Methods and tools supporting modular process design

Increasing competition in globalising markets requires effective means for development and production planning regarding innovative products. One efficient approach is an integrated product and process design, following the idea of concurrent engineering. Initialising process design at an early stage of product development allows for balancing the product characteristics and the process capabilities. In this connection, the architecture of process planning operations has to reflect the information certainty derived from the development process. At the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL), methods and electronic data processing (EDP) tools for a continuous, product related process design in different planning and optimisation phases have been developed. The procedure and the efficiency of the developed methods and EDP-tools which are designed modularly are illustrated in the following paper.     

Users and designers as partners - design method and tools for user participation and designer accountability within the design process

Abstract. We have found two main causes of inadequacies in a decision support system designed by us. They are, in general, the lack of direct user participation and the lack of designer accountability in the design process. In an attempt to solve the problem, we develop a new design method, the User Participation and Designer Accountability (UPDA) method. It involves users' direct manipulation of colour cards, which contain the contents of simple design charts. These cards are also made accessible to everyone involved in the design process and form the basis upon which the designer can be questioned. We have applied the UPDA method and so far the reactions are very positive.     

Graphical process design tools for iontophoretic transdermal drug-delivery devices

A graphical procedure was proposed for the optimum design of transdermal drug-delivery systems enhanced by iontophoresis. Contour plots displayed the relationships among steady-state plasma level, current density and initial drug concentration in a vehicle. This information was combined with a closed-form expression of the process time constant, estimated as the medicament in the blood reaches a plateau after application of the electric field. Analysis was conducted using Laplace-transformed variables and did not require time-domain solutions. Simulation results show that a current density of 0.044 mA/cm(2) and a loading of 3500 μg/ml of dexamethasone sodium m-sulfobenzoate were necessary to achieve an equilibrium plasma concentration of 1.254 ng/cm(3) with a time constant of 8.34 h.     

CASE: analysis and design tools

Computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools are defined, and ten CASE tools are briefly overviewed. Individual presentations on the various tools follow. The focus is on structured analysis, design, and programming. Two of the tools (Cradle and JSP Workbench) are implementations of the Yourdon and Jackson methods for structured analysis, structured design, and programming; three tools (Time Bench, Card Tools, and Prosa) are for real-time systems development; four (Excelerator, Adagen, Smart System, and Software Through Pictures) are general-purpose front-end CASE tools and one (Virtual Software Factory) is a CASE tool for building CASE tools     

The RAISE language,method and tools

This paper presents the RAISE¹ software development method, its associated specification language, and the tools supporting it. The RAISE method enables the stepwise development of both sequential and concurrent software from abstract specification through design to implementation. All stages of RAISE software development are expressed in the wide-spectrum RAISE specification language. The RAISE tools form an integrated tool environment supporting both language and method.The paper surveys RAISE and furthermore, more detailed presentations of major RAISE results are provided. The subjects of these are (a) an example of the use of the RAISE method and language, and (b) a presentation of the mathematical semantics of the RAISE specification language.     

软件过程改进方法的研究与设计

成熟度模型(CMM)是当前国内外研究的热点。给出了如何理解CMM的基本概念,提出了两种软件过程改进方法,即基于同行评审和测试的软件过程改进方法和基于CASE工具和文档的软件过程改进方法。这两种方法是分别针对现有软件开发机构实施过程改进时遇到的实际问题,结合CMM的关键实践而设计的。最后对现有软件过程活动中存在的问题进行了相关总结。     

Workflow structuring and reengineering method for design process

A short lead time for product commercialization is a critical advantage in the era of highly challenging competitions. It is more difficult, however, to shorten the design process rather than manufacturing process since the underlying design activities in process and related data are often interlinked and quite uncertain, and the attempts to perform the design activities concurrently increase the complexity of the design process.

In case the targeting process is well-structured and easy to be managed, many approaches have been proposed and it is the best way to use the well-known reengineering method such as crashing the bottle-neck activity. However, they have only concerned mainly about well-defined procedures, not an operational-level sophisticated workflow.

As a means to effectively manage and accelerate the design process, a process or workflow model needs to define complex relations such as iteration or coupled dependency in design process in order to coordinate the sophisticated process effectively. And, the acceleration approaches based on the operational-level information needs to be discussed.

Firstly, in order to develop an appropriate model that effectively captures the operational-level characteristics in design process, we define the workflow including the control and data flow with an incidence matrix called Workflow Matrix (WfM). Secondly, a workflow structuring method is developed for identifying the reengineering issue and it also transform the complex design process into a well-structured workflow. Finally, we analyze the design process with WfM and suggest reengineering strategies to improve the design process.     

Microprocessors and software design tools

Software development aids available to the programmer are introduced. Application programs can be broken down into almost independent software modules. Each module can be independently developed and its interface with other modules defined. Microprocessor development systems, software components and future software are discussed. It seems that changes in computer system architecture are inevitable as LSI technology spreads computing, but this will also lead to better, more reliable software development tools.     

Towards useful and usable interaction design tools: CanonSketch

Despite all the effort dedicated to bringing better User-Centered Design (UCD) tools to market, current studies show that the industry is still dominated by tools that do not support the activities and workstyles of designers. Also, there is a growing need for interaction design tools aimed at software engineers, a problem related to bringing usability into the software engineering processes.

We propose a new workstyle model that can be effectively used to envision, design and evaluate a new generation of innovative interaction and software design tools, aimed at integrating usability and software engineering.

We illustrate the effectiveness of our model by describing a new tool, called CanonSketch, that was built in order to support UCD in terms of the dimensions in our workstyle model. We also describe an evaluation study aimed at contrasting paper prototyping with our tool as well as the level of workstyle support.     

Semantic interoperability in building design: Methods and tools

Semantic interoperability is a crucial element to make building information models understandable and model data sharable across multiple design disciplines and heterogeneous computer systems. This paper presents a new approach and its software implementation for the development of building design objects with semantics of interoperable information to support semantic interoperability in building designs. The novelty of the approach includes its incorporation of building design domain ontology, object-based CAD information modeling, and interoperability standard to make building information models and model data semantically interoperable. A set of methods are proposed to address the issues of object-based building information representation compliant with the Industrial Foundation Classes (IFC); extension of IFC models with the supplementary information; and semantic annotation of the interoperable and extensible information sets. The prototype implementation of these methods provides a set of Web-enabled software tools for effectively generating, managing, and reusing the semantically interoperable building objects in design applications of architectural CAD, structural analysis, and building code conformance checking.     

Towards a generic design method for reconfigurable manufacturing systems: Analysis and synthesis of current design methods and evaluation of supportive tools

In today’s global manufacturing environment, changes are inevitable and something that every manufacturer must respond to and take advantage of, whether it is in regards to technology changes, product changes, or changes in the manufacturing processes. The reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) meets this challenge through the ability to rapidly and efficiently change capacity and functionality, which is the reason why it has been widely labelled the manufacturing paradigm of the future. However, design of the RMS represents a significant challenge compared to the design of traditional manufacturing systems, as it should be designed for efficient production of multiple variants, as well as multiple product generations over its lifetime. Thus, critical decisions regarding the degree of scalability and convertibility of the system must be considered in the design phase, which affects the abilities to reconfigure the system in accordance with changes during its operating lifetime. However, in current research it is indicated that conventional manufacturing system design methods do not support the design of an RMS and that a systematic RMS design method is lacking, despite the fact that numerous contributions exist. Moreover, there is currently only limited evidence for the breakthrough of reconfigurability in industry. Therefore, the research presented in this paper aims at synthesizing current contributions into a generic method for RMS design. Initially, currently available design methods for RMS are reviewed, in terms of classifying and comparing their content, structure, and scope, which leads to a synthesis of the reviewed methods into a generic design method. In continuation of this, the paper includes a discussion of practical implications related to carrying out the design, including an identification of potential challenges and an assessment of which tools that can be applied to support the design. Conclusively, further areas for research are indicated, which provides valuable knowledge of how to develop and realize the benefits of reconfigurability in industry.     

Design sketches and sketch design tools

In early stages of design architects often use sketching and diagramming to perform formal and functional reasoning. Design sketches are an external representation aid for visualization and evaluation of the spatial arrangements of artifacts. Symbols and configurations are used in design sketches to define context and object arrangements. This paper argues the need to study design drawing, reports the findings from empirical studies of design drawings, and describes the software systems implemented to support intention inference and automated activation of knowledge-based design tools to support design.     

软件过程风险评估方法研究

随着科技的突飞猛进,软件工程的不断革新,在软件开发的过程中,由于每项软件活动之间都存在着一定的风险,所以为了保证软件工程的健康平稳的发展,应该采用风险评估的研究方法对其进行监控,在软件生产的过程中,发生偏离最佳实践的风险就叫做软件过程的风险,本文通过根据建立在CMMI中的过程域的风险评估体系,并采用每个过程域的模糊综合评估,进而监控软件风险与质量,通过实例分析,进一步说明该风险评估的方法符合软件工程建模的要求。     

Socially augmented argumentation tools: Rationale,design and evaluation of a debate dashboard

Collaborative Computer-Supported Argument Visualization (CCSAV) is a technical methodology that offers support for online collective deliberation over complex dilemmas. As compared with more traditional conversational technologies, like wikis and forums, CCSAV is designed to promote more critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, by using representations that highlight conceptual relationships between contributions, and through computational analytics that assess the structural integrity of the network. However, to date, CCSAV tools have achieved adoption primarily in small-scale educational contexts, and only to a limited degree in real world applications. We hypothesise that by reifying conversations as logical maps to address the shortcomings of chronological streams, CCSAV tools underestimate the importance of participation and interaction in enhancing collaborative knowledge-building. We argue, therefore, that CCSAV platforms should be socially augmented in order to improve their mediation capability. Drawing on Clark and Brennan influential Common Ground theory, we designed a Debate Dashboard, which augmented a CCSAV tool with a set of widgets that deliver meta-information about participants and the interaction process. An empirical study simulating a moderately sized collective deliberation scenario provides evidence that this experimental version outperformed the control version on a range of indicators, including usability, mutual understanding, quality of perceived collaboration, and accuracy of individual decisions. No evidence was found that the addition of the Debate Dashboard impeded the quality of the argumentation or the richness of content.