Introduction and Terminology

In 1990, Andrzej Wnuk of Siemens A.G. proposed a comprehensive model of the system design process. The model combines an extended design AND/OR decision tree, aspects of the design process for the High Level Design Assistant (HILDA) developed by Siemens Research and Technology Laboratory, structured requirements, and process decomposition. A suitable requirements description language did not exist which resulted in a model which could not be implemented that is, until now. The recent development of the MIMIC (Microwave and Millimeter Wave Integrated Circuits) Hardware Description Language [MHDL] relieves that problem. Hierarchical, functional, and object oriented features of the language make it ideal for modeling the system design process, as well as capturing/cataloging the system and its components as they progress towards implementation. This paper reports on the implementation of a design process model and the associated impacts (i.e. automation of the design process; the creation of an homogeneous design complete, historical, electronic etc.). Additionally, solutions/migration paths for upgrading existing systems are discussed. >

An examination of designer and user perceptions of JAD and the traditional IS design methodology

This article presents a formative intervention study, called Learning Lab that facilitated the collective design of a culturally responsive behavioral support system at an urban middle school in the United States. Learning Lab united parents, teachers, support staff, education leaders, and researchers, specifically those who have been historically excluded from schools’ problem-solving activities to address an inner contradiction that they face—racial disproportionality in school discipline. Learning Lab members excavated and analyzed the school’s discipline system with its activities and disturbances and designed a new school-wide behavioral support system that is responsive to diverse experiences, perspectives, practices, and goals of their school community. A qualitative analysis of the Learning Lab process was conducted related to the development of the new system. Members examined outcomes in the existing discipline system, identified daily manifestations of the inner contradiction and collectively designed a culturally responsive system. The study showed the “how” of a systemic design and transformation process that helped develop a deeper understanding of educational change as a form of collective learning. The study demonstrated how a secondary artifact (system mapping) might facilitate movement from problem-definition to envisioning new possibilities. Given the inability of top-down education policies to impact sustained systemic transformation in schools, Learning Lab provides an ecologically valid collective knowledge-production and systemic design process that shows the possibilities of transforming marginalizing systems from the ground-up and collectively envisioning schools as spaces of solidarity, emancipation, and innovation.

IntroductionConsumer health IT applications have the potential to improve quality, safety and efficiency of consumers' interactions with the healthcare system. Yet little attention has been paid to human factors and...

PurposeEarthquakes are a serious threat to life; they claim many casualties and cause huge damage to people's properties. Seismic design provisions are added to building codes in response to the lessons learned from past earthquakes. However, despite all successes, many challenges are still faced and there are still deficiencies, especially in the field of architectural non‐structural components (ANSCs). In spite of their significance in the seismic performance of the building, ANSCs are mostly neglected from the viewpoint of seismic design. The purpose of this paper is to explain a proper state for the seismic consideration of ANSCs in the designing and construction process.Design/methodology/approachThe key aim of this research is explaining a proper state for the seismic consideration of ANSCs in designing and construction process. For this purpose, first, their state is analyzed based on the conventional seismic design and construction process. Then, the insufficiencies of this approach are discussed through studying the consequences in the past earthquakes. Finally, based on the results obtained, the article tries to offer useful strategies to bring the potential threats of ANSCs to minimum.FindingsIt is found that ANSCs are considered only in a very small part of the design and construction process. In most cases, their executed details are allocated to a minor part of the design process or left to be chosen in the last stage of construction, as finishing details. As a result, despite all code provisions and practical guidelines, we still see many damages to and from ANSCs. The paper shows that the only way that the success of ANSCs' seismic restraints can be anticipated is by considering them in all stages of the design and construction process. To achieve this goal, collaboration is needed throughout all parts of the design and construction process, namely an interactive system design.Originality/valueThe paper, from the viewpoint of the design process, analyzes the seismic consideration of ANSCs, offering a new model for placing these components in a systematic design and construction process.

This dissertation studies the process of operations systems design within the context of the manufacturing organization. Using the DRAMA (Design Routine for Adopting Modular Assembly) model as developed by a team from the IDOM Research Unit at Aston University as a starting point, the research employed empirically based fieldwork and a survey to investigate the process of production systems design and implementation within four UK manufacturing industries: electronics assembly, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and carpet manufacturing. The intention was to validate the basic DRAMA model as a framework for research enquiry within the electronics industry, where the initial IDOM work was conducted, and then to test its generic applicability, further developing the model where appropriate, within the other industries selected. The thesis contains a review of production systems design theory and practice prior to presenting thirteen industrial case studies of production systems design from the four industry sectors. The results and analysis of the postal survey into production systems design are then presented. The strategic decisions of manufacturing and their relationship to production systems design, and the detailed process of production systems design and operation are then discussed. These analyses are used to develop the generic model of production systems design entitled DRAMA II (Decision Rules for Analysing Manufacturing Activities). The model contains three main constituent parts: the basic DRAMA model, the extended DRAMA II model showing the imperatives and relationships within the design process, and a benchmark generic approach for the design and analysis of each component in the design process. DRAMA II is primarily intended for use by researchers as an analytical framework of enquiry, but is also seen as having application for manufacturing practitioners.

Technical system design processes are typically based on systems engineering vee models where designers move between functional and physical domains as they develop detailed designs of the overall system and its sub-systems and component parts. The movements between the functional and physical domains are informed by the core activities of any design process: synthesis, description, analysis and simulation, and decision-making. However, delivering socio-technical systems design mindsets, such as those needed to design multi-team systems, requires a new branch of systems science that integrates human behavior into system behavior. Design processes built on such a science would allow system designers to compare alternative solutions in terms of their anticipated performance and consider different options with respect to functions carried out by humans and machines. In this chapter we use a systems design process vee model and apply it to a case study that involves the design of a multi-team customer service system. Both the application of the vee model (i.e., the proposed design process) and the results of its application (i.e., the multi-team customer service system) can be regarded as socio-technical systems and are used to illustrate and elaborate on Clegg’s (Appl Ergon 31(5):463–477, 2000) socio-technical principles for system design. On this basis, we provide a practical framework for designing socio-technical systems and identify requirements for developing future methods and tools to support this process.

Background. Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness requiring self-management skills and information about the illness, its treatment, and where to get help with daily routines. Despite the systematic development of computer-based approaches in mental health, less systematic development of such methods can be found for patients with schizophrenia or psychosis.Objective. The aim is to describe the design and development process of patient-centered computer-based support system (Mieli.Net portal) for patients with schizophrenia spectrum psychoses.Methods. The process with a mixed methods approach includes four phases: analysis of users' needs, development of key patient information areas, development of a software prototype and to pilot the portal, and user evaluation by health care staff.Results. The computer-based patient support system is a promising health-promoting service to schizophrenic patients. It is important, that users of technology are involved in the development process, which will ensure that sites are user-friendly, information can be personalized, and mental patients' voices are heard in the development of patient education.Conclusions. The effectiveness needs to be evaluated carefully in future clinical trials. This will offer valuable information for policymakers, organizations and health care practitioners about the usability of web-based patient education in the area of mental health care.

A plant alarm system is one of important elements in a third layer of an independent protection layers (IPLs). Management of the plant alarm system has become identified as one of key issues because of disasters caused by alarm floods. The Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society (ISA) has proposed an alarm management standard. And some methods of alarm limits setting or nuisance alarms reduction obtained through each plant improvement activities have been proposed. But, explicit definition of a plant alarm system design process to properly manage the plant alarm system has not been proposed. Plant alarm systems are not always designed using whole information about their plants, because a concreteness and quantity of information is varied along with stages of their plant design. Requirements for each safety instrumented system may not be satisfied if the design of the plant alarm system was started after all stages of the plant design had been completed. The stages of the plant alarm system design should be carried out concurrently with the stages of the plant design. Therefore, the design process of the plant alarm system should be clarified corresponding to available information at each stage of the design. To clarify the design process of the plant alarm system, a framework is necessary to express design activities with tools, available information and output. So, a business process model (BPM) as the framework for the plant alarm system design will be developed. In this paper, we tried to express a BPM for the design of a plant alarm system. Even if the developed BPM is incomplete, the BPM approach has following merits; design rationale for the plant alarm system can be specified and stored, and the plant alarm system can be designed logically. The stored design rationale and the logically designed plant alarm system are very useful for management of change of the plant alarm system and ensuring consistency with other safety instruments. In future work, a BPM for a plant alarm system design will be improved to properly manage the plant alarm system throughout the plant lifecycle.

Components of the Design Process of Flexible and Reconfigurable Assembly Systems

We have developed a systematic design process for recently proposed slanted grating couplers (SGCs) that operates in the strong coupling regime. Based on rigorous analysis of SGC properties, this design process utilizes the k-vector diagram and a rigorous grating leaky-mode solver to intentionally enforce the phase-match and Bragg conditions. We demonstrate that the resultant SGC designs have performance similar to those obtained by parallel micro-genetic algorithm (muGA) optimization with the two-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (2D FDTD) method. Only two 2D FDTD simulations are necessary in the later stages of our systematic design process. Therefore the time saving is tremendous compared to a muGA 2D FDTD design tool, which can require thousands of individual 2D FDTD simulation runs. We illustrate the utility of our new systematic design process with an embedded slanted grating coupler example.

The ‘top‐down’ system design process of functional decomposition is increasingly being criticised as simplistic, outmoded, and (in particular) too ‘reductionist’. Its use on large, complex systems is frequently portrayed as naive and impractical. There is much comment on the need to concentrate, instead, on the ‘emergent behaviours’ of systems, and to adopt a ‘holistic’ design approach in which a system solution is ‘evolved’ through a process of system design synthesis.This paper presents a counter‐argument that top‐down design decomposition can, in fact, be a highly efficient way to produce good (optimal) system solutions .Many of the fundamentals of function based system design are addressed: the central role of system function in the design process; the characterisation of system complexity and complication; the identification and specification of component requirements; and the determination of optimal design solutions.An established mathematical theory of systems design, using formal constructs and set‐theory notation, is used as the basis for the presentation of ideas.

Modeling and simulation have become an important aspect of the design and development process of aircraft systems. During the design of high lift actuation systems for example, the dynamic loads in the transmission are estimated by simulation. Nevertheless huge development efforts and financial resources are still invested in physical testing. These integration and testing phases take place at a late stage in the design process. Therefore, identified malfunctions and development errors lead to undesired iterations and thus to high costs as well as to an increased development time. This issue is emphasized as system complexity is rising continuously in conjunction with an increase in the number of interconnections and functionality. Hence, early and continuous virtual testing activities on the overall system level become increasingly important. In order to establish such a process, this paper analyzes the effects of modeling depth and parameter uncertainties on the overall system behavior considering nominal operation as well as failure cases. It identifies which test cases can be performed in which development phase depending on the information required. The modeling and simulation is implemented in the multiphysics and object-oriented simulation environment Matlab/Simulink/Simscape using an example of a multifunctional high lift actuation system.

Traditional approaches to manufacturing systems design utilize a sequential procedure that focuses on production capacity requirements, with human operator task design developed late in the systems design phase. Implementing manufacturing systems in this way is difficult when operations management must design flexible and efficient processes, with an often incomplete understanding of how people can best perform within the system. This study developed an integrated methodology that uses both manual and computer simulations to evaluate system performance and ergonomic issues early in the system design process. Information about operator performance and ergonomics is obtained in the manual simulations, while estimates of operator utilization and system throughput is obtained through computer simulations. An iterative design process is used, with the results of manual and computer simulations informing each other during subsequent simulations. An industrial case study is presented here to demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology. The results show that the methodology can be used to design manufacturing systems with significant savings in labor cost and improved manufacturing system flexibility. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Hum Factors Man 13: 19–40, 2003.

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to present Privacy Safeguard (PriS) a formal security requirements engineering methodology which, incorporates privacy requirements in the system design process and to demonstrate its applicability in an e‐voting case.Design/methodology/approachPriS provides a methodological framework for addressing privacy‐related issues during system development. It provides a set of concepts for formally expressing privacy requirements (authentication, authorisation, identification, data protection, anonymity, pseudonymity, unlinkability and unobservability) and a systematic way‐of‐working for translating these requirements into system models. The main activities of the PriS way‐of‐working are: elicit privacy‐related goals, analyse the impact of privacy goals on processes, model affected processes using privacy process patterns and identify the technique(s) that best support/implement the above‐process patterns.FindingsAnalysis of a number of well known privacy‐enhancing technologies, as well as of existing security requirement engineering methodologies, pinpoints the gap between system design methodologies and technological solutions. To this end, PriS provides an integrated approach for matching privacy‐related requirements to proper implementation techniques. Experimentation with the e‐voting case suggests that PriS has a high degree of applicability on internet systems that wish to provide services that ensure users privacy, such as anonymous browsing, untraceable transactions, etc.Originality/valueThe paper proposes a new methodology for addressing privacy requirements during the design process. Instead of prescribing a single solution, PriS guides developers to choose the most appropriate implementation techniques for realizing the identified privacy issues. In addition, due to its formal definition it facilitates control of the accuracy and precision of the results and enables the development of automated tools for assisting its application.