COMPASS: An Ada based scheduler

COMPASS is a generic scheduling system developed by McDonnell Douglas and funded by the Software Technology Branch of NASA Johnson Space Center. The motivation behind COMPASS is to illustrate scheduling technology and provide a basis from which custom scheduling systems can be built. COMPASS was written in Ada to promote readability and to conform to DOD standards. COMPASS has some unique characteristics that distinguishes it from commercial products. This paper discusses these characteristics and uses them to illustrate some differences between scheduling tools

Remanufacturing: a key strategy for sustainable development

Remanufacturing is a process of bringing used products to "like-new" functional state with warranty to match. It recovers a substantial proportion of the resource incorporated in a used product in its first manufacture, at low additional cost, thus reducing the price of the resulting product. The key remanufacturing problem is the ambiguity in its definition leading to paucity of knowledge and research in the process. Also, few remanufacturing tools and techniques have been developed to improve its efficiency and effectiveness. This paper addresses these issues by describing the findings of in-depth UK case studies, including, a robust remanufacturing definition and an analytic model of the generic remanufacturing business process for improving remanufacturing knowledge and expertise

CoolBeans: Using Technology to Encourage Real-World Informal Interaction

Informal interaction is considered an important part of the work ethic and process in business and academia. We found that the new facilities for a computer science department at the University of Southampton were not conducive to this, and designed a technology-based solution to improve social awareness and encourage interaction using a presence-aware application and web interface. Users could use the system to find out who was taking a break and to invite others to do so. Initial results suggest that the project both encouraged social activity and became a popular fixture in the area on which efforts were focused

COMPASS: A general purpose computer aided scheduling tool

COMPASS is a generic scheduling system developed by McDonnell Douglas under the direction of the Software Technology Branch at JSC. COMPASS is intended to illustrate the latest advances in scheduling technology and provide a basis from which custom scheduling systems can be built. COMPASS was written in Ada to promote readability and to conform to potential NASA Space Station Freedom standards. COMPASS has some unique characteristics that distinguishes it from commercial products. These characteristics are discussed and used to illustrate some differences between scheduling tools

An Examination of Significant Issues in Naval Maintenance

AbstractThis paper summarises qualitative research undertaken within the “In-Service” stage of the lifecycle of Royal Navy surface ships and submarines. Whilst In-Service, Royal Navy vessels will typically cycle through three phases, i.e. Tasking, Upkeep and Regeneration. A series of semi-structured recorded interviews conducted with key stakeholders in each phase identifies and highlights common issues encountered whilst In-Service. Having identified common issues, e.g. risk, obsolescence, manpower availability, etc. additional interviews were undertaken to triangulate the results with other safety critical companies operating and maintaining complex systems, i.e. a power company operating an advanced gas-cooled nuclear reactor, rail infrastructure and Europe's largest regional airline