Scenario Development and Practical Decision Making under Uncertainty: Application to Requirements Engineering

In this paper, we address the question of how flesh and blood decision makers manage the combinatorial explosion in scenario development for decision making under uncertainty. The first assumption is that the decision makers try to undertake ‘robust’ actions. For the decision maker a robust action is an action that has sufficiently good results whatever the events are. We examine the psychological as well as the theoretical problems raised by the notion of robustness. Finally, we address the false feeling of decision makers who talk of ‘risk control’. We argue that ‘risk control’ results from the thinking that one can postpone action after nature moves. This ‘action postponement’ amounts to changing look-ahead reasoning into diagnosis. We illustrate these ideas in the framework of software development and examine some possible implications for requirements analysis.     

Performance Management in Breast Screening: A Case Study of Professional Vision

As part of a programme to investigate the requirements for computer-based detection aids in the NHS breast screening programme, we have been studying how the work of mammogram reading is done within different screening centres. Our findings show how various interactional practices have been evolved in order to help maintain readers’ performance within acceptable levels. In this paper, we investigate one of these in detail, the use of annotations on screening reporting forms, and we consider their role in managing readers’ performance. Finally, we consider the implications of such practices for the design of computer-based systems and tools for breast screening.     

Training Effective Human Performance in the Management of Stressful Emergencies

Emergency situations in industry occur suddenly and often unexpectedly; operators must make critical decisions under stress, and the consequences of errors can be immediate and catastrophic. Training effective performance under stress becomes an important aspect in the management of emergencies. This article proposes a taxonomy of cognitive strategies that enable operators to regulate their thinking and adapt decisions to changes in the demands of the situation. Cognitive strategies, such as, tolerating uncertainty, managing workload, planning for contingencies, and self-monitoring, provide the content of training emergency response. Stress, however, interferes with the learning of strategies, which presents a challenge to the design of training methods. Exposure to stress during training, degree of task decomposition, guidance, contextual variety and feedback are some of the training methods explored to facilitate the acquisition and transfer of cognitive strategies. Diversions from the traditional systems approach to training are pointed out and areas for further training research are identified.     

The Use of a Formalised Risk Model in NHS Information System Development

Information systems (IS) and technology are used extensively throughout the National Health Service (NHS), and the 1998 national information strategy, ‘Information for Health’, sets out how the NHS will be developing and implementing IS to support patient care within the next decade. This new IS initiative is set against a mixed record of success of IS projects in the NHS, with a number of high-profile failures. This paper highlights the need to consider the ‘organisational issues’ involved in systems implementation to avoid failures. It goes on to advocate the use of a process-oriented and organisation studies-based model for risk analysis and management for use in NHS IS projects. Two famous NHS case studies are used to validate the model. It is concluded that there is a real need in the NHS for tools to better control the inherent risks involved in IS development and implementation. Ultimately, the success of IS projects in the NHS is crucial if they want to best utilise clinical and patient information, with the overall aim of improving the efficiency and standard of the nation’s health care.     

Investigating the Work of Industrial Schedulers through Field Study

The study of planning and scheduling from a human factors perspective has re-emerged as an important area for research in contemporary manufacturing enterprises. Improved decision support systems are needed that optimally integrate people with computer-based systems in order to increase productivity and responsiveness. However, there is a dearth of knowledge on the reality of the human factors of planning and scheduling practice across manufacturing industry. This paper reviews previous studies of scheduling practice and demonstrates the lack of clearly reported and justified methods to study scheduling behaviour and to interpret and represent the findings. Field study is proposed as the most appropriate approach for carrying out studies of scheduling in practice and various methods used in scheduling field studies are specified. Particular emphasis is given to the investigation of the nature of planning and scheduling practice in the context of a functionally, spatially and temporally complex environment.     

Negotiating Use: Making Sense of Mobile Technology

This paper is based on a study of the ways in which a group negotiated the use of a new mobile technology. The group was made up of ski instructors who, during a one-week ski trip, were equipped with a mobile awareness device called the Hummingbird. The group was studied using ethnomethodologically inspired qualitative methods, with the focus on the group members’ different views of the Hummingbird’s intended use. Negotiations of use occurred using two methods: talk and action. The users negotiated issues such as where and when to use the technology, and whether to consider the Hummingbird a work tool or a gadget for social events. Further, the empirical results clearly show how negotiations of new, mobile technology differ from stationary technology.     

Features of Decision-Making in Process Control Tasks: The Relevance of the Work Context

This paper is centred on evaluating some significant features of decision-making in process control tasks. The study was carried out in a petrol refinery, specifically, with distillation console operators. Operator verbalisations were recorded during the completion of two specific tasks and later categorised by raters using a list of cognitive categories. The inter-rater reliability was calculated together with qualitative evaluations of the main overlaps among the categories. From the raters’ evaluations, flow diagrams were drawn that represented the plans and tactics developed by operators and the implied cognitive processes (evaluation, prediction, action, etc.). We found that the operators began the tasks with a primary global situation assessment that determined the choice of whether to cope with the task ‘step by step’ or ‘globally’. The results showed two patterns of decision sequences made in normal adjustment performance or in problem situations. Other findings are related to the importance of characteristics such as prediction, anticipation, feedback and the role of the alarms selected by a situation assessment and individual characteristics.     

Making Workflow Change Acceptable

Virtual professional communities are supported by network information systems composed from standard Internet tools. To satisfy the interests of all community members, a user-driven approach to requirements engineering is proposed that produces not only meaningful but also acceptable specifications. This approach is especially suited for workflow systems that support partially structured, evolving work processes. To ensure the acceptability, social norms must guide the specification process. The RENISYS specification method is introduced, which facilitates this process using composition norms as formal representations of social norms. Conceptual graph theory is used to represent four categories of knowledge definitions: type definitions, state definitions, action norms and composition norms. It is shown how the composition norms guide the legitimate user-driven specification process by analysing a case on the development of an electronic law journal.     

Distributed Cognition in an Emergency Co-ordination Center

*Formerly at the Department of Communication Studies, Linko¨ping University, Sweden. Most of this work was conducted during the author’s employment at the Department of Communication Studies. Recent research concerning the control of complex systems stresses the systemic character of the work of the controlling system, including the number of people and artefacts as well as the environment. This study adds to the growing body of knowledge by focusing on the internal working of such a system. Our vantage point is the theoretical framework of distributed cognition. Through a field study of an emergency co-ordination centre we try to demonstrate how the team’s cognitive tasks, to assess an event and to dispatch adequate resources, are achieved by mutual awareness, joint situation assessment, and the co-ordinated use of the technology and the physical arrangement of the co-ordination room.     

A Fusion Mechanism for Management Decision and Risk Analysis

Abstract

This study introduces a fusion mechanism by incorporating a risk metric with two-level data envelopment analysis (two-level DEA) for describing a corporate’s operation status and then constructs a hybrid model that combines rough set theory with artificial fish swarm algorithm (RSAFSA) and fuzzy support vector machine (FSVM) in order to forecast corporate operating performance. The introduced mechanism, supported by real-life cases, can assist both public and private market participants who must allocate their economic resources to suitable places as well as maximize their personnel wealth under anticipated risk exposure.     

Dynamic sculpting and animation of free-form subdivision solids

Published online: 15 March 2002     

Specifications, Design and Evaluation of an Advanced Human-Adapted Supervisory System

Supervision of highly automated processes is an interdisciplinary research area. Knowledge in the fields of automation, process knowledge, machine engineering, ‘work post’ ergonomics, cognitive ergonomics, working psychology, sociology and so on is necessary to design efficient supervisory systems. This is because supervision is an activity in which man, despite the increasing automation of recent years, is still present. Our research concerns monitoring tasks and diagnosis tasks in continuous processes. In this paper we propose specifications for an advanced human-adapted supervisory system (AHASS) integrating representation characteristics of the production system, such as functional, structural and behavioural aspects based on cognitive engineering models, with the use of advanced algorithms of detection and location. The main idea is to design a supervisory system well balanced between human and technical aspects. Indeed, man–machine system-centred approaches can deal to another extreme like purely technical approaches. These specifications have been used to design an AHASS for a nuclear fuel reprocessing system that has been evaluated through experiments with experienced operators. The results show that the approach is interesting because the boarder between support and assistantship is never crossed.     

An adaptive visual environment for digital libraries

CDL (Corporate Digital Library) is a prototypical intelligent digital library service that is currently being developed at the University of Bari, as an evolution of a previous project named IDL (Intelligent Digital Library). Among the characterizing features of CDL there are a retrieval engine and several facilities available for the library users. In this paper, we present the web-based visual environment we have developed with the aim of improving user-library interaction. The CDL environment is equipped with some novel visual tools that are primarily intended for inexperienced users, who represent most of the users that usually have access to digital libraries. Machine Learning techniques have been exploited in CDL for document analysis, classification, and understanding, as well as for building a user modeling module, which is the basic component for providing CDL with user interface adaptivity. This feature is also discussed in the paper. Received: 15 December 1997 / Revised: June 1999     

风险评估量化分析

文章介绍了风险评估量化模型及量化模型的算法改进,并对智能风险评估方法进行了介绍。文章简要介绍了风险的3要素（资产、弱点、威胁）的风险矩阵分析方法和变精度粗糙的方法,为有效地进行风险评估提供了可行的方法。     

Dynamic end-to-end QoS management middleware for distributed multimedia systems

In this paper, we present a separable, reusable middleware solution that provides coordinated, end-to-end QoS management over any type of service component, and can use existing (legacy) QoS management solutions (by using wrappers) in a distributed multimedia system. Our middleware solution incorporates strategic and tactical QoS managers, and supports protocols and messages between tactical managers and managed application components, and between QoS managers in the management hierarchy. Strategic QoS managers take a global view of QoS provided by a set of application components within the manager's policy domain. Tactical QoS managers provide local control over application components. We introduce the concept of QoS policy domains to scope the authority of a strategic QoS manager. We describe how the management hierarchy is dynamically configured and reconfigured based on runtime needs of the application.     

Dynamic playout scheduling algorithms for continuous multimedia streams

In this paper, we investigate a playout scheduling framework for supporting the continuous and synchronized presentations of multimedia streams in a distributed multimedia presentation system. We assume a situation in which the server and network transmissions provide sufficient support for the delivery of media objects. In this context, major issues regarding the enforcement of the smooth presentation of multimedia streams at client sites must be addressed to deal with rate variance of stream presentations and delay variance of networks. We develop various playout-scheduling algorithms that are adaptable to quality-of-service parameters. The proposed algorithms permit the local adjustment of unsynchronized presentations by gradually accelerating or retarding presentation components, rather than abruptly skipping or pausing the presentation materials. A comprehensive experimental analysis of the proposed algorithms demonstrates that our algorithms can effectively avoid playout gaps (or hiccups) in the presentations. This scheduling framework can be readily used to support customized multimedia presentations.     

动态直觉模糊多属性决策的VIKOR扩展方法

隐变量是观察不到或虚拟的变量,直接利用数据驱动的学习方法难以有效地发现隐变量,因而需要结合概率图结构分析的方法。针对基于结构分析的隐变量发现方法中难以确定隐变量个数和位置的问题,提出一种基于结构分解和因子分析的隐变量发现算法(S-FAHF)。S-FAHF算法利用联合树算法生成具较强依赖关系的变量子集,利用因子分析思想,通过求变量子集的特征值和累积贡献率确定变量子集中隐变量的个数,利用负荷矩阵确定隐变量的位置,最后利用打分函数测试所发现的隐变量的有效性。通过算法比较和实验结果表明,该方法能准确地确定贝叶斯网络中隐变量的个数及位置。     

Dynamic batching policies for an on-demand video server

In a video-on-demand environment, continuous delivery of video streams to the clients is guaranteed by sufficient reserved network and server resources. This leads to a hard limit on the number of streams that a video server can deliver. Multiple client requests for the same video can be served with a single disk I/O stream by sending (multicasting) the same data blocks to multiple clients (with the multicast facility, if present in the system). This is achieved by batching (grouping) requests for the same video that arrive within a short time. We explore the role of customer-waiting time and reneging behavior in selecting the video to be multicast. We show that a first come, first served (FCFS) policy that schedules the video with the longest outstanding request can perform better than the maximum queue length (MQL) policy that chooses the video with the maximum number of outstanding requests. Additionally, multicasting is better exploited by scheduling playback of the most popular videos at predetermined, regular intervals (hence, termed FCFS-). If user reneging can be reduced by guaranteeing that a maximum waiting time will not be exceeded, then performance of FCFS- is further improved by selecting the regular playback intervals as this maximum waiting time. For an empirical workload, we demonstrate a substantial reduction (of the order of 60%) in the required server capacity by batching.     

Human Values and the Management of Technological Change

This paper looks at how human values influence the reception of technology in organisations. It suggests that we need to know what values are and how value systems evolve in order to manage technological change effectively. This proposition is based on research into the issues surrounding performance measurement as part of an information system, the cognition of which contains many parallels with that of technology. The analysis places human values’ theory within the context of systems thinking, where values are taken as system components, their groupings as systems and the expectations and behaviour produced by them as emergence.