt to locate ‘creativity’ in it. We find that, although there are good strong hooks for what the designer does, we are forced to find a role for the community of the designer in the creative process in our framework, something that was only implicit in our previous work.
Keywords:
Natural design; Engineering design; Creativity</p
Designing an online part-time Master of Philosophy with Problem Oriented Engineering
The paper reports on the application of Problem Oriented Engineering (POE) to the design of a highly innovative post-graduate research programme for the Open University, UK, a world leader in supported distance higher education. The new programme, to be launched in October 2009, is a part-time Master of Philosophy (MPhil) to be delivered entirely at a distance, supported by a blend of synchronous, asynchronous and immersive internet and web technologies. POE is a framework for engineering design under development at the Open University. After a brief description of the project and the task at hand, the paper discusses the overall engineering approach taken, key aspects of product design, the mapping between requirements and technology, and the development of one key technological component
A phenomenal basis for hybrid modelling
This work in progress extends the new mechanical philosophy from science to engineering. Engineering is the practice of organising the design and construction of artifices that satisfy needs in real-world contexts. This work shows how artifices can be described in terms of their mechanisms and composed through their observable phenomena.
Typically, the engineering of real system requires descrip- tions in many different languages: software components will be described in code; sensors and actuators in terms of their physical and electronic characteristics; plant in terms of differ- ential equations, perhaps. Another aspect of this work, then, to construct a formal framework so that diverse description languages can be used to characterise sub-mechanisms.
The work is situated in Problem Oriented Engineering, a design theoretic framework engineering defined by the first two authors
Safety Engineering with COTS components
Safety-critical systems are becoming more widespread, complex and reliant on software. Increasingly they are engineered through Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) (Commercial Off The Shelf) components to alleviate the spiralling costs and development time, often in the context of complex supply chains.
A parallel increased concern for safety has resulted in a variety of safety standards, with a growing consensus that a safety life cycle is needed which is fully integrated with the design and development life cycle, to ensure that safety has appropriate influence on the design decisions as system development progresses.
In this article we explore the application of an integrated approach to safety engineering in which assurance drives the engineering process. The paper re- ports on the outcome of a case study on a live industrial project with a view to evaluate: its suitability for application in a real-world safety engineering setting; its benefits and limitations in counteracting some of the difficulties of safety en- gineering with COTS components across supply chains; and, its effectiveness in generating evidence which can contribute directly to the construction of safety cases
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An algebra of high level petri nets
PhD ThesisPetri nets were introduced by C.A. Petri as a theoretical model of concurrency in which the causal
relationship between actions, rather than just their temporal ordering, can be represented. As
a theoretical model of concurrency, Petri nets have been widely successful. Moreover, Petri nets
are popular with practitioners, providing practical tools for the designer and developer of real
concurrent and distributed systems.
However, it is from this second context that perhaps the most widely voiced criticism of Petri
nets comes. It is that Petri nets lack any algebraic structure or modularity, and this results in
large, unstructured models of real systems, which are consequently often intractable. Although
this is not a criticism of Petri nets per se, but rather of the uses to which Petri nets are put, the
criticism is well taken.
We attempt to answer this criticism in this work. To do this we return to the view of Petri nets
as a model of concurrency and consider how other models of concurrency counter this objection.
The foremost examples are then the synchronisation trees of Milner, and the traces of Hoare,
(against which such criticism is rarely, if ever, levelled). The difference between the models is
clear, and is to be found in the richness of the algebraic characterisations which have been made
for synchronisation trees in Milner's Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS), and for traces
in Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP).
With this in mind we define, in this thesis, a class of high level Petri nets, High Level Petri Boxes,
and provide for them a very general algebraic description language, the High Level Petri Box
Algebra, with novel ideas for synchronisation, and including both refinement and recursion among
its operators. We also begin on the (probably open-ended task of the) algebraic characterisation
of High Level Petri Boxes.
The major contribution of this thesis is a full behavioural characterisation of the High Level Petri
Boxes which form the semantic domain of the algebra. Other contributions are: a very general
method of describing communication protocols which extend the synchronisation algebras of
Winskel; a recursive operator that preserves finiteness of state (the best possible, given the
generality of the algebra); a refinement operator that is syntactic in nature, and for which the
recursive construct is a behavioural fix-point; and a notion of behavioural equivalence which is
a congruence with respect to a major part of the High Level Petri Box Algebra
Towards a design theoretic characterisation of software development process models
Effective assessment, comparison, selection and adaptation of software development processes remain an acute problem in Software Engineering practice. The quest for a unified theory which might serve this purpose is ongoing. Objective: To take a first step towards such a theory, with focus on characterising and comparing features of software development process models. Method: We consider a theory of design as problem solving and investigate how it can be applied to characterise and explicate specific process features in well known process models from the literature. The intention is to characterise emerging trade-offs between resource expenditure and risk mitigation, which result from the interplay between process efforts into problem and solution exploration vs. stakeholder validation. The analysis, at this point performed, is purely qualitative, and the treatment of resource expenditure and risk quite abstract. Results: We provide an initial characterisation and comparison of features found in a wide range of process models from the literature, within a design theoretic framework using a single building block -- the Problem Oriented Engineering (POE) Process Pattern -- that allows the characterisation of information flow, the relationship between actors, resource usage and developmental risk. Conclusions: The initial characterisation identifies repeated structure in diverse processes, which allows basic process comparison across models. The interpretations are modular, allowing the possibility of relationships between different process models to be explored. As such, the theory allows for a unified means to characterise and compare systematically key features of different process models. In being of an exploratory nature, the work has a number of limitations, which should be addressed by further research
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Parametrising a theory of software problem solving
We explore what can be said about the detailed modelling of problem solving ability via a stochastic semantics of a theory of software problem solving, and end with an invitation to discuss possible experiments that may lead to the practical characterisation of the problem solving ability of software teams
An Examination of Efficiency Level Variations for Bus Services
Currently, adult higher education software engineering pedagogy isolates the student in a controlled environment during delivery, with application of their learning temporally distant from their professional practice. Delivering software engineering teaching that is immediately relevant to professional practice remains an open challenge. In this paper, we discuss a new pedagogical model which addresses this problem by embedding the validation of the student’s learning within their rich professional context. We discuss our experience of applying the model to the design and delivery of a new post-graduate software development module, a core component in our new software engineering Masters qualification at the Open University, UK, a market leader in adult higher education at a distance
A problem-oriented theory of pattern-oriented analysis and design
The overall goal of this work is to provide problem-oriented support for Pattern-Oriented Analysis and Design (POAD) so that (i) we may construct a better understanding of the relationship of POAD to other software development approaches and (ii) we can extend the reach of problem-orientation to design patterns. This paper extends our previous contributions to show how both high-level and detailed design phases can be given a problem-oriented encoding
Towards process design for efficient organisational problem solving
This paper presents initial results on stochastic business process modelling. We interpret business processes as problem solving processes to show that certain trade-offs in stakeholder involvement can usefully be analysed. Our initial results illustrate the analytic potential of our stochastic model, which could be useful to business process analysts and designers. We show that our approach can be used to model and reason about business process resource usage. To support process improvement, and to help design process models enriched with relevant, measurable and comparable characteristics, we embed our business process modelling efforts in Problem Oriented Engineering, where we benefit from a systematic approach to problem solving
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