Management and integrated tools

After a brief overview, tools representing a broad spectrum of management features are described in separate presentations. DSCC and Configuration Management Assistant offer a user-definable development framework in which other tools and systems can be included. Amplify Control, EAST IPSE, and Epos are integrated project-management software-engineering systems that provide specific functions in such development frameworks. Aisle, is also such a system but with the even more specific purpose of aiding Ada developers. The Integrated Test Tool System is a utility system that can be integrated with the output of an integrated programming environment to test and validate the results of development efforts, either in Ada, C, Cobol, Fortran, or Pascal. CASE-PM is an example of a learning tool being used by software-engineering students     

Influence of rare earth metals on the nucleation and solidification behavior of iron and 1045 steel

Two series of experiments have been conducted to determine the influence of rare earth additions on the nucleation and crystallization behavior of pure iron and 1045 steel. In the first series, additions of rare earth suicide or cerium dioxide powder to two-Kg 1045 steel ingots indicated that rare earth suicide can refine the as-cast structure of such ingots. However, if the holding time after rare earth silicide addition is over two minutes, the grain refinement decreases. With cerium dioxide additions, a relatively large columnar zone was obtained. In the second series, the effects of cerium metal or cerium dioxide powder additions on the degree of undercooling obtainable in pure iron and 1045 steel were examined by the lévitation melting method. Surface tension measurements of the levitated droplets were carried out at the same time to investigate the possible effects of surface tension variations on the nucleation and crystallization behavior of the metals. The experimental data show that rare earth inclusions can greatly reduce the degree of undercooling of iron and steel, and that a small amount of dissolved cerium can further reduce the degree of undercooling of levitated droplets. The structure and reaction products obtained with Fe-Ce levitated droplets were examined with both optical and scanning electron microscopy as well as X-ray diffraction analysis. The experimental results clearly indicated that cerium solute redistribution during solidification is the dominant factor in refining the as-cast structure. A nucleation and solidification model for the Fe-Ce levitated droplets has been developed, which can successfully explain the experimental results. on research leave from Beijing University of Iron and Steel Technology     

Paths of progress in liquid metal processing

Industry has identified three major issues as being fundamental to future technological developments: process step elimination, product-process integration, and intelligent processing. This article reviews these concepts by discussing recent research at the University of Toronto on plasma processing, netshape casting, and diagnostic sensors for the evaluation of liquid metal quality.     

Interestingness measures for association rules based on statistical validity

Assessing rules with interestingness measures is the pillar of successful application of association rules discovery. However, association rules discovered are normally large in number, some of which are not considered as interesting or significant for the application at hand. In this paper, we present a systematic approach to ascertain the discovered rules, and provide a precise statistical approach supporting this framework. The proposed strategy combines data mining and statistical measurement techniques, including redundancy analysis, sampling and multivariate statistical analysis, to discard the non- significant rules. Moreover, we consider real world datasets which are characterized by the uniform and non-uniform data/items distribution with a mixture of measurement levels throughout the data/items. The proposed unified framework is applied on these datasets to demonstrate its effectiveness in discarding many of the redundant or non-significant rules, while still preserving the high accuracy of the rule set as a whole.     

Women in the UK construction industry

This paper considers the opportunities for, and barriers against, women within the UK construction industry. Women form the greater proportion of the economically active UK population and yet within construction, and other industries, they are under represented. Data available clearly indicates that women are more than capable of performing the tasks undertaken by many professional male counter-parts. Many of the professional bodies within the industry have a women's cohort, which may be perceived as a useful starting point, but does not fully reflect the potential available. It is suggested that women should be better represented and consideration is given to methods suitable for increasing the representation and reducing or eliminating some of the barriers to entry and eventual retention.     

Safety analysis of autonomous excavator functionality

This paper presents an account of carrying out a hazard analysis to define the safety requirements for an autonomous robotic excavator. The work is also relevant to the growing generic class of heavy automated mobile machinery. An overview of the excavator design is provided and the concept of a safety manager is introduced. The safety manager is an autonomous module responsible for all aspects of system operational safety, and is central to the control system's architecture. Each stage of the hazard analysis is described, i.e. system model creation, hazard definition and hazard analysis. Analysis at an early stage of the design process, and on a system that interfaces directly to an unstructured environment, exposes certain issues relevant to the application of current hazard analysis methods. The approach taken in the analysis is described. Finally, it is explained how the results of the hazard analysis have influenced system design, in particular, safety manager specifications. Conclusions are then drawn about the applicability of hazard analysis of requirements in general, and suggestions are made as to how the approach can be taken further     

Viewpoints: principles, problems and a practical approach to requirements engineering

The paper includes a survey and discussion of viewpoint‐oriented approaches to requirements engineering and a presentation of new work in this area which has been designed with practical application in mind. We describe the benefits of viewpoint‐oriented requirements engineering and describe the strengths and weaknesses of a number of viewpoint‐oriented methods. We discuss the practical problems of introducing viewpoint‐oriented requirements engineering into industrial software engineering practice and why these have prevented the widespread use of existing approaches. We then introduce a new model of viewpoints called Preview. Preview viewpoints are flexible, generic entities which can be used in different ways and in different application domains. We describe the novel characteristics of the Preview viewpoints model and the associated processes of requirements discovery, analysis and negotiation. Finally, we discuss how well this approach addresses some outstanding problems in requirements engineering (RE) and the practical industrial problems of introducing new requirements engineering methods.     

Model for the 3D Location of Buried Assets Based on RFID Technology

As construction and renovation equipment excavate in the vicinity of utility lines, the buried infrastructure is likely to suffer some form of “attack,” be that simple mechanical abrasion or a major rupture. Damage to underground services can lead to widespread disruption and significant upstream (service provider) and downstream (end user) losses, often resulting in whole communities being isolated from emergency services and losing essential utilities such as water, gas, and electricity. The ability to physically determine on site the location of underground utilities is critical to reduce risk and consequence during excavation. For these reasons, the location and efficient maintenance of buried assets are a high priority, especially for utility companies. This paper presents the development of a model for the three-dimensional (3D) location of buried assets based on radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and findings from laboratory and field experiments. Passive, low frequency RFID devices were used during the research. Two approaches of this model, “Method A” and “Method B,” along with major experimental findings are discussed within the paper. In order to validate the applicability of each method, “real-world” field experiments were performed. The findings from this research demonstrated that applying RFID technology to locate buried assets has a great potential for facilitating the accurate 3D data of underground infrastructure.     

MRT: A tool developed for predicting the mean message response time of communication channels in sizeable networks exemplified by the Internet

In this paper an algorithm M²RT for predicting the mean message response time (MMRT) of a communication channel is proposed with emphasis on Internet applications. The M²RT development went through four major phases. They include:

(a) Formulating the theoretical foundation with the central limit theorem.

(b) Determining the parameters of the algorithm by simulations.

(c) Performing off-line verification tests for the algorithm with local Internet/Intranet nodes and well-known middleware (MPI and CORBA).

(d) Performing on-line validation of the M²RT over the Internet involving both local and international sites.

The acceptance criteria for the algorithm include:

(a) It must perform efficiently for different conditions of workload, geography, and traffic.

(b) It must perform consistently with the same software entities (e.g., MPI) for similar operations.

(c) It must be able to exist both as an off-line tool and an on-line program object (to be invoked on a real-time basis).

(d) Its computation time should be sufficiently small so that the result actually reflects the current physical conditions.

All the results from simulations, verification tests, and validation experiments have confirmed that the M²RT algorithm indeed meets all the acceptance criteria. In these tests, we also discovered that the algorithm could be developed into a powerful tool for measuring the relative performance between firmware products. This development will be explored in the near future.