Integrated Product Development in Truck Industry - A Case Study on Product Development Processes

This paper presents the result from a case study at Scania on product development processes. The objective with the case study was to gather information on Scania’s product development process (PDP) including the use of CAD and simulation tools, and project work. The objective was also to find any deviations or different interpretations among the employees on the PDP. To gather the information, semi-structured tape-recorded interviews have been used to ensure that individual interpretations from the interviewees could be gathered. Scania uses a defined and structured PDP which facilitates concurrent and cross-functional work. The PDP is implemented and followed to various degrees. The newly employed personnel may have difficulties with communication, both to find and to give information. Although, newly graduated personnel may find it easier to adapt to changes, and also to use a structured process which they have studied at universities. It was also known during the case study that the PDP is a major support for the newly employed personnel, which in turn decreases the time to get into the same working process as the more experienced personnel. Employees with decades of experience know the right sources from which to both give and gather information. Also, the terminology and definitions in the product development process may not be used as intended. This makes it difficult for other project members or teams who need to interpret the information received. At the same time, the routines among the more experienced personnel, which have been set-up throughout the years, make them more inflexible in adapting changes. The findings in the case study as well as challenges with implementing the PDP are known to Scania and are a part of the continuing work with improvement.

Development of a Real-time Formative Feedback Student Response System

This paper is focusing IT-supported real-time formative feedback in a classroom context. The development of a Student and Teacher Response System (STRS) is described. Since there are a number of obstacles for effective interaction in large classes, IT can be used to support the teachers aim to find out if students understand the lecture and accordingly adjust the content and design of the lecture. The system can be used for formative assessment before, during, and after a lecture. It is also possible for students to initiate interaction during lectures by posing questions anonymously. The main contributions of the paper are a) the description of the interactive real-time system and b) the development process behind it.

A framework for ICT-based knowledge sharing in sustainable rural development : the case of Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan

Some 50% of the people in the world live in rural areas, often under harsh conditions and in poverty. The need for knowledge of how to improve living conditions is well documented. In response to this need, new knowledge of how to improve living conditions in rural areas and elsewhere is continuously being developed by researchers and practitioners around the world. People in rural areas, in particular, would certainly benefit from being able to share relevant knowledge with each other, as well as with stakeholders (e.g. researchers) and other organizations (e.g. NGOs). Central to knowledge management is the idea of knowledge sharing. This study is based on the assumption that knowledge management can support sustainable development in rural and remote regions. It aims to present a framework for knowledge management in sustainable rural development, and an inventory of existing frameworks for that. The study is interpretive, with interviews as the primary source for the inventory of stakeholders, knowledge categories and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure. For the inventory of frameworks, a literature study was carried out. The result is a categorization of the stakeholders who act as producers and beneficiaries of explicit and indigenous development knowledge. Stakeholders are local government, local population, academia, NGOs, civil society and donor agencies. Furthermore, the study presents a categorization of the development knowledge produced by the stakeholders together with specifications for the existing ICT infrastructure. Rural development categories found are research, funding, agriculture, ICT, gender, institutional development, local infrastructure development, and marketing & enterprise. Finally, a compiled framework is presented, and it is based on ten existing frameworks for rural development that were found in the literature study, and the empirical findings of the Gilgit-Baltistan case. Our proposed framework is divided in four levels where level one consists of the identified stakeholders, level two consists of rural development categories, level three of the knowledge management system and level four of sustainable rural development based on the levels below. In the proposed framework we claim that the sustainability of rural development can be achieved through a knowledge society in which knowledge of the rural development process is shared among all relevant stakeholders.

Testing of combined heating systems for small houses: Improved procedures for whole system test methods : Deliverable 2.3

Dynamic system test methods for heating systems were developed and applied by the institutes SERC and SP from Sweden, INES from France and SPF from Switzerland already before the MacSheep project started. These test methods followed the same principle: a complete heating system – including heat generators, storage, control etc., is installed on the test rig; the test rig software and hardware simulates and emulates the heat load for space heating and domestic hot water of a single family house, while the unit under test has to act autonomously to cover the heat demand during a representative test cycle. Within the work package 2 of the MacSheep project these similar – but different – test methods were harmonized and improved. The work undertaken includes:  • Harmonization of the physical boundaries of the unit under test. • Harmonization of the boundary conditions of climate and load. • Definition of an approach to reach identical space heat load in combination with an autonomous control of the space heat distribution by the unit under test. • Derivation and validation of new six day and a twelve day test profiles for direct extrapolation of test results.   The new harmonized test method combines the advantages of the different methods that existed before the MacSheep project. The new method is a benchmark test, which means that the load for space heating and domestic hot water preparation will be identical for all tested systems, and that the result is representative for the performance of the system over a whole year. Thus, no modelling and simulation of the tested system is needed in order to obtain the benchmark results for a yearly cycle. The method is thus also applicable to products for which simulation models are not available yet. Some of the advantages of the new whole system test method and performance rating compared to the testing and energy rating of single components are:  • Interaction between the different components of a heating system, e.g. storage, solar collector circuit, heat pump, control, etc. are included and evaluated in this test. • Dynamic effects are included and influence the result just as they influence the annual performance in the field. • Heat losses are influencing the results in a more realistic way, since they are evaluated under "real installed" and representative part-load conditions rather than under single component steady state conditions.   The described method is also suited for the development process of new systems, where it replaces time-consuming and costly field testing with the advantage of a higher accuracy of the measured data (compared to the typically used measurement equipment in field tests) and identical, thus comparable boundary conditions. Thus, the method can be used for system optimization in the test bench under realistic operative conditions, i.e. under relevant operating environment in the lab.   This report describes the physical boundaries of the tested systems, as well as the test procedures and the requirements for both the unit under test and the test facility. The new six day and twelve day test profiles are also described as are the validation results.

Fábricas de software e a academia: análise da formação acadêmica em informática no município do Rio de Janeiro

As Brazil wants to be perceived as a competitor in providing computer applications and system development services in the global market, the concept of Software Factory gains importance. The metaphor for the 'Factory', when applied to the activity of software development, is used to describe organizations which produce software with a minimum quality standard and at competitive costs. However, the term 'Factory' recalls Fordist concepts, which have been challenged for a few decades in the manufacturing industry. This study analyzed university curricula and how students and teachers perceive the concept of Software Factory and assessed them in relation to the Fordism ------------ post-Fordism /continuum/. It was observed that some of the teachers who have influence over curricula define Software Factories according to Fordist concepts. It was also observed that, despite opportunities for improvements, curricula are adequately structured with regards to the skills a professional at these organizations must possess. We conclude that education provided at the programs being analyzed is adequate, but that it must be supplemented by companies or by the professionals themselves so that the knowledge acquired in the programs may be put in practice.

JML- Based formal development of a Java card application for managing medical appointments

Although formal methods can dramatically increase the quality of software systems, they have not widely been adopted in software industry. Many software companies have the perception that formal methods are not cost-effective cause they are plenty of mathematical symbols that are difficult for non-experts to assimilate. The Java Modelling Language (short for JML) Section 3.3 is an academic initiative towards the development of a common formal specification language for Java programs, and the implementation of tools to check program correctness. This master thesis work shows how JML based formal methods can be used to formally develop a privacy sensitive Java application. This is a smart card application for managing medical appointments. The application is named HealthCard. We follow the software development strategy introduced by João Pestana, presented in Section 3.4. Our work influenced the development of this strategy by providing hands-on insight on challenges related to development of a privacy sensitive application in Java. Pestana’s strategy is based on a three-step evolution strategy of software specifications, from informal ones, through semiformal ones, to JML formal specifications. We further prove that this strategy can be automated by implementing a tool that generates JML formal specifications from a welldefined subset of informal software specifications. Hence, our work proves that JML-based formal methods techniques are cost-effective, and that they can be made popular in software industry. Although formal methods are not popular in many software development companies, we endeavour to integrate formal methods to general software practices. We hope our work can contribute to a better acceptance of mathematical based formalisms and tools used by software engineers. The structure of this document is as follows. In Section 2, we describe the preliminaries of this thesis work. We make an introduction to the application for managing medical applications we have implemented. We also describe the technologies used in the development of the application. This section further illustrates the Java Card Remote Method Invocation communication model used in the medical application for the client and server applications. Section 3 introduces software correctness, including the design by contract and the concept of contract in JML. Section 4 presents the design structure of the application. Section 5 shows the implementation of the HealthCard. Section 6 describes how the HealthCard is verified and validated using JML formal methods tools. Section 7 includes some metrics of the HealthCard implementation and specification. Section 8 presents a short example of how a client-side of a smart card application can be implemented while respecting formal specifications. Section 9 describes a prototype tools to generate JML formal specifications from informal specifications automatically. Section 10 describes some challenges and main ideas came acrorss during the development of the HealthCard. The full formal specification and implementation of the HealthCard smart card application presented in this document can be reached at https://sourceforge.net/projects/healthcard/.

Meta, tracer - MOF with traceability

The following document proposes a traceability solution for model-driven development. There as been already previous work done in this area, but so far there has not been yet any standardized way for exchanging traceability information, thus the goal of this project developed and documented here is not to automatize the traceability process but to provide an approach to achieve traceability that follows OMG standards, making traceability information exchangeable between tools that follow the same standards. As such, we propose a traceability meta-model as an extension of MetaObject Facility (MOF)1. Using MetaSketch2 modeling language workbench, we present a modeling language for traceability information. This traceability information then can be used for tool cooperation. Using Meta.Tracer (our tool developed for this thesis), we enable the users to establish traceability relationships between different traceability elements and offer a visualization for the traceability information. We then demonstrate the benefits of using a traceability tool on a software development life cycle using a case study. We finalize by commenting on the work developed.

Designing for workstyle transitions: interaction design tools for software engineering

Supervisor: Duarte Nuno Jardim Nunes

O impacto da utilização de design patterns nas métricas e estimativas de projetos de software: a utilização de padrões tem alguma influência nas estimativas?

VALENTIM, R. A. M. ; SOUZA NETO, Plácido Antônio de. O impacto da utilização de design patterns nas métricas e estimativas de projetos de software: a utilização de padrões tem alguma influência nas estimativas?. Revista da FARN, Natal, v. 4, p. 63-74, 2006

Uma arquitetura baseada em agentes para configuração dinâmica de aplicações inteligentes em ambiente foundation fieldbus

The industrial automation is directly linked to the development of information tecnology. Better hardware solutions, as well as improvements in software development methodologies make possible the rapid growth of the productive process control. In this thesis, we propose an architecture that will allow the joining of two technologies in hardware (industrial network) and software field (multiagent systems). The objective of this proposal is to join those technologies in a multiagent architecture to allow control strategies implementations in to field devices. With this, we intend develop an agents architecture to detect and solve problems which may occur in the industrial network environment. Our work ally machine learning with industrial context, become proposed multiagent architecture adaptable to unfamiliar or unexpected production environment. We used neural networks and presented an allocation strategies of these networks in industrial network field devices. With this we intend to improve decision support at plant level and allow operations human intervention independent

Desenvolvimento de um software de comunicação sem fio aplicado à instrumentação de unidade de elevação de petróleo tipo Plunger Lift

This dissertation aims to develop a software applied to a communication system for a wireless sensor network (WSN) for tracking analog and digital variables and control valve of the gas flow in artificial oil s elevation units, Plunger Lift type. The reason for this implementation is due to the fact that, in the studied plant configuration, the sensors communicate with the PLC (Programmable and Logic Controller) by the cables and pipelines, making any changes in that system, such as changing the layout of it, as well as inconveniences that arise from the nature of the site, such as the vicinity s animals presence that tend to destroy the cables for interconnection of sensors to the PLC. For software development, was used communication polling method via SMAC protocol (Simple Medium Access ControlIEEE 802.15.4 standard) in the CodeWarrior environment to which generated a firmware, loaded into the WSN s transceivers, present in the kit MC13193-EVK, (all items described above are owners of Freescale Semiconductors Inc.). The network monitoring and parameterization used in its application, was developed in LabVIEW software from National Instruments. The results were obtained through the observation of the network s behavior of sensors proposal, focusing on aspects such as: indoor and outdoor quantity of packages received and lost, general aspects of reliability in data transmission, coexistence with other types of wireless networks and power consumption under different operating conditions. The results were considered satisfactory, which showed the software efficiency in this communication system

Desenvolvimento formal de aplicações para smartcards

Smart card applications represent a growing market. Usually this kind of application manipulate and store critical information that requires some level of security, such as financial or confidential information. The quality and trustworthiness of smart card software can be improved through a rigorous development process that embraces formal techniques of software engineering. In this work we propose the BSmart method, a specialization of the B formal method dedicated to the development of smart card Java Card applications. The method describes how a Java Card application can be generated from a B refinement process of its formal abstract specification. The development is supported by a set of tools, which automates the generation of some required refinements and the translation to Java Card client (host) and server (applet) applications. With respect to verification, the method development process was formalized and verified in the B method, using the Atelier B tool [Cle12a]. We emphasize that the Java Card application is translated from the last stage of refinement, named implementation. This translation process was specified in ASF+SDF [BKV08], describing the grammar of both languages (SDF) and the code transformations through rewrite rules (ASF). This specification was an important support during the translator development and contributes to the tool documentation. We also emphasize the KitSmart library [Dut06, San12], an essential component of BSmart, containing models of all 93 classes/interfaces of Java Card API 2:2:2, of Java/Java Card data types and machines that can be useful for the specifier, but are not part of the standard Java Card library. In other to validate the method, its tool support and the KitSmart, we developed an electronic passport application following the BSmart method. We believe that the results reached in this work contribute to Java Card development, allowing the generation of complete (client and server components), and less subject to errors, Java Card applications.

Visual IMML: um perfil UML para a modelagem de interfaces de usuário

The software development processes proposed by the most recent approaches in Software Engineering make use old models. UML was proposed as the standard language for modeling. The user interface is an important part of the software and has a fundamental importance to improve its usability. Unfortunately the standard UML does not offer appropriate resources to model user interfaces. Some proposals have already been proposed to solve this problem: some authors have been using models in the development of interfaces (Model Based Development) and some proposals to extend UML have been elaborated. But none of them considers the theoretical perspective presented by the semiotic engineering, that considers that, through the system, the designer should be able to communicate to the user what he can do, and how to use the system itself. This work presents Visual IMML, an UML Profile that emphasizes the aspects of the semiotic engineering. This Profile is based on IMML, that is a declarative textual language. The Visual IMML is a proposal that aims to improve the specification process by using a visual modeling (using diagrams) language. It proposes a new set of modeling elements (stereotypes) specifically designed to the specification and documentation of user interfaces, considering the aspects of communication, interaction and functionality in an integrated manner