Abstracts
Tool Interoperability: A Next Generation Approach to Building Engineering Environments
Tool interfaces challenge designers of engineering environments. Often users must adapt their engineering and business processes to make interfaces possible. Even when processes are stretched to the limits of user tolerance, file-based bridges are seldom better than barely satisfactory. The new generation of client-server tools with open application development interfaces enable an interoperability and integration paradigm in which tools cooperate seamlessly as clients to each other or as servers to a new breed of shared clients.
Redesign Cost Avoidance Using System Engineering
BY
Jim Helm
Mobile Satellite Communications Division,
MOTOROLA INC.
R. T. Cantrell
A system engineering approach was used for development of the Motorola space-based cellular network called IRIDIUM®. Significant cost reductions were realized using requirements analysis and management along with system engineering team processes. Statistics show a 40 to 1 reduction in development time due to team requirements inspections. Due to their general nature, these system engineering processes are easily transportable to any project with a development phase.
This paper was voted the best in the Processes & Methods section of INCOSE 1997.
Requirements Consistency -A Basis For Design Quality-
BY
F. Scott Van Dewerker
Motorola SATCOM
Stuart T. Booth
Large design projects have a significant challenge to maintain consistent quality specifications throughout the development life cycle. The cost of maintaining such specifications and ensuring their consistency is high, and if not performed adequately can pose a significant risk to the program by inducing errors into the design. This paper presents methods for automation in concert with a process that will effectively reduce the inconsistencies in specifications.
Integrating Concurrent Tool Set
BY
Jane McKennon
With the availability of commercial tools to automate the many different phases of the system life cycle, users are faced with the problem of integrating the information produced by one tool with the information required by another. The current state of the practice is for users to create paper or electronic document-based bridges between tools. The challenge is to create an integrated concurrent engineering tool set using engineering models, rather than documents, to transfer design information. An examination of the issues raised by integrating engineering tools leads to the conclusion that complete integration cannot be achieved by external mechanisms such as backplanes or by unilateral modifications to a single tool. Integrating multiple engineering tools requires changes to all tools.
A Process Driven Approach to Integrated Environments
BY
Jane McKennon
A process driven approach allows construction of integrated concurrent engineering tool environments based on the tool requirements of the tasks to be performed on a program. Tool capabilities can be matched to task requirements and the semantics of tool to tool bridges can be derived from process semantics. Finally, the process can be tuned to take optimal advantage of the integration capabilities of the tools. Two examples show how very different bridges are needed between the same two tools in the context of two different processes.