Optimal resource allocation in new product development projects: a control-theoretic approach

Considers problems motivated by the dynamic allocation of limited heterogeneous resources in new product development (NPD) projects. The interchangeability of resources and simultaneous resource sharing are defining characteristics of NPD processes. A continuous flow model is introduced that incorporates these features. For problems without activity precedence constraints, a linear program is presented which yields the minimum completion time for all activities. A dynamic, rule-based algorithm is shown to be optimal for two resources processing a multiple-activity arrival stream. For problems with precedence constraints, some special cases are solved, and structural properties of the class of optimal controls for the general problem are discussed.     

Why usability gets lost or usability in in-house software development

This study tries to shed some light on what happens to usability and occupational health issues in a bespoke software development project. Usability is an essential quality in software, in particular in a work context where poor usability and other risk factors related to the software and computers may cause health problems. We have interviewed a number of software developers, usability people and users about their attitudes to and practices for integrating usability and users' health concerns in software development. The interviews were conducted in two Swedish organisations with in-house development of bespoke software. Our main conclusion is that several factors combine to push usability and occupational health matters aside, some of which are attitudes to usability and users' health issues, unclear responsibilities, poor support for user-centeredness and usability in software development models, ineffective user participation and usability and users' health being ignored or forgotten in decisions about the software, its use and its design.     

Integrating usability techniques into software development

Now merged into Siemens Medical Solutions Health Services, our company, formerly called Shared Medical Systems, creates clinical, financial, and administrative software for the healthcare industry. Like other medium to large companies, SMS had reached a scale and maturity level that required the development process to be documented, predictable, repeatable, measurable, and usable by the development groups. After much study and consideration, senior management committed to implementing a universal OO development methodology. Senior management recognized the need to improve customer satisfaction, which had always been high but needed to he better in an increasingly competitive market. Management saw the introduction of usability practices as a prime means to achieve this objective. So they began to place greater emphasis on usability-even to the point of building and staffing dual state-of-the-art usability labs. Our goal throughout the projects we describe was to combine the best OO analysis and design practices and usability techniques to create a powerful, unified way to develop software     

A systematic approach for resource allocation in software projects

The completion of reliable software products within their expected time frame represents a major problem for companies that develop software applications. Today, the software industry continues to struggle with delivering products in a timely manner. A major cause for delays is the training time required for engineers and other personnel to acquire the necessary skills to complete software tasks. Therefore, it is important to develop systematic personnel assignment processes that consider complete skill sets of candidates to provide solutions that reduce training time. This paper presents a novel methodology to assign resources to tasks when optimum skill sets are not available. The methodology takes into account existing capabilities of candidates, required levels of expertise, and priorities of required skills for the task. A sample case is used to show the model capabilities, and the results are compared with the current resource assignment approach.     

‘Representing the User’ in software development—a cultural analysis of usability work in the product development context

It is widely accepted that users should be involved in the development of interactive systems. However, involving users in interactive systems development is challenging, especially in product development. The organizational culture is a key factor affecting the successes and failures of organizational change and development efforts. This paper shows how user involvement is intertwined with the organizational cultures in a case study of five software development organizations. User involvement is indirect in the case organizations, and labeled as usability work. Using cross case analysis, four ‘cultures of usability work’ are identified. The cultures have distinct cultural characteristics, employ different approaches to usability work, and have different preferences and strategies for the prospective facilitation of usability work. Sensitivity to the cultural context is identified as an important consideration in the facilitation of usability work, and culturally compatible strategies for usability work in different cultural settings are identified. The paper concludes that there might not be one ‘best, universally valid, context free way’ of introducing and carrying out usability work in software product development organizations.     

Optimization-based resource allocation for software as a service application in cloud computing

Software as a service (SaaS) is a software that is developed and hosted by the SaaS vendor. SaaS cloud provides software as services to the users through the internet. To provide good quality of service for the user, the SaaS relies on the resources leased from infrastructure as a service cloud providers. As the SaaS services rapidly expand their application scopes, it is important to optimize resource allocation in SaaS cloud. The paper presents optimization-based resource allocation approach for software as a service application in cloud. The paper uses optimization decomposition approach to solve cloud resource allocation for satisfying the cloud user’s needs and the profits of the cloud providers. The paper also proposes a SaaS cloud resource allocation algorithm. The experiments are designed to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with other two related algorithms.     

Toward a new software development environment

The Lyee methodology allows the development of a software by simply defining its requirements. More precisely, a developer has only to provide words, calculation formulae, calculation conditions and layout of screens and printouts, and then leaves in the hands of the computer all subsequent troublesome programming process, i.e. control logic aspects. The formalization of Lyee methodology led to the definition of Lyee-Calculus, a formal process algebra, that easily and naturally supports the basic concepts of the Lyee methodology. Moreover, we provided an implementation of the constructs of the Lyee-Calculus in Java language in order to concretely show the efficiency of this calculus and its suitability for the Lyee methodology. In other words, this Java implementation of the Lyee-Calculus provides a means of bridging the gap between Lyee requirement specifications and their implementations.In this paper, we present a new software development environment, LyeeBuilder, that allows to automatically generate applications from specifications using a GUI interface. This software aims to give to programmers an environment that allows them to automatically generate applications from screens and word definitions.     

资源分配问题的协商模型

研究Agent多次协商过程中的策略调整问题,目的是使得Agent在协商过程中具有自学能力,对环境和协商对手更敏感。结合资源分配问题,讨论Agent协商过程中的学习问题,基于博弈论分别分析了单次协商和多次协商模型,给出了协商过程中在不同信息条件下遵循的策略,并进行了证明。     

Decentral task allocation for industrial AGV-systems with resource constraints

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) form a large and important part of the logistics transportation systems in today's industry and are widely used, especially in Europe. Today's AGV-systems offered by global manufacturers almost all operate under some form of centralized control where a single central controller coordinates the entire fleet of AGVs. There is a trend towards decentralized control of these systems where AGVs make individual decisions that promote the flexibility, robustness and scalability of transport. However, its practical implementation seems to be in its infancy. In addition to the lack of practical implementation of decentralized control in industrial AGV-systems, we have observed a research gap in intelligent resource management of AGV-systems, which we have tried to address in previous work by proposing a more intelligent resource management approach. In this paper, we have addressed both the perceived lack of practical decentralized AGV control and the lack of intelligent resource management by proposing a decentralized task allocation algorithm based on sequential single-item auctions, taking into account resource constraints, and in which our intelligent resource management approach from previous work is introduced. We have benchmarked our new approach to a genetic algorithm-based task-allocation solver that uses “threshold-100”-charging as a resource management strategy. The result of the proposal is a decentralized task-allocation architecture under resource constraints that could be used in current AGV-systems to add more decentralized features to the fleet.     

软件研发中的精细化人力资源管理模型及系统

软件项目研发的成功与否,人力资源的管理起着决定性作用。从实践项目中提出了精细化人力资源管理的模型,将人力资源、软件项目、任务等抽象成具有状态、属性和操作的实体,通过定义任务效率、效率奇点等指标,综合SPI、CPI指标进行项目成本进度偏差分析,为人力资源的计划、调度、冲突处理等提供支撑。基于该模型进行平台研发,并通过在该平台中跟踪和分析真实的精细化人力资源管理案例,验证了模型的有效性。     

Evaluation of simulation-assisted value stream mapping for software product development: Two industrial cases

Context: Value stream mapping (VSM) as a tool for lean development has led to significant improvements in different industries. In a few studies, it has been successfully applied in a software engineering context. However, some shortcomings have been observed in particular failing to capture the dynamic nature of the software process to evaluate improvements i.e. such improvements and target values are based on idealistic situations.Objective: To overcome the shortcomings of VSM by combining it with software process simulation modeling, and to provide reflections on the process of conducting VSM with simulation.Method: Using case study research, VSM was used for two products at Ericsson AB, Sweden. Ten workshops were conducted in this regard. Simulation in this study was used as a tool to support discussions instead of as a prediction tool. The results have been evaluated from the perspective of the participating practitioners, an external observer, and reflections of the researchers conducting the simulation that was elicited by the external observer.Results: Significant constraints hindering the product development from reaching the stated improvement goals for shorter lead time were identified. The use of simulation was particularly helpful in having more insightful discussions and to challenge assumptions about the likely impact of improvements. However, simulation results alone were found insufficient to emphasize the importance of reducing waiting times and variations in the process.Conclusion: The framework to assist VSM with simulation presented in this study was successfully applied in two cases. The involvement of various stakeholders, consensus building steps, emphasis on flow (through waiting time and variance analysis) and the use of simulation proposed in the framework led to realistic improvements with a high likelihood of implementation.     

Interference aware resource allocation for hybrid hierarchical wireless networks

This paper addresses the problem of interference aware resource allocation for OFDMA based hybrid hierarchical wireless networks. We develop two resource allocation algorithms considering the impact of wireless interference constraints using a weighted SINR conflict graph to quantify the interference among the various nodes: (1) interference aware routing using maximum concurrent flow optimization; and (2) rate adaptive joint subcarrier and power allocation algorithm under interference and QoS constraints. We exploit spatial reuse to allocate subcarriers in the network and show that an intelligent reuse of resources can improve throughput while mitigating interference. We provide a sub-optimal heuristic to solve the rate adaptive resource allocation problem. We demonstrate that aggressive spatial reuse and fine tuned-interference modeling garner advantages in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay and power distribution.     

A model for software product quality

A model for software product quality is defined, it has been formulated by associating a set of quality-carrying properties with each of the structural forms that are used to define the statements and statement components of a programming language. These quality-carrying properties are in turn linked to the high-level quality attributes of the International Standard for Software Product Evaluation ISO-9126. The model supports building quality into software, definition of language-specific coding standards, systematically classifying quality defects, and the development of automated code auditors for detecting defects in software     

Integration of usability evaluation and model-based software development

Model-based software development is carried out as a well defined process. Depending on the applied approach, different phases can be distinguished, e.g. requirements specification, design, prototyping, implementation and usability evaluation. During this iterative process manifold artifacts are developed and modified, including, e.g. models, source code and usability evaluation data. CASE tools support the development stages well, but lack a seamless integration of usability evaluation methods. We aim at bridging the gap between development and usability evaluation, through enabling the cooperative use of artifacts with the particular tools. As a result of integration usability experts save time to prepare an evaluation and evaluation results can be easier incorporated back into the development process. We show exemplary our work on enhancing the Eclipse framework to support usability evaluation for task model-based software development.     

Toward a hybrid data mining model for customer retention

The prevention of subscriber churn through customer retention is a core issue of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). By minimizing customer churn a company maximizes its profit. This paper proposes a hybridized architecture to deal with customer retention problems. It does so not only through predicting churn probability but also by proposing retention policies. The architecture works in two modes: learning and usage.

In the learning mode, the churn model learner seeks potential associations from the subscriber database. This historical information is used to form a churn model. This mode also calls for a policy model constructor to use the attributes identified in the churn model to divide all ‘churners’ into distinct groups. The policy model constructor is also responsible for developing a policy model for each churner group. In the usage mode, a churn predictor uses the churn model to predict the churn probability of a given subscriber. When the churn model finds that the subscriber has a high churn probability the policy model is used to suggest specific retention policies.

This study’s experiments show that the churn model has an evaluation accuracy of approximately eighty-five percent. This suggests that policy model construction represents an interesting and important technique in investigating the characteristics of churner groups. Furthermore, this study indicates that understanding the relationships between churns is essential in creating effective retention policy models for dealing with ‘churners’.     

Scaling for agility: A reference model for hybrid traditional-agile software development methodologies

The adoption of agility at a large scale often requires the integration of agile and non-agile development elements for architecting a hybrid adaptive methodology. The challenge is ”which elements or components (agile or non-agile) are relevant to develop the context-aware hybrid adaptive methodology reference architecture?” This paper addresses this important challenge and develops a hybrid adaptive methodology reference architecture model using a qualitative constructive empirical research approach. In this way, we have uncovered the agility, abstraction, business value, business policy, rules, legal, context and facility elements or components that have not been explicitly modelled or discussed in International Standards (IS) such as the ISO/IEC 24744 metamodel. It is anticipated that a context-aware hybrid adaptive methodology can be architected by using the proposed context-aware hybrid adaptive methodology reference architecture elements for a particular situation when using a situational method engineering approach.     

引入弹性理论的混合接入式Femtocell网络资源分配策略

在混合接入式Femtocell网络中,为了激励家庭小区基站接纳位于死区的宏用户,提出了基于Stackelberg 博弈和弹性理论的资源分配方法。首先建立Stackelberg博弈模型,宏基站 （Macro Base Station,MBS）作为主导者（Leader）,家庭小区基站（Femto base station,FBS）作为跟随者（Follower）,MBS支付给FBS效用,而FBS通过获利来补偿因为接纳宏用户（Macro user equipment,MUE）而损失的速率。接着引入弹性理论确立MBS和FBS的效用函数,构建凸优化问题,并求解出价格和速率的均衡解,参与人都能实现效用最大化。最后通过数值分析,验证了均衡解的存在,比较分析了在发射功率不同的情况下,FBS和MBS的效用。结果表明,迭代20次左右即可找到均衡解,弹性因子参数为0.7时,FBS和MBS的收益最佳。通过理论研究和数值分析验证了策略有效性。     

SoPHy+: Programming model and software platform for hybrid resource management of many-core accelerators

As demand of higher computing power is steadily increasing, it becomes popular to equip a many-core accelerator in a computer system to run concurrent applications. Efficient management of compute resources in such a system is challenging because various factors such as workload variation, QoS requirement change, and hardware failure may cause dynamic change in system status. Recently, a variety of resource management techniques for many-core accelerators have been proposed. They are usually tailored for a specific target architecture. In this paper, we present SoPHy+, which supports various types of many-core accelerators, based on a hybrid resource management technique. SoPHy+ provides a seamless design flow from programming front-end, which generates dataflow-style function codes automatically from the task specification, to run-time environment, which adaptively manages compute resources for concurrent applications in response to system status change. SoPHy+ has been implemented on two different many-core architectures: the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor and an Epiphany-like NoC virtual prototype. Experimental results prove that SoPHy+ is capable of adapting to the run-time workload variation effectively with affordable overhead of run-time resource management.