Review of generic software for environmental engineering applications

Generic software such as spreadsheet and data base programs provide utilities that can be used to construct routines for various applications. The specific used is determined by the user. Generic software allows interactive programming and data manipulation. These programs have dramatically changed the everyday use of microcomputers by creating an easy and flexible interace ofr inexperienced computer users to create their own user defined routines without requiring any formal programming skills. Data entry and retrieval are extremely easy, as well as transfer of data between different software packages. This paper review some of the commonly used generic software packages, focusing on spreadsheets, data base programs, and integrated software packages for IBM PC compatible microcomputers.Several commercial programs, varying in price and capability, are evaluated to determine their applicability in environmental engineering calculations Evaluations were made in terms of the potential use in engineering calculations and other applications, the mathematical capacity, speed of calculations, versatility, and user friendliness. Data transfer between different programare extremely crucial for engineering applications. It is achieved by using “standard” file formats, such as SIF and DIF files.     

A Hypermedia Tutoring System for Design Trainers

Research and development has been undertaken on the production of hypertext-based authoring and end-user training systems, linked to a videodisc player. A hypermedia system enabled the use of animation, purpose-designed graphics, sound and fast response to enhance the learning environment. The package structure could be presented, to allow the user to move around the package, and to see at a glance the consequence of his actions. In addition, material visited by the user and decisions taken, could be stored to enable computer managed manipulation of the data structure for individual requirements.

This paper discusses one particular system for design trainers to explore various structures of training material. This videodisc-based package gives guidance on the use of multi-media authoring packages to produce material that is sensitive to the interests of each trainee at an appropriate level of understanding. The control structure required some innovative programming techniques of benefit to other researchers investigating the potential of hypermedia.     

The design of a user friendly engineering economy analysis package for a microcomputer

The design and features of a user friendly engineering economy analysis software package for the Apple II microcomputer is described. The software package is written in Applesoft Basic. An Apple II with 64k RAM, one or two disk drives and a line printer is required to use the software package. The package consists of five complementary programs: (1) Selection of the better of two alternatives using present-worth evaluations. (2) Conventional rate-of-return computations for a single project. (3) Selection from mutually exclusive alternatives using rate-of-return analysis. (4) Optimal capital allocation among several investment opportunities under risk. (5) Probabilistic after-tax economic analysis for a single project. All programs but (4) are based on the time value of money. Program (4) is a chance-constrained optimization model utilizing the Lagrange-multiplier technique. Program (5) implements depreciation, debt/equity financing, and taxes and performs a sequential after-tax Monte Carlo simulation over a specified life-span. The use of this software package does not require any previous computer or programming experience. A menu format is used. The software package allows the user to specify the shapes of the interest and inflation probability distributions on a year by year basis. The user has the option to specify the reinvestment rates. The package presents the results in tables and graphs. User acceptance has been excellent with this software package and this package is well suited for the use in an engineering economy class or for the practicing industrial engineer in industry.     

A kinematics and dynamics simulation of the IBM-7565 robot using AML

This article presents a kinematics and dynamics simulation of the IBM-7565 robot using its AML programming language. The kinematics and dynamics models are formulated according to the Denavit-Hartenberg convention and a recursive Newton-Euler algorithm, respectively. The simulation is integrated in a CAD software package (CATIA) which is used in robot offline programming and collision/interference analysis. The CAD package software which runs on an IBM 3033 main frame also emulates the AML for automatic programming. The simulation models can be run on the IBM 3033 using the emulator or on the robot's dedicated Series-1 computer to where the programs are downloaded for execution and control of robot motion.     

BIBasis,a package for reduce and Macaulay2 computer algebra systems to compute Boolean involutive and Gröbner bases

In this paper, we describe the BIBasis package designed for REDUCE and Macaulay2 computer algebra systems, which allows one to compute Boolean involutive bases and Gröbner bases. The implementations and user interfaces of the package for both systems are described in the respective sections of the paper. Also, we present results of comparisons of BIBasis with other packages and algorithms for constructing Boolean Gröbner bases available in the computer algebra systems.     

AIDA for reproductive medicine and the fertility clinic

A Medical Information System for the Fertility Department has been built (VERGYNIA) using the 4th generation software package AIDA to make the medical data accessible for research and teaching on the one hand and to assist the management of the department in the daily routine of patient care on the other. The system has been implemented on a PDP 11/23 computer with a 20 Mbyte hard disk, a 10 Mbyte removable disk and 128 Kbyte central memory. Three visual display terminals and a small printer are connected to the system. A dedicated line connection between this system and the computer facilities of the Department of Medical Informatics allows easy transfer of data for analysis by statistical packages and the transfer of new programs to the computer of the Fertility Department. The PDP 11/23 contains a production system, a developmental system, and a separate environment for research which can all three run simultaneously on the same computer without interfering with each other. VERGYNIA was predominantly constructed with AIDA; only parts of the output programs have been programmed in MUMPS, due to the fact that the required AIDA tools were not yet available at the time of development. The original version of VERGYNIA was already in operation in 1982 and was built with the tools that form the basis of the current AIDA release. Due to many ad hoc modifications and additions, the system needed a total redesign in order to make it compatible with the new enhancements of the current AIDA release. This redesign was carried out during 1985.     

The Package Blueprint: Visually analyzing and quantifying packages dependencies

Large object-oriented applications are structured over many packages. Packages are important but complex structural entities that are difficult to understand since they act as containers of classes, which can have many dependencies with other classes spread over multiple packages. However to be able to take decisions (e.g. refactoring and/or assessment decisions), maintainers face the challenges of managing (sorting, grouping) the massive amount of dependencies between classes spread over multiple packages. To help maintainers, there is a need for at the same time understanding, and quantifying, dependencies between classes as well as understanding how packages as containers of such classes depend on each other.In this paper, we present a visualization, named Package Blueprint, that reveals in detail package internal structure, as well as the dependencies between an observed package and its neighbors, at both package and class levels. Package blueprint aims at assisting maintainers in understanding package structure and dependencies, in particular when they focus on few packages and want to take refactoring decisions and/or to assess the structure of those packages. A package blueprint is a space filling matrix-based visualization, using two placement strategies that are enclosure and adjacency. Package blueprint is structured around the notion of surfaces that group classes and their dependencies by their packages (i.e., enclosure placement); whilst surfaces are placed next to their parent node which is the package under-analysis (i.e., adjacency placement). We present two views: one stressing how an observed package depends upon the rest of the system and another stressing how the system depends upon that package.To evaluate the contribution of package blueprint for understanding packages we performed an exploratory user study comparing package blueprint with an advanced IDE. The results show that users of package blueprint are faster in analyzing and assessing package structure. The results are proved statically significant and they show that package blueprint considerably improves the experience of standard browser users.     

Package Fingerprints: A visual summary of package interface usage

ContextObject-oriented languages such as Java, Smalltalk, and C++ structure their programs using packages. Maintainers of large systems need to understand how packages relate to each other, but this task is complex because packages often have multiple clients and play different roles (class container, code ownership, etc.). Several approaches have been proposed, among which the use of cohesion and coupling metrics. Such metrics help identify candidate packages for restructuring; however, they do not help maintainers actually understand the structure and interrelationships between packages.ObjectivesIn this paper, we use pre-attentive processing as the basis for package visualization and see to what extent it could be used in package understanding.MethodWe present the Package Fingerprint, a 2D visualization of the references made to and from a package. The proposed visualization offers a semantically rich, but compact and zoomable views centered on packages. We focus on two views (incoming and outgoing references) that help users understand how the package under analysis is used by the system and how it uses the system.ResultsWe applied these views on four large systems: Squeak, JBoss, Azureus, and ArgoUML. We obtained several interesting results, among which, the identification of a set of recurring visual patterns that help maintainers: (a) more easily identify the role of and the way a package is used within the system (e.g., the package under analysis provides a set of layered services), and (b) detect either problematic situations (e.g., a single package that groups together a large number of basic services) or opportunities for better package restructuring (e.g., removing cyclic dependencies among packages). The visualization generally scaled well and the detection of different patterns was always possible.ConclusionThe proposed visualizations and patterns proved to be useful in understanding and maintaining the different systems we addressed. To generalize to other contexts and systems, a real user study is required.     

Software design for analysis of multichannel intracardial and body surface electrocardiograms

Analysis of multichannel ECG recordings (body surface maps (BSMs) and intracardial maps) requires special software. We created a software package and a user interface on top of a commercial data analysis package (MATLAB) by a combination of high-level and low-level programming. Our software was created to satisfy the needs of a diverse group of researchers. It can handle a large variety of recording configurations. It allows for interactive usage through a fast and robust user interface, and batch processing for the analysis of large amounts of data. The package is user-extensible, includes routines for both common and experimental data processing tasks, and works on several computer platforms. The source code is made intelligible using software for structured documentation and is available to the users. The package is currently used by more than ten research groups analysing ECG data worldwide.     

DYNAMIC DISPLAY OF PERSONALIZED SOFTWARE FUNCTIONS

Generalized software packages endowed with a large spectrum of functionalities are often underutilized because users are not always aware of all the functionalities. It is hence desirable to display personalized information about the package. Though popular in web-based applications, personalization as a field of research in the design of generalized software packages is rare. This article develops a semi-Markov model of user navigation and an adaptive dynamic programming formulation to select high-utility software functions (states) for dynamically displaying them to a user. The personalization algorithm considers the interests of the software designers, the past users, and the current user. Frequency of visit to a state and the holding time in the state together determines the utility of the state. The personalization algorithm considers the interests of the software designers, the past users, and the current user. The algorithm is built in a demo package of ActiveX Servers and Controls. Graduate students tested the package. Pareto analysis and tests of hypothesis conducted on the test results indicate that the users did utilize the information on the displayed personalized software functions.     

DISPRO: A discrete programming package

Conclusions The DISPRO package is open for modification and further development. Its modular structure allows expansion of the source language, incorporation of new system and application modules, realization in the current version of an interface with DBMS and other application packages (e.g., report generator, matrix generator), synthesis of the package with PL/1 and FORTRAN IV programming systems.The first version of DISPRO released in 1980 has successfully passed the requisite acceptance tests and is now officially part of the optimization packages supported by ES series computers. As outlined in this article, the package has tremendous possibilities for solving a wide range of discrete optimization problems. So far, certain classes of discrete programming problems could be solved by LP ASU [31], VEKTOR-1, the Z-system [58], and TsP [31] application packages. In addition, some packages have been developed in recent years for mathematical programming and operations research (DISPLAN, an interactive planning system [60]; PTP, optimization of transportation problems [58]; PMP, separable and parametric linear programming; DILOS, interactive system for unconstrained optimization, nonlinear programming, and optimal control; ORBITAL', unconstrained optimization and approximation [61]; NDO, nondifferentiable and stochastic optimization [62]; and other less known packages reviewed, in particular, in [58].New optimization packages are currently being developed in response to increased demands for quality, efficiency, and applicability in various MIS and ADPS. The next version of the DISPRO package is being designed on the basis of the appropriate principles and requirements for modern method-oriented packages, including accumulation and analysis of package performance data (these data may be used to improve the package software and structure), large dimensionality of the relevant problems, operating reliability, commercial development of packages, and their usability in integrated data processing systems.In conclusion, DISPRO was developed by the concerted effort of a large team. In particular, we should mention the contributions of Yu. M. Ermol'ev, V. L. Volkovich, A. I. Kuksa, Yu. Yu. Chervak, N. S. Podgorodetskaya, E. S. Karpinka, V. M. Sementsova, V. I. Artemenko, and other members of the team.Translated from Kibernetika, No. 3, pp. 117–137, May–June, 1981.     

A simply constructable user-oriented computer language using fortran

One important task of the industrial engineer is to be an interface person—between operations and planning, between workers and their physical environment, between bench level tasks and systems level management, and with growing need, between the computer and the user. The latter has been caused in part by the programming requirement to express how a task is to be done, rather than what is to be done. The IEs role here is to provide the interface to ask the “what” questions. This paper addresses one strategy for constructing the computer-user interface.Using a core set of sixteen short FORTRAN subprograms, a simple procedure for constructing user oriented conversational computer languages has been developed (seven subprograms are directed at the conversational language and nine are list handling routines). This core set has been used successfully to develop user packages for medical doctors doing cell kinetics simulation in cancer research, for energy policy makers to access and manipulate time series energy data, for undergraduates to solve statistical and mathematical programming problems. The procedure is machine independent, only requiring a FORTRAN compiler, and can be used by the IE to bridge the gap between the user with a question, and the solution power of the computer.     

Distributed concurrent engineering computation on a network of microcomputers

A programming method that facilitates interworkstation communications on a local area network (LAN) of microcomputers has been developed. Communications are managed using a set of common access status and data files, which are writen to and read from the file server hard disk.Use of this programming method permits the work load associated with large computational problems to be distributed to various workstations connected to a LAN for concurrent processing, and has resulted in substantial solution time savings in problems that have been run.Test problems have been programmed in IBM Compiled BASIC [1] and are continuing with further programs in BASIC and IBM Professional FORTRAN [2]. Applications to actual computational engineering problems are presently being investigated and are briefly discussed.This paper describes the basic principles underlying the distributed processing technique that was developed and presents several example problems that were run to test the technique and develop benchmark results for a particular LAN configuration.     

Program entanglement,feature interaction and the feature language extensions

One of the most difficult tasks in software development is that the programmer must implement a feature going through a laborious and error prone process of modifying the programs of other features. The programs of the different features entangle in the same reusable program units of the programming language, making them also difficult to be verified, maintained and reused. We show that if (C1) the features interact, (C2) they are executed by the same process and (C3) they are implemented in a programming language that requires the programmer to specify execution flows, program entanglement is inevitable and the problem cannot be solved by software design alone. Applications with interacting features are common including those that require exception handling.The feature language extensions (FLX) is a set of programming language constructs designed to enable the programmer to develop interacting features as separate and reusable program modules even though the features interact. The programmer uses FLX to specify non-procedural program units, organize the program units into reusable features and integrate features into executable feature packages. He develops a feature based on a model instead of the code of other features. FLX supports an automatic procedure to detect the interaction condition among features; the programmer then resolve the interaction in a feature package without changing feature code. FLX features and feature packages are reusable; the programmer may package different combinations of them and resolve their interactions differently to meet different user needs. An FLX to Java compiler has been implemented; our experience of using it has been very positive.     

SignatureClust: a tool for landmark gene-guided clustering

Over the last several years, many clustering algorithms have been applied to gene expression data. However, most clustering algorithms force the user into having one set of clusters, resulting in a restrictive biological interpretation of gene function. It would be difficult to interpret the complex biological regulatory mechanisms and genetic interactions from this restrictive interpretation of microarray expression data. The software package SignatureClust allows users to select a group of functionally related genes (called ‘Landmark Genes’), and to project the gene expression data onto these genes. Compared to existing algorithms and software in this domain, our software package offers two unique benefits. First, by selecting different sets of landmark genes, it enables the user to cluster the microarray data from multiple biological perspectives. This encourages data exploration and discovery of new gene associations. Second, most packages associated with clustering provide internal validation measures, whereas our package validates the biological significance of the new clusters by retrieving significant ontology and pathway terms associated with the new clusters. SignatureClust is a free software tool that enables biologists to get multiple views of the microarray data. It highlights new gene associations that were not found using a traditional clustering algorithm. The software package ‘SignatureClust’ and the user manual can be downloaded from .     

The use of interactive computing in teaching geology and geophysics

In both geology and solid-earth geophysics first-degree courses we employ interactive computing to teach programming, statistics, and a variety of geological and geophysical procedures and concepts. BASIC is used on a system which offers teletype output or simple graphical display. As an example, details (procedure, annotated BASIC programs and graphical output) of a teaching package to determine the direction of magnetisation of a body are given. Graphical display is shown from packages to simulate (1) a trace fossil Chondrites, and (2) the development of flute mark profiles. The use of interactive computer packages, especially with graphical display, has greatly improved our teaching and the students' understanding of concepts and processes. Further teaching packages are now being written, for data analysis and reduction, and for geological modeling.     

Juricas: Legal computer advice systems

In the late seventies at the Centre for Computers and Law research was started to find means for supporting lawyers' work with the aid of a computer. The research project was called JURICAS. In 1982 a prototype of a JURICAS system was produced and since 1986 seven advisory packages have been brought out on the market in the Netherlands. These packages consist of two main parts, an author's shell and an advisory program. The user cannot make changes to either the shell or the program.In 1988 the JURICAS author's shell became commercially available. A buyer has to make his own advisory program and fill it with his expertise to produce an advisory package. To facilitate the designing, the typing in and the testing of a package a number of utility programs are included in the author's system.An example of a self-developed legal computer advice system is a JURICAS system for Social Security Law. This system was written by two lawyers of a social security service in the Netherlands and helps with the processing of requests for social security. In May 1991 the computer advice system was put into use.     

QUAD: a computer package for the analysis of QUantal assay data

The computer package QUAD has been developed at the University of Kent, U.K. It is menu-driven and written in Advanced BASIC. It runs on IBM PC compatible machines equiped with a suitable graphics facility such as CGA or simulated CGA. QUAD is available on a floppy disk, for a small handling charge.

QUAD has four main functions: it performs a logit analysis of quantal assay data; it provides a flexible way of analysing the data, allowing dose transformations and providing alternative confidence intervals for ED_p values; it produces a range diagnostics for assessing the fit of models to data; it provides and fits two families of extended models, each containing the logit as a special case.

The package makes use of the latest statistical research, and fitted models are displayed by means of the good graphics facilities available on microcomputers.

This document describes the facilities available in detail, and provides and discusses illustrations of the package at work. QUAD has been designed as a pilot package. Further additions and developments are planned and described later.     

Hierarchical structures of optimization packages

Conclusions The expanding operational potential of application packages (interactive and multiprocessing disciplines, application in systems with complex environment, processing of large volumes of data) necessitated a transition from the one-level to a hierarchical package model, in line with the increasing complexity of the package structure.Not all the levels are necessarily present in the design of specific packages. For example, packages executing in the batch mode without multiprocessing and user-initiated dialog do not need the process synchronization level, whereas the top level-the process level-is realized by a single process (in the operating system sense) with the structure described in [1–3]. Packages whose programs always fit into the main memory do not need the data management level, i.e., the cluster is realized by an abstract application module. The application program level is missing in those packages where the application programs are prepared in advance, rather than being generated in run time.The proposed structure is not restricted to optimization packages: it may be used to typify other classes of method-oriented packages. Structure-driven package design ensures that the package has the required properties, makes it possible to implement the software-engineering approach to the design process, avoids gross design errors, and simplifies package adaptation to different environments. Moreover, the hierarchical package structure allows a more technological approach to the development process, as it leads to more effective application of the methods of hierarchical, modular, and structured programming.Translated from Kibernetika, No. 2, pp. 35–39, March–April, 1982.