Practicum of Systems Integration in Engineering Education

This project asked engineering students to develop a multi-subsystem design that would produce electricity. Students over the duration of this project learned how to simulate and design systems theoretically using computer tools. Furthermore, students were expected to produce a prototype of their model, thereby self-analyzing the practicality levels and enhancing learning. With the technology available to students advancing, systems integration techniques become more efficient learning experiences to the students. The benefits of systems integration can also be expanded to the professional world these students will soon step into. Therefore, teaching these techniques now will give students a better further insight on real world experience in a classroom setting. When students make the expected leap into the job market, it is important for them to have a solid understanding of system integration and multi-system design. It is this understanding that will make students more desirable to top end employers and set them apart form their peers.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Viking lander design and systems integration

Malfunction protection requires redundancy planning and mechanization in Viking lander design and systems integration in order to maximize the chance of getting the data back through the Orbiter. Various subsystems are discussed that protect the downlink to man on the ground in the framework of systems integration and insure the basic objectives of Viking: to land on a planet and to acquire data from its surface

Avionics systems integration technology

A very dramatic and continuing explosion in digital electronics technology has been taking place in the last decade. The prudent and timely application of this technology will provide Army aviation the capability to prevail against a numerically superior enemy threat. The Army and NASA have exploited this technology explosion in the development and application of avionics systems integration technology for new and future aviation systems. A few selected Army avionics integration technology base efforts are discussed. Also discussed is the Avionics Integration Research Laboratory (AIRLAB) that NASA has established at Langley for research into the integration and validation of avionics systems, and evaluation of advanced technology in a total systems context

Integration and Conventional Systems at STAR

At the beginning of the design and construction of the STAR Detector, the collaboration assigned a team of physicists and engineers the responsibility of coordinating the construction of the detector. This group managed the general space assignments for each sub-system and coordinated the assembly and planning for the detector. Furthermore, as this group was the only STAR group with the responsibility of looking at the system as a whole, the collaboration assigned it several tasks that spanned the different sub-detectors. These items included grounding, rack layout, cable distribution, electrical, power and water, and safety systems. This paper describes these systems and their performance.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures, Contribution to a NIM Volume Dedicated to the Detectors and the Accelerator at RHI

Evaluating the integration of supply chain information systems: A case study

Supply chain management (SCM) is the integrated management of business links, information flows and people. It is with this frame of reference that information systems integration from both intra- and inter-organisational levels becomes significant. Enterprise application integration (EAI) has emerged as software technologies to address the issue of integrating the portfolio of SCM components both within organisations and through cross-enterprises. EAI is based on a diversity of integration technologies (e.g. message brokers, ebXML) that differ in the type and level of integration they offer. However, none of these technologies claim to be a panacea to overcoming all integration problems but rather, need to be pieced together to support the linking of diverse applications that often exist within supply chains. In exploring the evaluation of supply chain integration, the authors propose a framework for evaluating the portfolio of integration technologies that are used to unify inter-organisational and intra-organisational information systems. The authors define and classify the permutations of information systems available according to their characteristics and integration requirements. These, classifications of system types are then adopted as part of the evaluation framework and empirically tested within a case study

A conceptual model of enterprise application integration in higher education institutions

Copyright @ 2013 EMCIS.It is eminent that several applications’ systems are deployed at different levels in Higher Education (HE), ranging from academic and administrative to staff and students record systems. Many of these systems suffer from different problems due to the lack of integration such as data redundancy, inconsistency and maintenance cost. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) can provide substantial benefits to these systems, such as assisting with business process integration, facilitating e-service based transformation and supporting collaborative decision-making. However, some factors that influence EAI adoption process in HE will be defined. This paper introduces a conceptual model to explain the outcome of using EAI in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Analyzing the combination of the existing classification of EAI factors with the HE factors will enhance the implementation of EAI in HEI at both organizational and operational levels. A pilot study at King Abdulaziz University (KAU), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will be presented in this paper to show that the integration of the multiple information systems gives an integrated view to facilitate information access and reuse. Moreover data from different information systems is combined to gain a more comprehensive basis to satisfy the educational needs

Application of fuzzy simulation for evaluating enterprise application integration in healthcare organisations

Healthcare organisations have focused on the latest technological innovations to overcome their organisational and clinical problems. The information systems were not developed in a cordinated way but evolved as autonomous and hetrogeneous systems. Thus, the integration of these systems represents one of the most urgent priorities of healthcare organisations that allow the whole organisation to meet the increasing clinical, organisational and managerial needs. Recently, technological developments have emerged in the area of integration technology such as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). This provides significant benefits to organisations to overcome the integration problem. This work therefore evaluates the adoption of EAI in healthcare organisations. In doing so, Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) simulation is used to demonstrate the causal inter-relationships between the EAI adoption factors. FCM simulation provides insights into better understanding about interdependencies of the factors that influence EAI adoption in healthcare organisations

Model-driven performance evaluation for service engineering

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Software quality aspects such as performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and calculating performance metrics of the implemented software. We present an approach for the empirical, model-based performance evaluation of services and service compositions in the context of model-driven service engineering. Temporal databases theory is utilised for the empirical performance evaluation of model-driven developed service systems