Global View Of System Research Articles

Tom swift and his electric airship

Sooner or later, the practices we call “green” will have to expand from the token gestures we make today (turning down the thermostat and driving hybrids) to a nearly universal avoidance of oxidizing fossil carbon. In terms of aviation, it's time to start thinking about how to move people and goods, in commercial quantities, with a zero-carbon footprint; indeed there are several schemes afoot. The pioneering Boeing and Lange/DLR fuel-cell prototype airplanes are an encouraging sign up to a point, but it seems more than bold to suggest that these models can be scaled up to commercial adequacy. The USAF/DARPA high-altitude Intel blimp provides ample carrying capacity and a ceiling of 65,000 feet, but again, not much of a useful turn of speed. Popular Science has reported on multiple-gas vehicles like the Sanswire STS-111 Stratellite and airship concepts such as Igor Pasternak's Aeroscraft. Of these, only the last seems to be well-targeted toward the goal, according to some accounts. This undertakes to apply some of the perennial concerns participants to a global fleet of dirigibles featuring fuel-cell-powered propulsion. That is, it adopts a global-system view taking the development of suitable vehicles for granted, rather than focusing on the vehicle innovations as their developers must primarily do. Discussions include performance and safety requirements for the airships, new terminal area concepts, collaborative-autonomous situational awareness and collision avoidance, weather considerations, in-flight refueling and towing, and intermodal possibilities.

Icarus’ predicament: Managing the pathologies of overspecification and overdesign

The phenomenon of overspecification and overdesign is well known in all industries: developing features that are not needed by the customer causes excess development efforts, missed due dates, terminated projects and higher lifecycle costs. The paper defines the phenomena, exploring inherent causes and prescribes solutions for both business-to-business and business-to-customer industries. It presents illustrative cases of overspecification and overdesign, proposes a self-assessment to determine the severity of these phenomena in an organization and resolves the conflicts driving these phenomena. Solutions suggested include adapting Simon’s satisficer approach, resolving the marketing conflict by focusing on the 20% of features that account for 80% of the value, breaking the assumption that overspecification is beneficial for future growth potential, resolving the product manager’s conflict via a global system view, implementing the 25/25 principle, freezing and stabilizing the specifications, constraining developer time to eliminate spontaneous overdesign, and piecemeal feature launch.

Knowledge transfer considerations and the future of the internalization hypothesis

The paper demonstrates how the scope of the internalization hypothesis can be extended by an explicit consideration of knowledge transfer costs and requirements. The paper outlines three important routes for advancing the internalization hypothesis: one is by adding a dynamic dimension to the internalization decision, the other is by adding more complexity to internalization decisions and the third is by taking a global system view rather than the traditional single firm view. The paper finally calls for a dynamic modeling of the complexities in knowledge transfer costs within a global competitive setting as a way to further advance the scope of the internalization hypothesis.

Orchestrating Web Services with BPEL

Effective Web services demand careful synchronization on various abstraction levels. The Business Process Execution Language supports modeling and executing business processes from both the user and systems perspectives. In this way, Web services application developers can use BPEL to orchestrate service interactions in a global system view and to manage individual interactions based on outside events. More and more Web service providers are using BPEL to integrate their services independently of vendors and related programming languages. In this column, we introduce BPEL and presents some guidelines for using it in your Web services management.

Variable Fuzzy Sets and its Application in Comprehensive Risk Evaluation for Flood-control Engineering System

Due to significance of the engineering system for flood control and the multi-dimensional synthesis of the risk evaluation issue that the paper selects typical risk indexes to classify risk degree of flood-control engineering. Under global view of system that the variable fuzzy sets method is presented to set up comprehensive evaluation model for flood-control engineering system (FCES). The method can scientifically and reasonably determine membership degrees and relative membership functions of disquisitive indexes at level interval that relating to engineering, also it can fully use one's experience and knowledge, qualitative and quantitative information of index system to obtain weights of indexes for operating comprehensive risk evaluation for FCES. The numerical example shows that the proposed method is feasible and effective, and the evaluation results are reasonable.

A global system view of firm boundaries

This paper applies the global system view to the location and control strategies of firms. This approach envisages the world as a grid of potential locations for value-adding activities, connected by flows of information and products. The simplified model provides a basis for testing new hypotheses on the number of firms that will exist in the global system, their locations, and their organisational boundaries. The paper provides a rigorous and formal exposition of the theories of internationalisation and the multinational enterprise.

A parameter variation modeling approach for enterprise optimization

The past two decades have seen significant improvements in optimization modeling and software solvers for large-scale optimization problems, especially discrete problems. We feel that a critical feature of many of these systems is being overlooked. That is, the process control engineer adjusts process parameters while only considering the local efficiency or not considering process efficiency at all. Production control engineers, while optimizing the global system performance, consider process parameters as given and fixed, i.e., unchangeable. Combining the optimization of the process parameters with a global system view can significantly improve the overall system performance. In practice, "hot jobs" are treated in this ad hoc manner, making sure that all resources are available and operate at peak efficiency (minimum production time) for these critical products. This phenomenon occurs not only in manufacturing but also in many other industries. This modeling part of the optimization problem can be even more important than "optimal versus heuristic"-based solution decisions made. In this paper, we present an aggregative high-fidelity modeling approach and illustrate the formulation of parameter variability in three different domains: manufacturing, air travel, and food processing.

DELTA-T: A user-transparent software-monitoring tool for multi-transputer systems

Monitoring tools are important parts of future programming environments for parallel computers. In this paper the software monitor DELTA-T is presented which has been developed for performance monitoring of (standard) multi-transputer systems at the University of Paderborn. Instrumentation is implemented by ‘spy’-processes which are inserted into the target system either to observe it at the node or at the process level. Measurement traces generated by these spies are buffered locally in the node memories. A global system view is achieved by time-stamping the recorded events with a globally valid system time. Evaluation is carried out offline on a host workstation either with an animation tool or an interactive graphical visualization tool.