A model of software design

In this article we present a preliminary cognitive model of the process of software design. Our goal was to develop a model of expert problem-solving skills for a task in which domain knowledge played an extensive role. In our model the process of design is captured via goals-and-operators interacting with a knowledge base. We have defined the goals and operators as ones which are general to design, rather than specific to the current task. In addition, we have structured the atomic level operators so that they are able to access domain specific knowledge acquired through experience. This structure enables both general processes and domain specific knowledge to play critical roles in producing any particular design artifact. From our protocol analysis we have built a model which unites several recurring behaviors into an interpretable whole. the behaviors we account for include the building of mental models, mental simulation, and balanced development.     

Hybridation of Bayesian networks and evolutionary algorithms for multi-objective optimization in an integrated product design and project management context

A better integration of preliminary product design and project management processes at early steps of system design is nowadays a key industrial issue. Therefore, the aim is to make firms evolve from classical sequential approach (first product design the project design and management) to new integrated approaches. In this paper, a model for integrated product/project optimization is first proposed which allows taking into account simultaneously decisions coming from the product and project managers. However, the resulting model has an important underlying complexity, and a multi-objective optimization technique is required to provide managers with appropriate scenarios in a reasonable amount of time. The proposed approach is based on an original evolutionary algorithm called evolutionary algorithm oriented by knowledge (EAOK). This algorithm is based on the interaction between an adapted evolutionary algorithm and a model of knowledge (MoK) used for giving relevant orientations during the search process. The evolutionary operators of the EA are modified in order to take into account these orientations. The MoK is based on the Bayesian Network formalism and is built both from expert knowledge and from individuals generated by the EA. A learning process permits to update probabilities of the BN from a set of selected individuals. At each cycle of the EA, probabilities contained into the MoK are used to give some bias to the new evolutionary operators. This method ensures both a faster and effective optimization, but it also provides the decision maker with a graphic and interactive model of knowledge linked to the studied project. An experimental platform has been developed to experiment the algorithm and a large campaign of tests permits to compare different strategies as well as the benefits of this novel approach in comparison with a classical EA.     

Implementation of best manufacturing practices using logic models and system dynamics: project design and project assessment views

In today’s global competitive environment, the need for continuous improvement is a matter of considerable importance within manufacturing enterprises. To this end, project managers, and managers in general, design and assess different projects with the purpose of achieving efficient processes, reducing costs and waste, increasing product and service quality, developing new products and services, enhancing customer relationship management, optimising enterprise resources, and so on. However, it is well-known that managing enterprise resources in order to accomplish effective completion of projects is a complex task to carry out. Furthermore, it has been recognised that the way staff actually understands the purpose of a project, the way they perform different project activities, and how they are able to influence project design and assessment are key factors for influencing the success of a project. This paper presents a systemic methodology to design and assess projects more effectively and efficiently based on program logic models and system dynamics with the aim of facilitating a clear understanding of the needs, purposes, goals, activities and tasks of a project among its stakeholders towards achieving success.     

KidStory: a technology design partnership with children

We present a new design method that is used within the KidStory project to enable a large number of young children to participate as partners in the design of advanced storytelling technology. The method is an adaptation of the cooperative inquiry method for school environments and uses a combination of evaluation, brainstorming and traditional education methods. These activities have lead to the elaboration of new ideas, impacted the design of existing software and produced a number of interesting new technology designs.     

Computer aided system design of linked cooperative digital computers for control

For accurate and reliable automatic control the organisation of computer systems in aircraft and applications in other multi-task computer systems is more likely to be based on a number of “cooperative” computers in an integrated manner [1], than a main central computer.

Such a cooperative design should provide for the normal work load of each computer plus checking the data processing of another computer and have the ability to continue operation in case of a malfunction in one processor. To ensure that these requirements are met in a data driven operating system the basic system design parameters need careful assessment for optimised system performance especially when deadlines must be met in some control functions and an order of priorities preserved.

The present paper reports progress on a computer aided system design of such linked cooperative computers under the above conditions to determine basic system parameters such as the desirable character rates for the several central processors (C.P's) and optimum cycle length of C.P. to C.P. transfers.

The methods also overcomes objections [2] to some systems design procedures by allowing the results of sampled data theory to be made use of in the systems design by incorporating the sampling rate—although calculated separately [3] in one of the prime design parameters of the system.     

KidStory: A technology design partnership with children

We present a new design method that is used within the KidStory project to enable a large number of young children to participate as partners in the design of advanced storytelling technology. The method is an adaptation of the cooperative inquiry method for school environments and uses a combination of evaluation, brainstorming and traditional education methods. These activities have lead to the elaboration of new ideas, impacted the design of existing software and produced a number of interesting new technology designs.     

Collaborative design: Managing task interdependencies and multiple perspectives

This paper focuses on two characteristics of collaborative design with respect to cooperative work: the importance of work interdependencies linked to the nature of design problems; and the fundamental function of design cooperative work arrangement, which is the confrontation and combination of perspectives. These two intrinsic characteristics of the design work stress specific cooperative processes: coordination processes in order to manage task interdependencies, establishment of common ground and negotiation mechanisms in order to manage the integration of multiple perspectives in design.     

CAD-integrated engineering-data-management system for spring design

In an iterative design process, a large amount of engineering data needs to be processed. Owing to the limitations of traditional software, the engineering data cannot be handled simultaneously and are usually divided into geometric and non-geometric data in order to be managed by separate systems. In the spring industry, which requires repeated definition of complicated shapes, design engineers need special interfaces for efficient product design and drafting. In this paper, the CAD-integrated engineering-data-management system is developed and implemented for spring design, in order to simplify the drafting and data-management processes. This research focuses on three main issues that can be also applied to other applications, particularly for component designs. These issues include: (1) product model definition, (2) CAD-database communication, and (3) human-machine interface development. With the definition of product model, the system identifies which data should be accessed from data files to generate the proper drawings, and which database structure should be constructed for the application domain. By the use of CAD-database communication, when engineers modify the geometric or non-geometric parameters of a product design, these parametric values can be simultaneously updated in the database. Furthermore, the support of human-machine interface enhances the efficiency in routine manipulation of support engineering data management and design/redesign processes.     

Joint organisational and technical development of CIM-systems: An extension of the classic scandinavian approach

In Scandinavia theories and methods for cooperative design tools for the computer supported craftsman have been the topics for intensive research for several years. This paper widens the discussion by taking in the question of CIM and the reshaping of the division of labour, work organisation and manufacturing processes. The paper argues for an evaluation of methods and tools developed for very different aspects of integrated manufacturing.     

Needs’ elaboration between users,designers and project leaders: Analysis of a design process of a virtual reality-based software

ContextThe participation of users in the design process is recognized as a positive and a necessary element as artifacts suit their needs. Two complementary approaches of users’ involvement co-exist: the user-centered design and the participatory design. These approaches involve learning process from users to designers and vice versa. However, there has no research in design of virtual reality (VR)-based software dealing with how the elaboration of needs is actually distributed in time and among users, designers and project leaders, as well as how it is actually supported by tools and methods.ObjectiveThis paper aims to observe, in a real design project of a virtual reality-based software, how the various stakeholders (users, designers, project leaders) actually participate by sharing and pulling pieces of information from the process of needs elaboration, and how these contributions evolve throughout the decisions made in the course of the project.MethodOur method, based on the observation of the practices in collective design, allows us to collect and analyze the relationship between each possible action (e.g., elicitation), each stakeholder who initiates these actions (e.g., users) and each phase of the design process (e.g., evaluation phase), and the dynamics of the construction of needs.ResultsOur results detail how the elicited needs are dealt with by designers, users and/or project leaders: (1) we show a strong contribution of users in the design, compared to others stakeholders, (2) among the needs elicited by users, most have been validated by the designers, (3) some elicited needs could have been firstly rejected and finally validated and implemented.ConclusionWe identify the reasons which justify and explain our results confronting them to the literature. We underline the conditions have been satisfied in our study in order to involve effectively users in the design of emerging technologies.     

The relevance of ‘work-practice’ for design

Designers are increasingly being urged to take account of the situated and contingent organisation of the work that their systems are to support or automate. Within CSCW the concept of work-practice is a much used token for the organisation of work. This paper develops the debate about the position of work-practice in design by recognising that it is an ambiguous concept in sociology that is used to refer to different orders to work organisation. It is argued that as such it is as likely to mask the situated and contingent organisation of work as it is to make it visible. In order to fully realise the radicalisation of design portended by the deployment of the concept of work-practice and in order to make visible thein situ organisation of work it is argued that full and due weight has to be placed upon grounding the concept inanalytic explications of the interactional ordering of work. This stands in contrast to grounding work-practice in the formalisms of work emanating from theoretical debates about work in a capitalist economic/social structure; documentations of work; the narratives of workers, managers, and purchasers; dialogues with users, and mere observations of work. Two studies are invoked to substantiate this argument, one involving a sales ordering and invoicing system, the other a crime reporting system. We are grateful to Bob Anderson and Kjeld Schmidt for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

体验项目驱动的Java程序设计课程建设思路

Java语言凭借其平台无关性、开放性及安全性等特点有着较为广阔的应用前景。通过分析Java程序设计课程在教学中存在的一系列问题,提出了体验项目贯穿的教学方法,阐述了如何进行项目的选择与拆分、Java技术体系和学习地图的搭建、立体化教学资源的构建,以提高课程的教学效果,满足社会需要。     

Design breakdowns,scenarios and rapid application development

In this paper we consider the way in which two representational forms, scenarios and design breakdowns, which have emerged in the traditions of human-centred design are relevant within the recent commercial emphasis on rapid application development (RAD). RAD is a contingent approach to interactive software development that is characterised by large amounts of user involvement, incremental prototyping and product-based project management. Scenarios have become popular as an intermediate representation within the human–computer interaction and computer supported co-operative work communities. Design breakdowns have been suggested as a useful organising device and design technique within the co-operative prototyping literature. Both these representational forms are not currently utilised within the commercial RAD tradition. In order to detail the relevance of these concepts to commercial development, we describe the ‘natural history’ of one particular RAD project and show how scenarios, breakdowns and the resolution of such breakdowns contributed to the successful implementation of an information system within a small commercial organisation. We conclude with a discussion of lessons from our work and some intended future work in this area.     

Apel: A Graphical Yet Executable Formalism for Process Modeling

Software process improvement requires high level formalisms for describing project-specific, organizational and quality aspects. These formalisms must be convenient not only for capture but also for execution purposes. In order to fulfill these requirements and to build a software process environment capable of supporting engineering tasks we have designed a new graphical, but still enactable, formalism called APEL (for Abstract Process Engine Language).APEL is very ambitious in the sense that it aims to cover a wide spectrum of needs and approaches expressed not only in the software engineering field but also in many others such as real-time systems, object-oriented methodologies, tool integration, CSCW, workflow and information systems. It is then not surprising to see that many concepts and techniques used in APEL are borrowed from these connected fields. A major outcome of the work presented here was to integrate a broad range of concepts and paradigms in a single and coherent framework, but on the basis of a minimal set of primitive concepts which make it very easy to extend. Globally, the aspects which received most attention are: openness, reuse, scalability, human orientation and cooperative work.     

Using the cassiopeia method to design a robot soccer team

We have defined the Cassiopeia method, whose specificity is to focus the analysis and design of a multiagent system on the notion of organization. This article reports the use of this methodological framework for designing and implementing the organization of a robot soccer team in the context of a research project on collective robotics. We show why we chose this application, and we discuss its interest and inherent difficulties, in order to clearly express the needs for a design methodology dedicated to distributed artificial intelligence.     

Building the hybrid organisation through ERP and enterprise social software

This research traces the implementation of an information system in the form of ERP modules covering tenant and contract management in a Chinese service company. Misalignments between the ERP system specification and user needs led to the adoption of informal processes within the organisation. These processes are facilitated within an informal organisational structure and are based on human interactions undertaken within the formal organisation. Rather than to attempt to suppress the emergence of the informal organisation the company decided to channel the energies of staff involved in informal processes towards organisational goals. The company achieved this by harnessing the capabilities of what we term a hybrid ERP system, combining the functionality of a traditional (formal) ERP installation with the capabilities of Enterprise Social Software (ESS). However the company recognised that the successful operation of the hybrid ERP system would require a number of changes in organisational design in areas such as reporting structures and communication channels. A narrative provided by interviews with company personnel is thematised around the formal and informal characteristics of the organisation as defined in the literature. This leads to a definition of the characteristics of the hybrid organisation and strategies for enabling a hybrid organisation, facilitated by a hybrid ERP system, which directs formal and informal behaviour towards organisational goals and provides a template for future hybrid implementations.     

A metrics suite for object oriented design

Given the central role that software development plays in the delivery and application of information technology, managers are increasingly focusing on process improvement in the software development area. This demand has spurred the provision of a number of new and/or improved approaches to software development, with perhaps the most prominent being object-orientation (OO). In addition, the focus on process improvement has increased the demand for software measures, or metrics with which to manage the process. The need for such metrics is particularly acute when an organization is adopting a new technology for which established practices have yet to be developed. This research addresses these needs through the development and implementation of a new suite of metrics for OO design. Metrics developed in previous research, while contributing to the field's understanding of software development processes, have generally been subject to serious criticisms, including the lack of a theoretical base. Following Wand and Weber (1989), the theoretical base chosen for the metrics was the ontology of Bunge (1977). Six design metrics are developed, and then analytically evaluated against Weyuker's (1988) proposed set of measurement principles. An automated data collection tool was then developed and implemented to collect an empirical sample of these metrics at two field sites in order to demonstrate their feasibility and suggest ways in which managers may use these metrics for process improvement     

An object-oriented knowledge based Petri net approach to intelligent integration of design and assembly planning

Artificial intelligence can play an important role in the reduction of manufacturing costs and the enhancement of production efficiency and product quality. In order to assist designers in the early stages of a product development this paper develops an intelligent methodology for integration of design and assembly planning processes, including product design, assembly evaluation and redesign, assembly process planning, design of assembly system and assembly simulation, subjected to both econo-technical and ergonomic evaluations. A new unified class of object-oriented knowledge based Petri nets called OOKPNs, incorporating knowledge based expert systems and fuzzy logic into ordinary place–transition Petri nets, is defined and used for the representation and modeling of the distributed design processes. A prototype intelligent integrated design and assembly planning system (IIDAP) is implemented through distributed blackboard structure with concurrent integration of multiple cooperative knowledge sources and software. It consists essentially of the networked agents and the meta-system, each of which is a knowledge Petri net system with the capabilities of problem solving, learning and conflict resolution, and can be obtained through the inheritance, polymorphism and dynamic binding of instances of OOKPNs. In IIDAP system, both C/C++ language and COOL (CLIPS object-oriented language) are used to incorporate a Petri net tool, a geometric modeling and design tool, a planner and simulator and an evaluation tool. By use of this system, product design and assembly planning can be carried out simultaneously and intelligently in an entirely computer-aided concurrent design and assembly planning system. The design of manufacturable, cost-effective, usable products can therefore be achieved rapidly and flexibly. The developed methodology and system have been successfully applied to assembly design and planning of a micro switch.     

Towards a framework to manage formalised exchanges during collaborative design

New organizational frameworks for companies dealing with product development are required for the new market rules as for the rising pressure and complexity in product and process development. Thus, the new stake is to examine new methods of leading design activities as the cooperative design that deals with the sharing of various interests and resources among various actors, with the aim of reaching a common purpose. The latter lay on the development of products by means of knowledge sharing and interactions with a certain level of coordination between these varied activities. Embedded into the IPPOP research project perspectives, this paper focus on the particular collaborative situation of conflict management occurring during design activities. From an analysis of the conflict management domain, we shall specify a collaborative design framework dedicated to conflict handling thanks to one specification method based on the UML language. The specified solving process is applied on a real-life industrial case: a windmill stator sheet design. The design context of the artefact is exposed and the met conflicts are explained. Extracts of IPPOP demonstrator's graphical user interfaces, illustrating these collaborative aspects of the software application are then presented. They show the ability of the demonstrator to run the conflict solving process and to subscribe relevant actors in this process as well as filers to track pertinent past solutions suitable for the current problem.