System Design Perspective Research Articles

Compulsive mobile application usage and technostress: the role of personality traits

PurposeCompulsive usage of mobile applications may have a negative effect on people’s health and social interaction. Past studies have indicated that personality traits were related to compulsive usage of technologies, but most of them have explored the factors from the system and interface design perspectives, specifically. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Big Five personality traits, materialism, and external locus of control affect compulsive mobile application usage, and examines how compulsive usage impacts technostress.Design/methodology/approachThe present study proposes a framework based on Big Five personality traits and related literature. The author collected a total of 546 valid responses to the online survey, and the author examined the 18 proposed hypotheses using SmartPLS software.FindingsThe results show that neuroticism, extraversion, materialism, and external locus of control have significant effects on compulsive usage of mobile social applications. In addition, agreeableness, materialism, and external locus of control significantly influence compulsive usage of mobile game applications. Compulsive usage (of both mobile social apps and mobile games), materialism, and external locus of control all have a positive, direct impact on technostress.Practical implicationsThis study offers mobile app design companies and educational institutions a understanding of the social problems caused by the misuse of mobile devices, helping them to prevent the increase of the negative influences of such misuse.Originality/valueThe primary value of this paper lies in providing a better understanding of the influence of personality traits on the compulsive use of mobile apps and technostress.

Conformal displays: human factor analysis of innovative landing aids

In the past couple of years, research on display content for helicopter operations headed in a new direction. The already reached goals could evolve into a paradigm change for information visualization. Technology advancements allow implementing three-dimensional and conformal content on a helmet-mounted see-through device. This superimposed imagery inherits the same optical flow as the environment. It is supposed to ease switching between display information and environmental cues. The concept is neither pathbreaking nor new, but it has not been successfully established in aviation yet. Nevertheless, there are certainly some advantages to expect—at least from perspective of a human-centered system design. Within the following pages, the next generation displays will be presented and discussed with a focus on human factors. Beginning with recalling some human factor related research facts, an experiment comparing the former two-dimensional research displays will be presented. Before introducing the DLR conformal symbol set and the three experiments about an innovative drift, indication related research activities toward conformal symbol sets will be addressed.

Designing an intelligent decision support system for effective negotiation pricing: A systematic and learning approach

Automatic negotiation pricing and differential pricing aim to provide different customers with products/services that adequately meet their requirements at the “right” price. This often takes place with the purchase of expensive products/services and in the business-to-business context. Effective negotiation pricing can help enhance a company's profitability, balance supply and demand, and improve the customer satisfaction. However, determining the “right” price is a rather complex decision-making problem that puzzles pricing managers, as it needs to consider information from many constituents of the purchase channel. To further advance this line of research, this study proposes a systematic and learning approach that consists of three different types of fuzzy systems (FSs) to provide intelligent decision support for negotiation pricing. More specifically, the three FSs include: 1) a standard FS, which is a typical multiple inputs and single output FS that forms a mathematical mapping from the input space to the output space; 2) an SFS-SISOM, which is a linear fuzzy inference model with a single input and a single output module; and 3) a hierarchical FS, which consists of several FSs in a hierarchical manner to perform fuzzy inference. To address the existing problem of a standard FS suffering from the high-dimensional problem with a large number of influential factors, a generalized type of FS (named hierarchical FS), including its mathematical models and suitability for tackling the negotiation pricing problem, is introduced. In particular, a proof-of-concept prototype system that integrates these three FSs is also developed and presented. From a system design perspective, this artifact provides immense potential and flexibility for end users to choose the most suitable model for the given problem. The utility and effectiveness of this proposed system is illustrated and examined by three experimental datasets that vary from dimensionality and data coverage. Moreover, the performances of three different approaches are compared and discussed with respect to some important properties of decision support systems (DSSs).

Choice Architecture as a Way to Encourage a Whole Systems Design Perspective for More Sustainable Infrastructure

Across fields, more sustainable and resilient outcomes are being realized through a whole systems design perspective, which guides decision-makers to consider the entire system affected including interdependent physical and social networks. Although infrastructure is extremely interdependent, consisting of diverse stakeholders and networks, the infrastructure design and construction process is often fragmented. This fragmentation can result in unnecessary tradeoffs, leading to poor outcomes for certain stakeholders and the surrounding environment. A whole systems design perspective would help connect this fragmented industry and lead to more sustainable outcomes. For example, a whole systems design approach to relieve traffic on a highway might see beyond the obvious, but often ineffective, response of adding a new vehicle lane to encourage a solution such as repurposing existing road lanes from automobiles to above-ground “subway” systems. This paper discusses influences to whole systems design and how intentional choice architecture, meaning the way decisions are posed, can nudge decision-makers to employ whole systems design and result in more sustainable infrastructure. By uncovering these influences and organizing them by the social, organizational, and individual levels of the infrastructure design process, this paper provides the needed foundation for interdisciplinary research to help harness these influences through choice architecture and whole systems design for the infrastructure industry.

Probabilistic Design of Optical Transmission Systems

Traditionally, optical fiber nonlinearity is considered a limiting factor for transmission systems. Nevertheless, from a system design perspective this nonlinearity can be exploited to minimize the impact of uncertainty on the system performance. A consequence of this is that it becomes beneficial to consider the uncertainty at the design stage, resulting in a probabilistic design, rather than conventional design approaches whereby uncertainty is added by way of system margins to a deterministic design. In this paper, we conduct extensive experimental measurements to quantify the impact of uncertainty for a multispan wavelength division multiplexed system transmitting 100 GbE or 200 GbE as dual polarization quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) or 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM), respectively. The impact of uncertainty in the power launched into a span is assessed for a 10 × 80 km link. For dual polarization (DP)-QPSK, the intralink power deviation with the probabilistic design with 100% reliability is $\pm$ 1.3 dB falling to 99% reliability with $\pm$ 1.6 dB. In contrast, for DP-16QAM maximum deviation for 100% reliability is $\pm$ 0.5 dB falling to 99% for $\pm$ 0.6 dB. Following this, we consider the interplay between polarization dependent loss (PDL) and fiber nonlinearity over an 8 $\times$ 80 km system again for both DP-QPSK and DP-16QAM. A system Q variation of less than 0.15 dB due to the interaction between PDL and fiber nonlinearity is observed for 99.9% of examined PDL values for DP-QPSK and DP-16QAM, thereby allowing the two effects to be considered separately.

A Generic Framework for Assessing the Performance Bounds of Image Feature Detectors

Since local feature detection has been one of the most active research areas in computer vision during the last decade and has found wide range of applications (such as matching and registration of remotely sensed image data), a large number of detectors have been proposed. The interest in feature-based applications continues to grow and has thus rendered the task of characterizing the performance of various feature detection methods an important issue in vision research. Inspired by the good practices of electronic system design, a generic framework based on the repeatability measure is presented in this paper that allows assessment of the upper and lower bounds of detector performance and finds statistically significant performance differences between detectors as a function of image transformation amount by introducing a new variant of McNemar’s test in an effort to design more reliable and effective vision systems. The proposed framework is then employed to establish operating and guarantee regions for several state-of-the art detectors and to identify their statistical performance differences for three specific image transformations: JPEG compression, uniform light changes and blurring. The results are obtained using a newly acquired, large image database (20,482 images) with 539 different scenes. These results provide new insights into the behavior of detectors and are also useful from the vision systems design perspective. Finally, results for some local feature detectors are presented for a set of remote sensing images to showcase the potential and utility of this framework for remote sensing applications in general.

Al-Zahrawi: A Telesurgical Robotic System for Minimal Invasive Surgery

Surgical robots provide various advantages, such as improved precision and dexterity, over conventional surgical procedures and have been extensively studied in the last decade. Many surgical robots have been recently developed and described in the literature. However, given their multidisciplinary nature, due to the involvement of medical surgery, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and computer science, very few existing documents provide a system design perspective of a complete surgical robot. We tend to fill this gap by presenting the complete system-level design of Al-Zahrawi, which is a new telesurgical robotic system. The Al-Zahrawi system is mainly composed of two parts, i.e., a master console and a slave console, which are connected through a communication link. The master console consists of master manipulators (MMs), visual information presentation apparatus, and foot pedals. The slave console is primarily composed of three slave manipulators (SMs): The left and right manipulators are equipped with surgical instruments, whereas the middle one holds the endoscope. All the manipulators utilize the modified double parallelogram mechanism to achieve the remote center of motion. The distinguishing features of this system include: 1) a custom-made simple-in-construction user-friendly MMs; 2) a modular SM, with an interchangeable instrument module that does not contain any electronic circuitry and thus can be completely sterilized with ease; and 3) the availability of an independent forceps jaw movement, which increases the dexterity of the surgical tool tip without using the wrist mechanism.

Molecular communications: channel model and physical layer techniques

This article examines recent research in molecular communications from a telecommunications system design perspective. In particular, it focuses on channel models and state-of-the-art physical layer techniques. The goal is to provide a foundation for higher layer research and motivation for research and development of functional prototypes. In the first part of the article, we focus on the channel and noise model, comparing molecular and radio-wave pathloss formulae. In the second part, the article examines, equipped with the appropriate channel knowledge, the design of appropriate modulation and error correction coding schemes. The third reviews transmitter and receiver side signal processing methods that suppress inter-symbol interference. Taken together, the three parts present a series of physical layer techniques that are necessary to produce reliable and practical molecular communications.

Supporting novice clinicians cognitive strategies: System design perspective.

Infections occur among all clinical domains. The changing nature of microbes, viruses and infections poses a great threat to the overall well-being in medicine. Clinicians in the infectious disease (ID) domain deal with diagnostic as well as treatment uncertainty in their everyday practice. Our current health information technology (HIT) systems do not consider the level of clinician expertise into the system design process. Thus, information is presented to both novice and expert ID clinicians in identical ways. The purpose of this study was to identify the cognitive strategies novice ID clinicians use in managing complex cases to make better recommendations for system design. In the process, we interviewed 14 ID experts and asked them to give us a detailed description of how novice clinicians would have dealt with complex cases. From the interview transcripts, we identified four major themes that expert clinicians suggested about novices' cognitive strategies including: A) dealing with uncertainty, B) lack of higher macrocognition, C) oversimplification of problems through heuristics and D) dealing with peer pressure. Current and future innovative decision support tools embedded in the electronic health record that can match these cognitive strategies may hold the key to cognitively supporting novice clinicians. The results of this study may open up avenues for future research and suggest design directions for better healthcare systems.

Decision Learning : Data analytic learning with strategic decision making

With the increasing ubiquity and power of mobile devices as well as the prevalence of social systems, more activities in our daily life are being recorded, tracked, and shared, creating the notion of social media. Such abundant and still growing real-life data, known as big data, provide a tremendous research opportunity in many fields. To analyze, learn, and understand such user-generated data, machine learning has been an important tool, and various machine-learning algorithms have been developed. However, since the user-generated data are the outcome of users' decisions, actions, and socioeconomic interactions, which are highly dynamic, without considering users' local behaviors and interests, existing learning approaches tend to focus on optimizing a global objective function at the macroeconomic level, while totally ignoring users' local interactions at the microeconomic level. As such, there is a growing need to combine learning with strategic decision making, which are two traditionally distinct research disciplines, to be able to jointly consider both global phenomena and local effects to better understand, model, and analyze the newly arising issues in the emerging social media with user-generated data. In this article, we present an overview of the emerging notion of decision learning, i.e., learning with strategic decision making, which involves users' behaviors and interactions by combining learning with strategic decision making. We will discuss some examples from social media with real data to show how decision learning can be used to better analyze users' optimal decision from a user's perspective, as well as design a mechanism from the system designer's perspective to achieve a desirable outcome.

Interpretation and Classification of P-Series Recommendations in ITU-R

As ITU-R Recommendations is widely implemented for countries all over the world, the role and status of ITU-R Recommendations are increasingly prominent in the field of radio engineering. ITU and ITU-R Study Groups are summarized. Furthermore, the operating mode of the third study group, and the input documents are interpreted in detail. Lastly, from both wireless system design and electromagnetic compatibility analysis perspective, all of 79 P-series Recommendations are analyzed and classified, and the main contents of each Recommendation are summarized. The above research promote P-series Recommendations are widely used in China.

Fault Diagnoses for Industrial Grid-Connected Converters in the Power Distribution Systems

The reliability of power electronics converter systems (PECSs) is of paramount importance in industrial, commercial, aerospace, and military applications. Therefore, the knowledge about the fault-mode behavior of a converter system is extremely important from the perspective of improved system design, protection, and fault-tolerant control. Faults of power switches in PECSs are classified as short circuit (S-C) faults, open circuit (O-C) faults, and degradation faults. S-C faults in most cases cause an overcurrent condition that is readily detected and acted upon by standard protection systems such as overcurrent, undervoltage, or overvoltage protection. However, the degradation faults and O-C faults often do not trigger fault protection but rather cause system malfunction or performance degradation. Since the standard protection system may not detect these fault types, their diagnoses become critical for PECSs. This paper presents new methods for fault detection, localization, and diagnosis for grid-connected power converters and the identification of the unbalance input voltage to the converter. The proposed fault diagnostic algorithms are verified in both the simulation and the experimental environments in order to evaluate their robustness and effectiveness. The power converter under the study consists of three main subsystems: the three-phase uncontrolled rectifier, the boost chopper, and the single-phase inverter circuits.

A Soft-Defined Pulse Width Modulation Approach—Part II: System Modeling

In this work we model from a system design perspective the realization of a novel mixed-signal approach to pulse width modulation (PWM). The working principle for the approach, along with an implementation scheme comprised of a digital zero-positioning (ZP) followed by a proper digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and comparator, has been introduced in a companion paper. We here focus on analyzing the global system in order to get a model of its performances in terms of dynamic range and non-linearity. Since non-linearities and quantization noise occur between the ZP and the comparator, firstly, upstream models for them are provided; then their effect on the PWM signal is calculated by means of a downstream model of perturbations at the input of an ideal natural sampling PWM. Finally, an exhaustive formula for the resulting dynamic range is given and some configurations of practical interest are proposed.

CAPI: A Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface

Heterogeneous computing systems combine different types of compute elements that share memory. A specific class of heterogeneous systems discussed in this paper pairs traditional general-purpose processing cores and accelerator units. While this arrangement enables significant gains in application performance, device driver overheads and operating system code path overheads can become prohibitive. The I/O interface of a processor chip is a well-suited attachment point from a system design perspective, in that standard server models can be augmented with application-specific accelerators. However, traditional I/O attachment protocols introduce significant device driver and operating system software latencies. With the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI), we enable attaching an accelerator as a coherent CPU peer over the I/O physical interface. The CPU peer features consist of a homogeneous virtual address space across the CPU and accelerator, and hardware-managed caching of this shared data on the I/O device. This attachment method greatly increases the opportunities for acceleration due to the much shorter software path length required to enable its use compared to a traditional I/O model.

"Crossing Contexts: How Persuasive Systems Promote Green Behaviors at Work, Home and in the Community"

Environmental problems are recognized to be direct and indirect consequences of human behaviors. Thus, persuading people to engage in environmentally responsible behaviors is an important strategy for mitigating ongoing environmental deterioration and adapting to new climatic realities. A variety of public organizations and private enterprises undertake such initiatives, using persuasive information systems targeting their citizens, customers, or employees within specific contexts. In this paper, we build on the perspective of persuasive system design, integrating the concept of spill-over effects and boundary theory to develop a model for explaining and predicting how persuasive systems can be most effective at promoting environmentally responsible behaviors across individuals’ multiple domains at home, at work and in the community. Specifically, when there is high perceived persuasiveness, high integration support, low complexity changes targeted by the system, and the individual user’s boundary strengt...

Systems Design Perspective of Healthcare Provision in Humanitarian Aid

This study focuses on the role of Systems Design in addressing the challenges of healthcare provision by international emergency relief organizations in developing countries. More specifically the challenges related to the safety and performance of medical equipment that is transferred in the aftermath of a humanitarian crisis. The aim of this paper is to describe the transfer of medical equipment and its associated challenges from a systems perspective and to reflect on the value of Systems Design as an approach to humanitarian innovation, addressing the identified systemic challenges. The concepts of Human Factors and Ergonomics, and Product-Service Systems will be presented as valuable contributions to support designers in handling a larger degree of complexity throughout the design process and to support them to make informed choices regarding this particular context.

Wearable Wireless Cardiovascular Monitoring Using Textile-Based Nanosensor and Nanomaterial Systems

Wearable and ultraportable electronics coupled with pervasive computing are poised to revolutionize healthcare services delivery. The potential cost savings in both treatment, as well as preventive care are the focus of several research efforts across the globe. In this review, we describe the motivations behind wearable solutions to real-time cardiovascular monitoring from a perspective of current healthcare services, as well as from a systems design perspective. We identify areas where emerging research is underway, namely: nanotechnology in textile-based wearable monitors and healthcare solutions targeted towards smart devices, like smartphones and tablets.

Evaluation of the driver’s mental workload: a necessity in a perspective of in-vehicle system design for road safety improvement

Human factors research and debate related to mental workload have been going on for decades since the 60's (McKenzie et al. 1966) and is still happening (Finomore et al. 2013). The raised issues are: is it useful (do we need the concept of mental workload or do we have to banish it for good? Leplat 2002), is it scientifically credible (Dekker et al. 2010), and, in case of a positive answer, how to measure it (Jex 1988). In the context of the driving task, human factors research is abundant and diversified, aiming at a better understanding of driver behavior and functional capacities in terms of perception, cognition, and motor processes in order to improve road safety (Lee 2008), drivers' mental workload being an important issue to consider in this framework (Dick de Waard 1996). This problematic is even more crucial since the deployment of onboard Intelligent Transport System in the vehicles (Carsten and Nilsson 2001), as human factors have the responsibility to evaluate whether these innovative systems really support the driving task or, on the contrary, lead to distraction and increase mental workload, with potential dramatic consequences in terms of road safety. So, since the beginning of research in this area, the objectives have been to establish methods of assessing fluctuations in mental workload that are sensitive to the various aspects of attentional processing requirements in relation to both external environmental conditions, such as traffic density as well as in-vehicle conditions, such as competing visual and auditory displays (Pauzie´ and Amditis 2010). Workload can be defined as a hypothetical construct that represents the cost incurred by a human operator to achieve a particular level of performance (Hart 1986). Driving performance and the driver's mental workload are both relevant and complementary parameters to consider, knowing that they can vary independently (Yeh and Wickens 1988). Indeed, if the complexity of the task increases, the driver is able to maintain a stable performance to a certain degree, by increasing effort. Keywords: Driver distraction; Language: en

A longitudinal view of supply chain education

Purpose – The logistics and supply chain management discipline has evolved dramatically over the past generation. The rapid pace of change has challenged education providers – e.g., universities, professional associations, and publications – to remain relevant to various stakeholders. Relying on an open systems design perspective, the purpose of this paper is to assess how well organizations use constrained resources (personnel, dollars, time, etc.) to meet customers’ educational needs. Design/methodology/approach – To examine how well educational providers are meeting stakeholder goals, universities, associations, and publications are examined across time by multiple surveys to determine if they are keeping pace in the changing business world. Findings – The paper identifies two gaps. First, stakeholders report a growing gap between the offerings of existing education providers and their educational needs. Second, the gap between academic and practitioner perceptions is growing. Importantly, some organizations and universities are doing a better job of responding to changing educational requirements. Finally, a shift to SCM is further complicating the educational process. Originality/value – This study makes two primary contributions. First, it identifies important changes in the logistics and supply chain education market. Second, it provides updated rankings of the perceptions of academics and practitioners regarding three education providers: professional organizations, universities, and publications. This insight enables logistics and supply chain thought leaders to evaluate how they can enhance education resources and thus remain relevant in a rapidly changing and increasingly tumultuous marketplace.

The Analysis of the Standardization in Signage System Design

This paper analyzes the principles of signage system design, especially the principle of standardization and how to use it to improve the design. Except the study about the elements of system, this paper also analyzes the coherence of the whole system .This shows another perspective of the signage system design.