Software Design Methodology Research Articles

Software Optimization and Design Methodology for Low Power Computer Vision Systems

This tutorial paper addresses a low power computer vision system as an example of a growing application domain of neural networks, exploring various technologies developed to enhance accuracy within the resource and performance constraints imposed by the hardware platform. Focused on a given hardware platform and network model, software optimization techniques, including pruning, quantization, low-rank approximation, and parallelization, aim to satisfy resource and performance constraints while minimizing accuracy loss. Due to the interdependence of model compression approaches, their systematic application is crucial, as evidenced by winning solutions in the Lower Power Image Recognition Challenge (LPIRC) of 2017 and 2018. Recognizing the typical heterogeneity of processing elements in contemporary hardware platforms, the effective utilization through parallelizing neural networks emerges as increasingly vital for performance enhancement. The paper advocates for a more impactful strategy—designing a network architecture tailored to a specific hardware platform. For detailed information on each technique, the paper provides corresponding references.

Gas Concentration Measuring-System (CH4, NH3, CO2) Upon Cow Feces in an Encased-Space Based on Arduino Uno

The goal of this exploration is to fabricate an estimating instrument for perceiving Methane, Smelling salts, and Carbon Dioxide gas concentrations in cow feces within a confined space. The feasibility of gas concentration detection devices using MQ-2 sensors, MQ-4 sensors, and Arduino Uno-based MQ-135 sensors will also be tested. This research relates to physics, particularly instrument physics. The research will employ hardware design, software design, and testing methodologies. The gas used for testing was produced from 500 grams of cow feces through three treatments: no treatment, addition of 50 grams of activated charcoal, and addition of 50 milliliters of EM4. The tool validation test was conducted by three experts, and the typical worth acquired was 95.8%, classified as entirely achievable. The experiment yielded the highest concentrations of CH4, NH3, and CO2 gases at 11:30 AM (plus EM4), 03:00 AM (plus EM4), and 24:00 AM (without treatment), respectively, with readings of 9.49 ppm, 26.89 ppm, and 4.57 ppm.

The IBdata Web System for Biological Collections: Design Focused on Usability

The software design process must put users at the core of the process to enable them to meet their specific objectives effectively, efficiently, and successfully. Thus, a software design for a computing system to consult biological collections guided by the concept of usability will result in an effective and efficient biodiversity informatics tool. Here, we introduce IBdata, a web system to consult biological collections, developed using a design approach based on the architecture of three layers: database, business rules, and user interface. The user interface design was guided by the concept of usability focused on four core concepts: simplicity, adaptability, guide the user through the journey, and feedback. The IBdata web system that we developed is composed of three modules (query, capture and editing, and administration), permitting it to query a database with about 1.7 million specimen records. Biodiversity data query systems must be effective and efficient and should meet the user’s expectations. Software design methodologies play a central role in achieving these goals, and, in this context, interface design techniques that put the user at the core of development are valuable, as in the development of the IBdata web system.

Designing and building a business data collection application using the waterfall method

The Department of Industry and Trade of Ende Regency is a local government agency that is directly related to the process of data collection and assistance for small and medium industrial enterprises (SME) in Ende Regency which is still done manually, causing problems in data collection. the process is considered to be very slow so there is still a lot of SMI data that is not recorded clearly and completely. This website-based IKM data collection application aims to assist the Trade and Industry Office of the Ende Regency in the computerized IKM data collection process and checking of business assistance funds so that it can run effectively and efficiently. The software design methodology used in this study is the system development life cycle (SDLC) starting from the analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance stages. In this study, researchers used 2 system testing methods, namely system usability scale testing (SUS), and black box testing. The results of the research on 4 respondents obtained an average SUS score of 86.2 with an acceptable interpretation of the B value category. While the results of black box testing are obtained from the tests that have been carried out, it can be concluded that all functional features can run well.

A Novel Technique to Support Deep Learning Applications in a Model-Based Embedded Software Design Methodology

A Novel Technique to Support Deep Learning Applications in a Model-Based Embedded Software Design Methodology

FRIDA, a Framework for Software Design, Applied in the Treatment of Children with Autistic Disorder

The “FRIDA” framework is a guide for the agile development of accessible software for users with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as a tool for strengthening emotional and social skills in the treatment of autism. It is based on the use of accessible software for the development of emotional and social skills, and designed with a focus on the user with intellectual disabilities. A mixed quasi-experimental study is carried out with three focus groups: children with ASD, expert therapists in ASD treatments and software designers adapting the Design Thinking model for the co-creation of the functional characteristics of the software and its use in therapies. The findings and results show that using FRIDA facilitates the agile design of accessible apps by reducing their development time by 94% and increasing their usability level by more than 90%. This facilitates the treatment of people with ASD, especially in the development of emotional self-recognition skills and social adaptation. The experience applied collaborative design thinking models and agile software design methodologies, articulating knowledge between software developers, therapists, and families of users with ASD. Users were characterized separately, and the functionalities required for the software that would be developed and linked in the treatment of autism were identified.

Bayesian Networks for software testing

A software design methodology is proposed that involves development of approximate models based on Bayesian Networks capturing probabilistic representations of expected behavior, which are further used in developing and running tests that can dynamically diagnose bugs and attacks during production. While automation of Software design is still a very remote goal, it can already benefit from AI tools and ideas. One of the main challenges with automating software design methods, for any product with modest complexity, is the mere intractability of enumerating all scenarios of the product usage when also taking into account user intentions.
 This leads to an intractability of generating exact specifications and exhaustive tests.
 We show how approximate models of the design can exploit AI techniques to represent the system and to derive meaningful tests, warning when the environment is not behaving as designed, detecting bugs and attacks. The representation can use Bayesian Networks that are rather simple, enabling usage by novice practitioners. We validate the methodologies with on two different applications: a device driver for Wi-Fi Direct, and a website, MindBlog.com. In the Wi-Fi Direct use case, we successfully built a test ensuring the connection is fair and contrasted it experimentally to earlier work where we created a robust Bayes network based on expert knowledge. In the MindBlog.com use case, we show that the procedure is flexible and can detect when the developers found a bug and were attempting to debug their application yielding anomalous behavior.

Notification-oriented software design methodology

The Notification Oriented Paradigm (NOP) is an alternative paradigm of software programming, in which a rules-oriented and notifications approach about factual elements are applied. In Notification Oriented Paradigm, rules and factual elements are decomposed into a set of entities that communicate themselves directly through notifications, and it constitutes a process of active inference about the rules. The paradigm particulars also lead to challenges in the software design. For example, the full use of Unified Modeling Language (UML) is not suitable for the Notification Oriented Paradigm because this paradigm is not object-oriented. This paper proposes the Notification-Oriented software design Methodology (NOM), which applies concepts of software design within a new notation for modeling, defined as Holonic Flow Diagram (HFD). The Notification-Oriented software design Methodology was tried and evaluated in some use cases. In addition, it was conduced a focus group with Notification Oriented Paradigm expert developers that demonstrated the methodology viability.

Risk Assessment for the Population of Kyiv, Ukraine as a Result of Atmospheric Air Pollution.

Background.According to the World Health Organization, 92% of the world's population lives in places where air quality levels exceed recommended limits. Recently, Ukraine had the most deaths per every 100,000 people (out of 120 countries) attributed to atmospheric air pollution. High levels of atmospheric air pollution have been observed not only in typically industrial regions, but in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, as well.Objectives.The aim of the present study was to establish the state of air pollution in Kyiv and perform a risk assessment of associated human health effects.Methods.Using official statistics and state monitoring data, the study aimed to identify and analyze risks to the health of Kyiv's population associated with air pollution. The following methods were used: systematic, functional and comparative analysis, risk theory, mathematical modeling, probability theory and mathematical statistics, as well as geographic information system technologies for digital map design and objective-oriented methodology for software design systems.Results.The risk values across different areas of the city varied significantly, indicating that atmospheric air quality remains unstable. Areas with the highest and lowest risk values were identified.Conclusions.The environmental state of atmospheric air in Kyiv requires greater attention and additional research to identify the causes of air pollution, along with implementation of measures to improve air quality.Competing Interests.The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Design and evaluation of a mobile application for monitoring patients with Alzheimer's disease: A day center case study

Background and objectiveThis paper presents Alzheed, a mobile application for monitoring patients with Alzheimer's disease at day centers as well as a set of design recommendations for the development of healthcare mobile applications. The Alzheed project was conducted at Day Center “Dorita de Ojeda” that is focused on the care of patients with Alzheimer's disease. Materials and methodsA software design methodology based on participatory design was employed for the design of Alzheed. This methodology is both iterative and incremental and consists of two main iterative stages: evaluation of low-fidelity prototypes and evaluation of high-fidelity prototypes. Low-fidelity prototypes were evaluated by 11 day center's healthcare professionals (involved in the design of Alzheed), whereas high-fidelity prototypes were evaluated using a questionnaire based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) by the same healthcare professionals plus 30 senior psychology undergraduate students uninvolved in the design of Alzheed. ResultsHealthcare professional participants perceived Alzheed as extremely likely to be useful and extremely likely to be usable, whereas senior psychology undergraduate students perceived Alzheed as quite likely to be useful and quite likely to be usable. Particularly, the median and mode of the TAM questionnaire were 7 (extremely likely) for healthcare professionals and 6 (quite likely) for psychology students (for both constructs: perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use). One-sample Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were performed to confirm the significance of the median for each construct. ConclusionsFrom the experience of designing Alzheed, it can be concluded that co-designing with healthcare professionals leads to (i) fostering group endorsement, which prevents resistance to change and (ii) helps to meet the needs of both healthcare professionals and patients, guaranteeing the usefulness of the application. In addition, evaluation of mobile healthcare applications by users involved and uninvolved in the application's design process helps to improve the ease of use of the application.

Is "Deny Access" a Valid "Fail-Safe Default" Principle for Building Security in Cyberphysical Systems?

In 1975, Saltzer and Schroeder (SaS) elucidated eight design principles that shaped decades of security research and development.1 Some of them are listed as key tenets of security protocols2 in software design methodologies, such as Microsoft's Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, and Elevation of Privilege threat model,3,4 and in McGraw's 2004 article Software in IEEE Security a Privacy.5

DESIGNING A TASK ALLOCATOR FRAMEWORK FOR DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING

Software Frameworks attempt to capture and implement a software system architecture that is reusable. A frameworks, thus, is a semicode that needs to be customized for a particular reuse. The problem of finding an optimal task allocation in distributed computing system (DCS) is an NP-hard. There are various task allocation algorithms and hence a Task Allocator may implement any of them. Any Task Allocator, hence will have many portions that can be reused to define and implement a Task Allocator. In distributed system a Task Allocation mechanism may be replaced by a new one if a standardized definition of a reusable system architecture for this purpose is available. This work attempts at formalizing a system architecture of a Task Allocator by proposing a framework for the purpose. Here we start the design methodology for OO software and identify the various parts of the software system architecture for task allocation. This effort finally results into a semicode framework. The interesting conclusions include “Identification of that code portion of the semicode framework that does not change when reused”, “Characteristics of the code portion that need customization” and the nature of framework definitions that need to be coded at the time of reuse. In this work OO design of various activities of task allocation process has been carried out as per the OO design methodology. To be objects have been identified the dynamic and functional modeling along with identification use cases, corresponding scenarios and data flow diagrams.

Design and Implementation of Students’ File Encryption and Decryption System Using One Time Pad Algorithm for Computer Science Department, Adsu Mubi

The research, design and implementation of students file encryption and decryption system using one-time pad algorithm seeks to improve the security of student records in tertiary institutions by using trusted techniques as given in the research. The purpose is to develop an automated student’s data protection application in order to consolidate existing security measures as it pertains to data integrity and privacy. The software design methodology adopted for the research is the waterfall model due to the fact that is does not allow overlapping of processes. For the system design and implementation. Pelles C programming for windows version 9.00.9 for code generation and startUML was used for user interface design all in a bid to actualize the objectives of the research.

DESIGN AND OPTIMIZATION OF HEAT EXCHANGE NETWORK AND EXERGY ANALYSIS FOR METHANATION PROCESS OF COAL-GAS

It has the significant meaning to design an energy-efficient heat exchange network (HEN) for the methanation process in the coal-gas industry in China. In this work, HENs are set up to produce multiple saturated steams with different pressure levels by software design and manual retrofit methodology based on pinch analysis, and evaluated from the economic and exergetic viewpoints. The result shows that high pressure steam (312℃, 10Mpa, 13000kg/h) and medium pressure saturated steam (175℃, 0.9Mpa, 500kg/h) can be cogenerated by the optimal HEN with lower exergy loss and economic cost as well as higher exergy efficiency.

PENERAPAN METODE PROTOTYPE DALAM PERANCANGAN APLIKASI E-LAPOR BENCANA BPBD SUMEDANG BERBASIS ANDROID

The disaster that occurred in Sumedang district was the main concern of the services provided by the BPBD of Sumedang Regency, the handling of disasters that was fast and precise became the motto of BPBD. But in practice there are many obstacles, one of which is the lack of community participation in disaster reporting and many other technical constraints. Whereas with this reporting BPBD can quickly and responsively handle the disaster. E-disaster report based on Android BPBD Sumedang district is present as an electronic disaster reporting service to overcome problems in the BPBD of Sumedang district. This e-disaster report was built using a prototype software design methodology. This methodology is very suitable for software that continues to grow such as Android-based software. With this disaster report, people can easily report disasters. The location of the disaster can also be detected with the GPS feature on the Android smartphone. The community only needs to attach a photo of the event and the description of the incident and the report will be processed immediately by the investigating officer. With this application, Sumedang District people can participate in disaster reporting, and the BPBD of Sumedang District can be helped in carrying out the handling and handling of disasters quickly and precisely in Sumedang District.

Software Design using Genetic Quality Components Search

The paper presents a software design methodology based on computational experiments for effective selection of software component set. The selection of components is performed with respect to the numerical quality criteria evaluated in the reproducible experiments with various sets of components in the virtual infrastructure simulating the operating conditions of a software system being developed. To reduce the number of experiments with unpromising sets of components the genetic algorithm is applied. For representing the sets of components in the form of natural genotypes, the encoding mapping is introduced, reverse mapping is used to decipher the genotype. In the first step of the technique, the genetic algorithm creates an initial population of random genotypes that are converted into the assessed sets of software components. The paper shows the application of the proposed methodology to find the effective choice of Node.js components. For this purpose, a MATLAB program of genetic search and experimental scenario for a virtual machine running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system were developed. To guarantee the proper reproduction of the experimental conditions, the Vagrant and Ansible configuration tools were used to create the virtual environment of the experiment.

Development of localisation and mapping software for autonomous cars

Autonomous car requires localisation and mapping capabilities to model the surrounding environment and to plan a safe and efficient route for the autonomous driving. Implementation of the localisation and mapping software depends on the type of sensors, map formats, computing environment, and processing algorithms. These dependencies make it difficult to extend, reuse, and maintain localisation and mapping software. The common software platform and software development guideline is a way to address the software dependency issues and to enhance the software reusability, scalability, maintainability, and transferability. Therefore, this study proposes a common software platform and implementation guidelines for localisation and mapping of autonomous cars. The common software platform for localisation and mapping is built on the philosophy of the AUTomotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR), which is a standard automotive software platform. The software development methodology of AUTOSAR applies to implementation guidelines of the localisation and mapping software. A graph structure of localisation and mapping is used to design the common software platform. The proposed common software platform and design methodology are evaluated using practical applications of localisation and mapping in a real autonomous car. The results show that the proposed platform and methodology are able to improve the reusability, scalability, maintainability, and transferability of the localisation and mapping software.

A model-based design approach for simulation and virtual prototyping of automotive control systems using port-Hamiltonian systems

Cyber–physical systems (CPS) such as automotive control systems consist of various interacting cyber and physical components. Heterogeneous domains, composition of multiple components, complex dynamics, and nonlinearities result in significant challenges for design, modeling, and simulation of CPS. Model-based design can be used to address such challenges, but it is very important to use physically accurate heterogeneous models that can be composed to represent the overall system behavior. Further, it is important to preserve the properties derived from analyses based on the mathematical models in the control system implementation in order to reduce costly testing and design changes late in the development cycle. This paper proposes a model-based design methodology for automotive control software using port-Hamiltonian systems (PHS). PHS are used to model the vehicle dynamics, speed and steering control systems, and the interactions between physical and cyber components. Passivity analysis is used to design the controllers and ensure system stability. More importantly, the proposed approach guarantees that passivity is preserved after time-discretization and quantization of the controllers. The models are then used for code generation and compilation, scheduling, and software deployment, ensuring that passivity is preserved by the control system implementation. We evaluate the methodology using an automotive control design case study implemented on a hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform and present simulation results to demonstrate its effectiveness.

From Pthreads to Multicore Hardware Systems in LegUp High-Level Synthesis for FPGAs

In the last decade, processor speeds have remained fairly stagnant, and to improve performance further, the industry started to increase the number of processor cores. The use of specialized hardware, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), has also been on the rise. The traditional design methodology for FPGAs, however, requires hardware knowledge, which makes the platform inaccessible to software engineers. High-level synthesis (HLS) tools aim to resolve this issue by allowing software design methodologies to be used for FPGAs. However, HLS remains difficult to use for many software engineers, as there are tasks, such as system integration, which is still mostly a manual process. Consequently, creating a multicore hardware system on an FPGA is not feasible for most software engineers. To this end, we provide an HLS framework, which can automatically generate a multicore hardware system from software. We provide support for POSIX threads, which can be compiled to concurrently executing hardware cores that can be used in a processor–accelerator hybrid system, or in a hardware-only system without a processor. With this, we show that we can create multicore FPGA systems that can provide significant benefits in performance and energy-efficiency compared with hardware executing sequentially, and software executing on MIPS/ARM/ x86 processors.

Agile Software Development Methodologies: Survey of Surveys

Agile software design and development methodologies have been gaining rigorous attention in the software engineering research community since their early introduction in the mid-nineties in addition to being highly adopted by the software development industry. In the last 15 years, an excessive number of research studies have been conducted on agile methods, a great number of notable methods have been proposed and various surveys have been presented by many researchers. In this study, the authors intend to conduct a literature survey study of the surveys of the different agile methodologies ranging from January 2000 to December 2015 using an intuitive research methodology called “Compare and Review” (CR). Furthermore, these survey papers were classified into four major categories according to their area of study. Additionally, the newly proposed agile methodologies that have not been addressed yet in any other literature review were reviewed and compared in terms of where the changes that they proposed lay on the SDLC.