| 1. |
- Adamsson, Niklas, 1977-
(författare)
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Interdisciplinary integration in complex product development : managerial implications of embedding software in manufactured goods
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Incorporating electronics and software systems into manufactured goods is becoming very common in manufacturing companies. New technical functions, increased flexibility, and compensation for mechanical design weaknesses are some key drivers of this technological change in our everyday products. The automotive industry exemplifies this trend, since approximately 80–90% of new functions in cars are based on electronics and software, and it is expected that at least a third of the total cost of a car will eventually be accounted for by electronics and software. However, one of the main downsides of this technological trend is the increasing number of quality issues related to these new technologies, something usually claimed to be a result of the increased product development complexity. Previous research into product development management has mainly concentrated on either physical products or software systems, but not concurrently on both. Additionally, much of the research has concentrated on issues of integrating marketing, R&D, and manufacturing in these companies, and has treated the engineering disciplines in R&D as a homogenous group. Motivated by this change in technology content and the lack of research into complex product development and especially into integration between engineering disciplines, the present work investigates how to increase operational performance in multidisciplinary engineering organizations. This work has especially focused on interdisciplinary integration and the feasibility of various so-called integration mechanisms, such as building common physical facilities, job rotation programs, the implementation and use of information and communications technology, and computer-aided engineering tools. Both qualitative and quantitative research has been performed, involving 11 different companies and over 300 respondents. Supported by the present findings, it is demonstrated that interdisciplinary integration is a crucial factor to consider, and it is concluded that certain integration mechanisms stand out as more important than others. Organizational structure, work procedures and methods, training, social systems, and computer-aided engineering were the five types of mechanisms that displayed the greatest potential for improvement. It is further concluded that the ability to successfully match the body of practices to current products is essential, since there is a high risk of current practices becoming out-dated with respect to the technology content. Furthermore, inadequate identification of or managerial ability to establish the currently most important interfaces complicate the choice of trade-offs between various technologies that are found to be essential to cope with the inherent dynamic complexity. The organizational powerbase is often re-positioned in the studied organizations, and the loss of decisive power can result in a demoralizing ignorance of newly established disciplines and their design practices. Additionally, rigid structures and counterproductive traditions can reduce the potential gains accruing from new boundary-spanning innovations, so organizational responsibilities and mandates must be declared unambiguously, in many cases differently from how they have been in the past. Based on these conclusions, it is suggested that managers in organizations like those studied must be able to do the following: cultivate software knowledge in all parts and levels of the product development organization; reassess their recruitment strategies; organize for interdisciplinary collaboration; articulate and communicate the technology fusion strategy to all disciplines; and realize and disseminate the fact that product launches do not only concern manufacturability.
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| 2. |
- Armengaud, Eric, et al.
(författare)
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Introduction
- 2013
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Ingår i: CESAR. - Vienna : Springer. - 9783709113868 - 9783709113875 ; , s. 1-14
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The embedded safety-critical system design and development industries are facing ever-increasing demands regarding the variety and flexibility of systems and devices from society. At a technical level, these demands result in more and more complex solutions that, at the same time, need to abide by stringent regulatory requirements and economic challenges, such as cost, performance and time to market.
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| 3. |
- Asplund, Fredrik
(författare)
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Risks Related to the Use of Software Tools when Developing Cyber-Physical Systems : A Critical Perspective on the Future of Developing Complex, Safety-Critical Systems
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The increasing complexity and size of modern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has led to a sharp decline in productivity among CPS designers. Requirements on safety aggravate this problem further, both by being difficult to ensure and due to their high importance to the public.Tools, or rather efforts to facilitate the automation of development processes, are a central ingredient in many of the proposed innovations to mitigate this problem. Even though the safety-related implications of introducing automation in development processes have not been extensively studied, it is known that automation has already had a large impact on operational systems. If tools are to play a part in mitigating the increase in safety-critical CPS complexity, then their actual impact on CPS development, and thereby the safety of the corresponding end products, must be sufficiently understood.An survey of relevant research fields, such as system safety, software engineering and tool integration, is provided to facilitate the discussion on safety-related implications of tool usage. Based on the identification of industrial safety standards as an important source of information and considering that the risks posed by separate tools have been given considerable attention in the transportation domain, several high-profile safety standards in this domain have been surveyed. According to the surveyed standards, automation should primarily be evaluated on its reliable execution of separate process steps independent of human operators. Automation that only supports the actions of operators during CPS development is viewed as relatively inconsequential.A conceptual model and a reference model have been created based on the surveyed research fields. The former defines the entities and relationships most relevant to safety-related risks associated with tool usage. The latter describes aspects of tool integration and how these relate to each other. By combining these models, a risk analysis could be performed and properties of tool chains which need to be ensured to mitigate risk identified. Ten such safety-related characteristics of tool chains are described.These safety-related characteristics provide a systematic way to narrow down what to look for with regard to tool usage and risk. The hypothesis that a large set of factors related to tool usage may introduce risk could thus be tested through an empirical study, which identified safety-related weaknesses in support environments tied both to high and low levels of automation. The conclusion is that a broader perspective, which includes more factors related to tool usage than those considered by the surveyed standards, will be needed.Three possible reasons to disregard such a broad perspective have been refuted, namely requirements on development processes enforced by the domain of CPS itself, certain characteristics of safety-critical CPS and the possibility to place trust in a proven, manual development process. After finding no strong reason to keep a narrow perspective on tool usage, arguments are put forward as to why the future evolution of support environments may actually increase the importance of such a broad perspective.Suggestions for how to update the mental models of the surveyed safety standards, and other standards like them, are put forward based on this identified need for a broader perspective.
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| 4. |
- Asplund, Fredrik, 1977-
(författare)
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Tool Integration and Safety : A Foundation for Analysing the Impact of Tool Integrationon Non-functional Properties
- 2012
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The increasing complexity of embedded systems development is becoming difficult to handle with development environments based on disjoint engineering tools. Support for interactions between various engineering tools, especially through automated means, has therefore received an increased amount of attention during the last few years. The subsequent increase in the amount of tool integration is leading to an increased impact of tool integration on non-functional properties of development efforts, development environments and end products. At the same time there is a lack of methods and tools for analysing the relationship between these properties and tool integration. To establish a foundation for analysing this generic relationship, the specific relationship between tool integration and the safety of end products is analysed in this thesis.A survey was conducted to analyze the State of the Art of tool integration as related to safety. This survey specifically identified the lack of an efficient handling of tool integration by modern safety standards as an important concern. In relation to this survey, three theories were identified as of specific importance. These are the school of thought known as Systems Thinking, the Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes (STAMP) causality model and the System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) hazard analysis technique.Building on these theories, this thesis provides original contributions intended to (1) describe concepts and models related to tool integration and safety (the first and second contribution), (2) link tool integration to safety in a way that reduces complexity during analysis (the third contribution) and (3) propose how to interpret and make use of the implications of the presented theories and the first three contributions (the fourth and fifth contribution).• The first contribution is a new conceptual model of a development effort that emphasizes tool integration.• The second contribution is a new reference model for tool integration in highly heterogeneous environments.• The third contribution consists of nine safety-related tool chain properties, i.e. properties of tool chains that could mitigate at least part of the risks introduced by tool integration.• The fourth contribution is a proposition on how to identify safety implications due to a high level of automation of tool integration.• The fifth contribution is a proposition for a new software tool qualification process.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Behere, Sagar, 1981-
(författare)
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Architecting Autonomous Automotive Systems : With an emphasis on Cooperative Driving
- 2013
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The increasing usage of electronics and software in a modern automobile enables realization of many advanced features. One such feature is autonomous driving. Autonomous driving means that a human driver’s intervention is not required to drive the automobile; rather, theautomobile is capable of driving itself. Achieving automobile autonomyrequires research in several areas, one of which is the area of automotive electrical/electronics (E/E) architectures. These architectures deal with the design of the computer hardware and software present inside various subsystems of the vehicle, with particular attention to their interaction and modularization. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how automotive E/E architectures should be designed so that 1) it ispossible to realize autonomous features and 2) a smooth transition canbe made from existing E/E architectures, which have no explicit support for autonomy, to future E/E architectures that are explicitly designed for autonomy.The thesis begins its investigation by considering the specific problem of creating autonomous behavior under cooperative driving condi-tions. Cooperative driving conditions are those where continuous wireless communication exists between a vehicle and its surroundings, which consist of the local road infrastructure as well as the other vehicles in the vicinity. In this work, we define an original reference architecture for cooperative driving. The reference architecture demonstrates how a subsystem with specific autonomy features can be plugged into an existing E/E architecture, in order to realize autonomous driving capabilities. Two salient features of the reference architecture are that it isminimally invasive and that it does not dictate specific implementation technologies. The reference architecture has been instantiated on two separate occasions and is the main contribution of this thesis. Another contribution of this thesis is a novel approach to the design of general, autonomous, embedded systems architectures. The approach introduces an artificial consciousness within the architecture, that understands the overall purpose of the system and also how the different existing subsystems should work together in order to meet that purpose.This approach can enable progressive autonomy in existing embedded systems architectures, over successive design iterations.
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| 7. |
- Behere, Sagar, 1981-
(författare)
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Reference Architectures for Highly Automated Driving
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Highly automated driving systems promise increased road traffic safety, as well as positive impacts on sustainable transportation by means of increased traffic efficiency and environmental friendliness. The design and development of such systems require scientific advances in a number of areas. One area is the vehicle's electrical/electronic (E/E) architecture. The E/E architecture can be presented using a number of views, of which an important one is the functional view. The functional view describes the decomposition of the system into its main logical components, along with the hierarchical structure, the component inter-connections, and requirements. When this view captures the principal ideas and patterns that constitute the foundation of a variety of specific architectures, it may be termed as a reference architecture. Two reference architectures for highly automated driving form the principal contribution of this thesis. The first reference architecture is for cooperative driving. In a cooperative driving situation, vehicles and road infrastructure in the vicinity of a vehicle continuously exchange wireless information and this information is then used to control the motion of the vehicle. The second reference architecture is for autonomous driving, wherein the vehicle is capable of driver-less operation even without direct communication with external entities. The description of both reference architectures includes their main components and the rationale for how these components should be distributed across the architecture and its layers. These architectures have been validated via multiple real-world instantiations, and the guidelines for instantiation also form part of the architecture description. A comparison with similar architectures is also provided, in order to highlight the similarities and differences. The comparisons show that in the context of automated driving, the explicit recognition of components for semantic understanding, world modeling, and vehicle platform abstraction are unique to the proposed architecture. These components are not unusual in architectures within the Artificial Intelligence/robotics domains; the proposed architecture shows how they can be applied within the automotive domain. A secondary contribution of this thesis is a description of a lightweight, four step approach for model based systems engineering of highly automated driving systems, along with supporting model classes. The model classes cover the concept of operations, logical architecture, application software components, and the implementation platforms. The thesis also provides an overview of current implementation technologies for cognitive driving intelligence and vehicle platform control, and recommends a specific setup for development and accelerated testing of highly automated driving systems, that includes model- and hardware-in-the-loop techniques in conjunction with a publish/subscribe bus. Beyond the more "traditional" engineering concepts, the thesis also investigates the domain of machine consciousness and computational self-awareness. The exploration indicates that current engineering methods are likely to hit a complexity ceiling, breaking through which may require advances in how safety-critical systems can self-organize, construct, and evaluate internal models to reflect their perception of the world. Finally, the thesis also presents a functional architecture for the brake system of an autonomous truck. This architecture proposes a reconfiguration of the existing brake systems of the truck in a way that provides dynamic, diversified redundancy, and an increase in the system reliability and availability, while meeting safety requirements.
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| 8. |
- Biehl, Matthias, et al.
(författare)
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A Domain Specific Language for Generating Tool Integration Solutions
- 2011
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Model-based development of complex systems requires toolsupport for the dierent phases of the system life cycle. To allow for anecient development process, the involved tools need to be integrated.Despite the availability of modern tool integration platforms and frameworks,it is complex, labor-intensive and costly to build tool integrationsolutions. For managing the growing complexity of tool integration solutions,a need for systematic engineering arises. A missing piece is thehigh-level architectural description of tool integration solutions. We proposethe domain specic language TIL for describing tool integrationsolutions at a high level of abstraction. We propose an approach thattakes advantage of modeling technologies to systematize and automatethe process of building tool integration solutions. By automatically generatingintegration solutions from a TIL model, we can reduce the manualimplementation eort.
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| 9. |
- Biehl, Matthias
(författare)
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A Modeling Language for the Description and Development of Tool Chains for Embedded Systems
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The development of embedded systems is typically supported by a number of diverse development tools. To achieve seamless tool support throughout the embedded systems development process, tool chains are constructed as software solutions that integrate the development tools. Tool chains have grown from ad-hoc solutions to complex software systems, since they need to support distributed engineering, integration conventions, a specific set of tools and the complete product development process used in a company. In practice, the development of tool chains that fulfill these needs is difficult and time-consuming, since it is a largely unsupported, manual engineering task. In addition, tool chains are typically described using general purpose modeling languages or languages borrowed from other domains, which contributes to the accidental complexity of tool chain development. Due to the increasing sophistication and size of tool chains, there is a need for a systematic, targeted description and development approach for tool chains.This thesis contributes with a language for the systematic description of tool chains and semi-automated techniques to support their development.The Tool Integration Language (TIL) is a domain-specific modeling language (DSML) for tool chains that allows describing tool chains explicitly, systematically and at an appropriate level of abstraction. TIL concepts are from the domain of tool integration and express the essential design decisions of tool chains at an architectural level of abstraction. A TIL model serves as a basis for the development of a tailored tool chain.Semi-automated techniques for the specification, analysis and synthesis support the development of tool chains that are described as TIL models. Specification techniques support the creation and refinement of a tool chain model that is aligned to a given development process and set of tools. Domain-specific analysis techniques are used to check the alignment of the tool chain model with the supported process. Synthesis techniques support the efficient realization of the specified tool chain model as a software solution that conforms to integration conventions.Experiences from case studies are presented which apply TIL to support the creation of tool chains. The approach is evaluated, both qualitatively and quantitatively, by comparing it to traditional development methods for tool chains. The approach enables the efficient development of tailored tool chains, which have the potential to improve the productivity of embedded systems development.
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| 10. |
- Biehl, Matthias, et al.
(författare)
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An executable design decision representation using model transformations
- 2010
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 36th EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, SEAA 2010. - Lille. - 9780769541709 ; , s. 131-134
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Design decisions are often tacit knowledge of an architecture and consequently they are easily lost during software evolution, a phenomenon known as knowledge vaporization. As a countermeasure design decisions can be documented explicitly. However, documenting design decision is expensive because they need to be captured in addition to the changes in the architecture. We propose an executable representation for design decisions using model transformations which is independent of a particular component model or architectural description language. As a result we get all the advantages of explicitly captured design decisions such as the potential to reduce knowledge vaporization while preventing the high capturing cost since the corresponding architectural change can be computed automatically. The approach is illustrated by a case study in the context of embedded software architectures.
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