Open Systems Software Standards in Concurrent Engineering

The paper presents a specification based adaptive test case generation (SBATCG) method for integration testing in an open operating system standards environment. In the SBATCG method, templates describing abstract state transitions are derived from a model based specification, and the templates are refined to the internal structure of each implementation. We adopt the Z notation, one of the most widely used formal specification languages. We conducted mutation analysis to study the fault exposure abilities of the SBATCG method and that of a strategy based only on a specification. In our experiment, we used a Z version of the ITRON2 real time multi task operating system specification and two commercially available ITRON2 implementations. The results of this equipment show that the SBATCG method can achieve a higher fault detecting ability than can the strategy using only a specification.

Several European countries, as well as the European Commission, have acknowledged the importance of open standards (under various definitions of that term) and have taken steps accordingly. Formal (e.g. ISO) standards are often referred to in software development and procurement, but may not necessarily also be open standards. The authors consider the application of formal standards where national policy promotes their use, and, since much contemporary software development involves open source software, they further consider the interaction between the requirement to comply with open standards, and the implementation of open and formal standards in open source software, with particular reference to patent licensing. It is shown that not all formal standards are open standards. SSO policies and procedures regarding the notification of standards-essential patents (SEPs) present challenges for organisations wishing to implement standards in software since such policies and procedures need to be compliant with procurement requirements, patent licences and open source software licences. This paper draws out some implications for those organisations (differentiating where appropriate between small companies and other organisations) and suggests a number of ways of addressing the challenges identified. Use of formal standards may create barriers for implementation in open source software and inhibit an open and inclusive business-friendly ecosystem, and to avoid such barriers is of particular importance for small companies that are essential players in an innovative and international society.

This paper will describe the work done by KOP in the use of open standard systems to provide the control system backbone for the retrieval of large amounts of data from subsea control systems. The use of the OPC and TCP/IP standards allows the easy connection of almost any application to the subsea control system. Introduction The current generations of subsea control systems tend to be closed systems. These systems are constrained by the difficulties of connecting in other systems such as downhole systems or platform control systems. Vital areas of the system are implemented using proprietary protocols and methods that are poorly defined and entirely non-standard within the subsea community. This means that during the implementation of a system, integration of various manufacturers' equipment leads to a large number of well identified problems. It also leads to problems when additional functionality needs to be added to a system following its commissioning. It is becoming clear that, in future, there will need to be an increase in the amount of data that is retrieved from a subsea control system. The arrival of intelligent wells and the need for more information from reservoirs will have a large affect on the facilities that will need to be provided by any control and monitoring system. In the design and building of any new control and monitoring systems, open architecture standards are vital to enable inter-connectivity between the subsea equipment and other systems. Open systems can be considered to be fundamental standards and technologies used in the general computing market. These open standards define how different systems interconnect and how the data should be transferred between systems. The standards have been used for many years within the automation and control industries but less so within a subsea control and monitoring system environment. Theory and Definitions The use of interface standards will allow applications to connect to the subsea control system with ease and data to be passed around the wider system and to other applications in a much more efficient way. When the use of fibre optic technology or faster copper communications (increasing the speed of the line), exception based data retrieval (increasing the efficiency of the line) and the overall modularization of the system (increasing the flexibility of the system) are combined with the open standards, a control and monitoring system that can respond to future needs is produced. The ideas that have driven this work are to implement technology that has been used successfully in other areas and to apply this to the subsea field. The technologies that are used should advance the connectivity and flexibility of the system such that benefits can be seen in the time to configure a user system, the simplification of the interfaces to other systems and the extension of functionality beyond that of current systems. This work has principally investigated 2 open standard technologies.TCP/IP (The Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) is the protocol suite that drives the Internet.

As the development of technology, the mobile phone world also has developed very quickly. Mobile communication and services, over emerging wireless technologies, provide anyone, anytime and anywhere access. Moreover, the intelligence is now often embedded into modern applications, such as surveillance and supervising systems. This work presents an intelligent and a pervasive supervising platform for information system (IS) security based on multi-agent systems (MAS) which detects and classifies malware events that occurs on software and hardware components and sends real time notification to smart phone users. The proposed platform is formed by two components: The first one consists of a Central Software Component (CSC); the supervisor application that manages devices and evaluates logs and alarms of the supervised components. The second one consists of an Embedded Software Component (ESC) on the Mobile Device (MD) with an ANDROID OS. In our platform, we have implemented agents on ESC using JADE-LEAP android, note that the ESC is targeted to smart phones and tablet that run the operating system Android, JADE API on CSC and the communication between these two components is performed using the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol implemented using the JADE-S plug-in.

Concurrent Engineering (CE) systems tend to be of large-scale and are characterized by having imprecise data. Determining a suitable methodology for analyzing large-scale CE systems with imprecise data is a challenging research issue. In this paper, an approach called Interval-Based Concurrent Engineering Nets (ICE-Nets) is proposed. The main contribution of this work is that it presents a new approach to modeling and analyzing large-scale imprecise CE systems. The abstraction and analysis inherent in ICE-Nets gives several important benefits. First, the abstraction inherent in ICE-Nets offers the potential of being able to handle large-scale CE systems. Second, it allows the use of imprecise data in the form of intervals. Third, it applies a mathematical mechanism to the problem, with the potential of being relatively straightforward to computerize. Fourth, the graphical nature of ICE-Nets allows for users to interact with the network in a natural fashion.

A concurrent engineering system to support flexible automation in furniture production

New product “time to market” in the information technology (IT) industry is increasingly critical to a company′s competitiveness. Early product release into the marketplace will ensure higher profit margins, quicker returns on investment and therefore greater opportunity for a company to retain its market leadership in that product area. ICL Manufacturing Division is in the process of implementing information systems which support concurrent engineering concepts and facilitate automated processing of information from design to manufacturing. These integrated systems are based on distributed relational database technologies and open system standards. Provides an overview of the facilities and topology of the implemented environments within the engineering planning areas.

There is a growing trend to describe information system architectures in terms of reference models. This paper is a case study of how security services and mechanisms were integrated into one specific reference model, the NORAD/USSPACECOM Technical Infrastructure (N/U TI). The identification of security services and their placement in the N/U TI was motivated by a preliminary set of N/U security policy objectives. Issues arising from the integration of security into open systems standards are also identified.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The new economy is driving federal research laboratories to implement new ways for the management of their Research & Development (R&D) activities. This situation is very similar to that documented by many other organizations involved in R&D activities, where researchers are being asked to be relevant, to be more application-oriented, and to consider themselves key partners in the strategic management of the business. In addition, R&D is being asked to meet the same challenges as the rest of the organization, namely: 1) to reduce time to market; 2) reduce cost; 3) improve quality; 4) increase reliability; and 5) increase focus on customer needs. Concurrent Engineering (CE), and Collaborative Engineering (or Collaborative Product Development-CPD) have emerged as new paradigms with significant impact in the development of new products and processes. With documented and substantiated success in the automotive and technology industries CE and, most recently, CPD are being touted as innovative management philosophies for many other business sectors including Research and Development. This paper introduces two independent research initiatives conducted at the NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) in Cleveland, Ohio investigating the application of CE and CPD in an R&D environment. Since little research has been conducted in the use of CE and CPD in sectors other than the high mass production manufacturing, the objective of these independent studies is to provide a systematic evaluation of the applicability of these paradigms (concurrent and collaborative) in a low/no production, service environment, in particular R&D.

Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) is being used in a wide variety of application areas, including embedded systems, and the correct operation of the components is often critical for business success and, in some cases, human safety. In this way, assessment and evaluation of software components has become a compulsory and crucial part of any CBSE lifecycle. A risk of selecting a product with unknown quality properties is no longer acceptable and, when happened, may cause catastrophic results. Thus, the software components quality evaluation has become an increasingly essential activity in order to bring reliability in (re)using software components. In this way, we propose a quality verification framework to evaluate the quality of embedded software components in an efficient way. This model is based in component characteristics, sub-characteristics, quality attributes and metrics.

The paper is a summary of experience in applying the concurrent engineering (CE) enabling technology concepts of the Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC) to existing business processes and architectures as a member of an IBM Federal Systems Company (FSC) Quality Improvement Team (QIT). As follow-on to this effort, a role for profiles such as the Government's Open System Environment (OSE) Profile, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) Application Portability Profile (APP), is proposed as the basis for a CE profile for integrated tool and information development architecture in support of CE. Use of a profile is stressed as a foundation for transition to an automated and integrated CE infrastructure in any enterprise.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Chapter 2 - OSI - Open Systems Interconnection

Commercial standards adopted from the volume driven electronics markets provide improved processing capacities over those widely used military standards and at reduced cost. Desired future capabilities and advanced functions. such as RPA, require the throughput, bandwidth, and memory provided by commercial processors and data buses. The primary issues needing resolution prior to implementation are related to operations in military rotorcraft environment, reliability, redundancy management, and fault and battle damage tolerance. In addition, some required network components presently do not exist in the preferred form factors. The ROSA project is providing effective laboratory demonstrations of COTS products and open systems specifications and standards to rotorcraft avionics. Preliminary cost estimates forecast large potential savings and create a compelling business case for follow on research and transition to production systems. In addition, the project is developing a rotorcraft technical architecture with the participation of many industry partners and will promote the resulting documentation as background materials for the JTA-A.

This paper describes a new approach to designing and building missiles by Raytheon Missile and Defense Systems. Key aspects of the approach include (1) modular common components connected through identified standards, (2) modular open systems approaches and standards based interfaces, (3) Feature‐based Product Line Engineering (FbPLE) practices for identifying commonality and managing variation, and (4) implementing digital transformation through digital engineering capabilities to begin a missile's digital twin. Much more ambitious than simply reusing existing component designs from previously built missiles, this approach involves automatic generation, exploration, and pruning of an automatically generated trade space of possible missile designs that satisfy a given set of requirements. The goal is to radically lower development and production costs by rapidly settling on a viable design that can be taken to design validation, then complete design and production, all in a digital ecosystem. The paper focuses on the FbPLE aspect of the engineering approach and shows how its technology is used to create and manage the trade space, and then create a digital twin of a chosen design.

This paper describes a data visualization tool developed to support prototype development and testing of software standard interfaces in the open systems environment. The visualization capability is an extension of the Clemson Automated Testing System (CATS). CATS is a research facility which has proven valuable in exposing and addressing critical issues in emerging areas such as the IEEE POSIX real-time extensions. Preliminary investigations with CATS involving real-time interfaces and statistical reasoning about large scenarios of tests has motivated the need for a data visualization capability. Current approaches to testing open systems interfaces include very limited visualization aids, such as 2D bar charts to represent statistical information about the test results. The visualization tool developed in this work extends these capabilities by introducing realism and abstraction via raytracing and hierarchical data representations. These capabilities support a more meaningful analysis of system behavior in that a new, more descriptive set of questions is possible. Experimental results achieved with CATS and the visualization of system behavior with respect to deadlines for real-time systems are presented. Future applications for the data visualization tool in the open systems standards arena are proposed.