6652666
A method for analyzing team design activity
Design is a comples activity that has been the focus of substantial research work. Alone or in groups, dcsigncrs create, develop. refine. analyze and document their conceptualization of a product. Many research prqjects have proposed methods for observing the design activity. These methods vary from simple documentation analysis to video tape analysis. Although video tape technology has been in use for many years to record design activity. systematic methods have not been developed to analyze video data. This paper presents a method for analyzing team design activity recorded in videotapes. The purpose of the method is to reduce the subjectivity of video data analysis. Our study has been developed in the domain of cotlaborativc software design. The design activity of a multi-disciplinary group including from five to eight people was vidcotapcd and has heen analyzed. The team was involved with the design of an educational software system using the approach of decision making meetings. The analysis focused on the dynamics of the interactions among people involved in the design activity. This study is based on the belief that the interactions established among designers will provide important insights for a better understanding of design practice.
13425018
Lithofacies recognition hybrid bench
Well offshore petroleum exploration is a risky, but very profitable task. Determining the rock formation of each layer of a given reservoir diminishes the risks of expending a great deal of money drilling dry wells. Since collecting offshore rock samples is difficult and expensive, geologists must decide upon drilling based on indirect measures called well log. Traditional statistical methods have been used to assist this task. Neural networks have also been successfully used. As an alternative fuzzy logic based systems have an extra appeal of intuitive comprehension of some uncertainties. This paper presents a hybrid tool that combines neural networks, fuzzy logic and neuro-fuzzy logic to improve human intuition when analyzing the potential of oil fields.
29246421
Sharing design perspectives through storytelling
Design consists of analyzing scenarios and proposing artifacts, obeying the initial set of requirements that lead from initial to goal state. Finding or creating alternative solutions, analyzing them, and selecting the best one are expected steps in the designer’s decision making process. Very often, not a sole designer, but a team of them is engaged in the design process, sharing their expertise and responsibility to achieve optimum projects. In a design team, most conflicts occur due to misunderstanding of one’s assessment of specifications and contexts. Decision explanations play a key role in teamwork success. Designers are rational agents trained to follow rational methods. Acceptable justifications include value function, requirements, constraints, and criteria. Generally, explanations are delivered in a multimedia fashion, composed of text, graphics and gestures, to provide the audience the ability to perceive what was contextually imagined. The more spatial the reasoning is, the richer the explanation channel should be. This paper presents CineADD, a design explanation generation model based on cinema techniques such as animation, scripting, editing, and camera movements. The idea is to provide designers with a tool for describing the way their projects should be visually explained, as in a movie. Designers develop their projects in an active design document environment. Rationale is captured as a design model, so explanations can be generated instead of retrieved. The captured design model serves as a base to visually reconstruct design, giving emphasis and guidance by using movie storytelling techniques. CineADD was implemented for the domain of oil pipeline layout showing the feasibility of this approach. We expect CineADD to become a commodity attachable to any intelligent CAD system.
5520687
Web Navigation Patterns
44575256
An X-Ray of the Brazilian e-Gov Web Sites
The digital inclusion promotes the reduction of social inequalities. Based on this principle, the Brazilian Government has been setting up an increasing number of Web access locations to render virtual support to its citizens. However, there are no guidelines for the construction and assessment of these electronic Government (e-Gov) sites. In this article we measure the web site quality in the e-Gov domain with the following proprieties: usability, accessibility, interoperability, security, privacy, information reliability, and service agility. We implemented our method, by using a checklist tool, in the evaluation of 127 Brazilian government sites (federal, state and municipal). Our method proved itself efficient in the diagnosis and identification of specific problems in the e-Gov site domain.
15357706
Modeling flow around a microrotor in creeping flow using a quasi-steady-state analysis
Paramagnetic microsphere suspensions placed in a rotating magnetic field aggregate to form rotating magnetic chains. These chains that are several tens of micrometers in length act as microrotors, and can be modeled as circular cylinders. The flow and associated micromixing around these cylinders rotating about their radial axis is studied for a very low Reynolds number, creeping-flow system.. Time-scales for momentum transfer are much smaller than boundary movement, hence a quasi-steady approximation can be used. The flow is derived at every instant from the case of a steady motion of a horizontally translating cylinder, with the rotation approximated to a series of incremental translations. A numerical simulation was used to determine the pathlines and material lines of point fluid elements, which were analyzed to understand the behavior of the microfluidic system. The results indicate the flow to be unsteady, with chaotic advection observed in the system. The flow is primarily two-dimensional with planar fluid movement limited to the immediate area around the rotating cylinder, with a small disturbance in the axial direction that is experienced up to many diameters away. Elliptic and star shaped pathlines, including periodic orbits, are observed depending on the fluid element's initial location. The trajectories and phase angles compare well with the limited experimental results, as well as with data from particle dynamics simulations. Material lines and streaklines display stretching and folding, which are indicative of the chaotic behavior of the system. The material lines have similar lengths for the same amount of rotation at different speeds, and the affect of rotational speeds appears to be primarily to change the time of mixing.
979214
Enhancing agent-oriented models with aspects
The modular representation of concerns is imperative in the design modeling of multi-agent systems (MASs). However, MAS designers typically face a number of concerns that inherently affect several system agents and their respective internal elements, such as actions and goals. These crosscutting concerns encompass both internal and systemic properties, such as learning, mobility, error handling, and security. Without an explicit modeling of such MAS properties, designers can not properly communicate and reason about them and their broadly-scoped effects. The result is a multitude of agent-oriented design breakdowns: poor traceability from requirements to design models, hindering of reuse opportunities, and decreased evolvability. This paper presents an enhancement of an existing agent-oriented modeling language with aspects. We illustrate the use of our approach through some classical examples of crosscutting concerns in agent-oriented design models.
6575168
An Architectural-Based Reflective Approach to Incorporating Exception Handling into Dependable Software
Modern object-oriented software is inherently complex and has to cope with an increasing number of exceptional conditions to meet the system's dependability requirements. In this context, the goal of our work is twofold: (i) to present an exception handling model which is suitable for developing dependable object-oriented software, and (ii) to provide a systematic approach to incorporating exception handling during the design stage, that is, from the architectural design stage to the detailed design stage. The proposed approach employs the computational reflection concept to achieve a clear and transparent separation of concerns between the application's functionality and the exception handling facilities. This separation minimizes the complexity caused by the handling of abnormal behavior and facilitates the task of building dependable software with better readability, maintainability and reusability.
13430499
A Unified Meta-Level Software Architecture for Sequential and Concurrent Exception Handling