463 research outputs found
A hybrid approach to achieve organizational agility: An empirical study of a food company
No full textPurpose: In today’s intense global competition, agility is advocated as a fundamental characteristic for business survival and competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to propose a practical methodology to achieve and enhance organizational agility based on strategic objectives. Design/methodology/approach: In the first step, a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) of the organization being studied are recognized and classified under the perspectives of balanced scorecard (BSC). Critical success factors are then identified by ranking the KPIs according to their importance in achieving organizational strategic objectives using the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). In the second step, three houses of quality (HOQs) are constructed sequentially to identify and rank the main agile attributes, agile enablers, and improvement paths. In addition, in order to translate linguistics judgments of practitioners into numerical values in building HOQs, fuzzy logic is employed. Findings: The capability of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by applying it to a case of a multi-national food company in Iran. Through the application, the company could find the most suitable improvement paths to improve its organizational agility. Research limitations/implications: A limited number of KPIs were chosen due to computational and visual constraints related to HOQs. Another limitation, similar to other agility studies, which facilitate decision making among agility metrics, was that the metrics were more industry-specific and less inclusive. Practical implications: A strong practical advantage for the application of the methodology over directly choosing agility metrics without linking them is that through the methodology, the right metrics were selected that match organization’s core values and marketing objectives. While metrics may ostensibly seem unrelated or inappropriate, they actually contributed to the right areas where there were gaps between the current and desired level of agility. It would otherwise be impossible to choose the right metrics without a structured methodology. Originality/value: This paper proposes a novel methodology for achieving organizational agility. By utilizing and linking several tools such as BSC, fuzzy TOPSIS, and quality function deployment (QFD), the proposed approach enables organizations to identify the most appropriate agile attributes, agile enablers, and subsequently agile improvement paths
Semantically-enhanced topic recommendation systems for software projects
No full textSoftware-related platforms such as GitHub and Stack Overflow, have enabled their users to collaboratively label software entities with a form of metadata called topics. Tagging software repositories with relevant topics can be exploited for facilitating various downstream tasks. For instance, a correct and complete set of topics assigned to a repository can increase its visibility. Consequently, this improves the outcome of tasks such as browsing, searching, navigation, and organization of repositories. Unfortunately, assigned topics are usually highly noisy, and some repositories do not have well-assigned topics. Thus, there have been efforts on recommending topics for software projects, however, the semantic relationships among these topics have not been exploited so far. In this work, we propose two recommender models for tagging software projects that incorporate the semantic relationship among topics. Our approach has two main phases; (1) we first take a collaborative approach to curate a dataset of quality topics specifically for the domain of software engineering and development. We also enrich this data with the semantic relationships among these topics and encapsulate them in a knowledge graph we call SED-KGraph. Then, (2) we build two recommender systems; The first one operates only based on the list of original topics assigned to a repository and the relationships specified in our knowledge graph. The second predictive model, however, assumes there are no topics available for a repository, hence it proceeds to predict the relevant topics based on both textual information of a software project (such as its README file), and SED-KGraph. We built SED-KGraph in a crowd-sourced project with 170 contributors from both academia and industry. Through their contributions, we constructed SED-KGraph with 2,234 carefully evaluated relationships among 863 community-curated topics. Regarding the recommenders’ performance, the experiment results indicate that our solutions outperform baselines that neglect the semantic relationships among topics by at least 25% and 23% in terms of Average Success Rate and Mean Average Precision metrics, respectively. We share SED-KGraph, as a rich form of knowledge for the community to re-use and build upon. We also release the source code of our two recommender models, KGRec and KGRec+ (https://github.com/mahtab-nejati/KGRec).Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Software Engineerin
Traceability and sysml design slices to support safety inspections: A controlled experiment
No full textCertifying safety-critical software and ensuring its safety requires checking the conformance between safety requirements and design. Increasingly, the development of safety-critical software relies on modeling, and the System Modeling Language (SysML) is now commonly used in many industry sectors. Inspecting safety conformance by comparing design models against safety requirements requires safety inspectors to browse through large models and is consequently time consuming and error-prone. An important concern in relation to traceability is cost effectiveness. Making traceability cost effective requires a careful analysis of the trade-offs between the costs incurred over establishing and maintaining traceability links and the benefits that traceability offers. Traceability is considered worthwhile if it presents a significant advantage for achieving certain goals. In our case, the goals pursued from traceability are to increase the correctness and decrease the effort associated with design safety inspections
A SysML-based approach to traceability management and design slicing in support of safety certification: Framework, tool support, and case studies
No full textContext: Traceability is one of the basic tenets of all safety standards and a key prerequisite for software safety certification. In the current state of practice, there is often a significant traceability gap between safety requirements and software design. Poor traceability, in addition to being a non-compliance issue on its own, makes it difficult to determine whether the design fulfills the safety requirements, mainly because the design aspects related to safety cannot be clearly identified. Objective: The goal of this article is to develop a framework for specifying and automatically extracting design aspects relevant to safety requirements. This goal is realized through the combination of two components: (1) A methodology for establishing traceability between safety requirements and design, and (2) an algorithm that can extract for any given safety requirement a minimized fragment (slice) of the design that is sound, and yet easy to understand and inspect. Method: We ground our framework on System Modeling Language (SysML). The framework includes a traceability information model, a methodology to establish traceability, and mechanisms for model slicing based on the recorded traceability information. The framework is implemented in a tool, named SafeSlice. Results: We prove that our slicing algorithm is sound for temporal safety properties, and argue about the completeness of slices based on our practical experience. We report on the lessons learned from applying our approach to two case studies, one benchmark and one industrial case. Both studies indicate that our approach substantially reduces the amount of information that needs to be inspected for ensuring that a given (behavioral) safety requirement is met by the design. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
SafeSlice: A model slicing and design safety inspection tool for SysML
No full textSoftware safety certification involves checking that the software design meets the (software) safety requirements. In practice, inspections are one of the primary vehicles for ensuring that safety requirements are satisfied by the design. Unless the safety-related aspects of the design are clearly delineated, the inspections conducted by safety assessors would have to consider the entire design, although only small fragments of the design may be related to safety. In a model-driven development context, this means that the assessors have to browse through large models, understand them, and identify the safety-related fragments. This is time-consuming and error-prone, specially noting that the assessors are often third-party regulatory bodies who were not involved in the design. To address this problem, we describe in this paper a prototype tool called, SafeSlice, that enables one to automatically extract the safety-related slices (fragments) of design models. The main enabler for our slicing technique is the traceability between the safety requirements and the design, established by following a structured design methodology that we propose. Our work is grounded on SysML, which is being increasingly used for expressing the design of safety-critical systems. We have validated our work through two case studies and a control experiment which we briefly outline in the paper. © 2011 ACM
Thermal Buckling and Vibration Analysis of SMA Hybrid Composite Sandwich Beams
No full textThis work studies the buckling and free vibration behavior of Shape Memory Alloy Hybrid Composite (SMAHC) sandwich beams under a thermal environment. The sandwich beams consist of layers reinforced with SMAs and a FGM core, and they are simply supported at both ends. The higher order theory is combined with the Minimum Potential Energy principle or Hamilton principle to derive the governing equations of the thermal buckling and thermal vibration problems, respectively. The material properties of the beam are assumed as temperature-independent (TID) or temperature-dependent (TD). In the last case, two different types of thermal distribution are considered, namely a uniform and a linear distribution. The results based on the proposed formulation are verified against the reference literature, with a very good matching. A parametric study checks for the influence of different effective parameters such as thickness-to-length ratios, volume fraction powers, initial strain, volume fraction of SMA wires, and temperature distribution on the overall mechanical response of the selected structural member, with useful insights from a design standpoint
Research-based innovation: A tale of three projects in model-driven engineering
No full textIn recent years, we have been exploring ways to foster a closer collaboration between software engineering research and industry both to align our research with practical needs, and to increase awareness about the importance of research for innovation. This paper outlines our experience with three research projects conducted in collaboration with the industry. We examine the way we collaborated with our industry partners and describe the decisions that contributed to the effectiveness of the collaborations. We report on the lessons learned from our experience and illustrate the lessons using examples from the three projects. The lessons focus on the applications of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), as all the three projects we draw on here were MDE projects. Our goal from structuring and sharing our experience is to contribute to a better understanding of how researchers and practitioners can collaborate more effectively and to gain more value from their collaborations. © 2012 Springer-Verlag
Emotions and visualizations: where heart and mind intermingle
No full textThe etymological meanings of the words emotion and visualization will help in setting the scenario for the present work and offer an initial explanation of what the title implicates when it states that the interaction between emotions and visualizations allows human hearts and minds to intermingle and cooperate towards reaching goals and unveiling limiting blocks in second-language acquisition (SLA), and possibly in other learning contexts
Static and free vibration analysis of functionally graded conical shells reinforced by carbon nanotubes
No full textThis study investigates the static and free vibration behavior of rotating functionally graded (FG) truncated conical shells reinforced by carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with a gradual distribution of the volume fraction through the thickness. CNTs are here selected as reinforcement, because of their noteworthy physical and chemical properties, together with their ability to enhance the mechanical properties of the whole composite structure. A two-parameter agglomeration model is considered to describe the micromechanics of such particles, which tend to agglomerate into spherical regions when scattered in a polymer matrix. From the macro-mechanical point of view, the conical structures are characterized by a gradual variation of their mechanical properties along the thickness direction, since different distributions are explored to describe the volume fraction of the reinforcing phase. The governing equations of motion for the rotating truncated composite conical shells are derived and solved numerically by means of the Generalized Differential Quadrature (GDQ) method combined with the third order shear deformation theory (TSDT) in small deformations. The GDQ approach has recently emerged as a very promising numerical tool to solve complex problems without passing through any variational formulation, but solving directly the equations of motion in a strong form. In this paper, a parametric study based on the GDQ is systematically performed to exploit the effect of some geometry parameters, i.e. the length, the radius, the thickness and the semi-vertex angle of the cone, as well as the different distribution of CNTs along the thickness, on the frequency at different circumferential wave numbers and rotating speeds. A convergence study of the numerical results is also made in terms of deflection and stress distributions of the structure, which proves the efficiency of the GDQ approach, also for coarse mesh discretizations in the meridional direction
Sequential joint inversion of gravity and magnetic data via the cross-gradient constraint
No full textDifferent geophysical methods use different model parameterizations and inversion algorithms. Thus, combining these different inversion systems and yet adding the nonlinear cross-gradient constraint in a joint inversion framework might be a big challenge, for instance, as explained further by Moorkamp et al. in 2011, there is a complex interaction between the data misfit terms, regularization and cross-gradient terms and an imperfect fit to the data is expected. In this paper, we use a sequential algorithm for a two-dimensional joint inversion of gravity and magnetic data, which tries to avoid these issues by decoupling the gravity inversion, the magnetic inversion and the cross-gradient minimization processes. The efficiency of the algorithm and developed code is demonstrated by the joint inversion of noisy synthetic data. The results show a significant improvement in the respective models obtained by introducing the cross-gradient joint inversion over the models obtained by separate inversions for synthetic data and then for field data targeting potash ore source in the AjiChai salt deposit in north-western Iran. In this application case, the lower density of salt minerals such as potash, compared to its surrounding sedimentary sequences, motivates a gravity study. Furthermore, the relative lower susceptibility of these salt minerals, alongside their diamagnetic effect, makes them a suitable target for magnetic surveys. Separate gravity and magnetic studies had been performed over the deposit; however, a constitutive relationship between density and magnetization within the area of interest supporting a joint inversion had not been established. In this paper, we apply the sequential cross-gradient approach to perform the first full joint inversion for the AjiChai salt deposit. The magnetic inversion here is performed to recover the magnetization amplitudes rather than the magnetization vector. In fact, we assume there is no remanent magnetization and, therefore, that the magnetization vector is constant and parallel to the geomagnetic field direction. The constructed density and magnetization models are of high concordance with available geological information and previous studies including drilling results. In addition, unlike previous separate inversion models, the models are structurally and geometrically similar
- …
