System Development Efforts Research Articles

“People Gathered by Sorghum”: Cultural Practices and sorghum Diversity in Northern Ethiopia

Sorghum is an important crop in the livelihoods of Kunama and Tigrayan farmers in Northern Ethiopia and we present here a study of what factors have shaped the genetic diversity of the varieties cultivated in neighboring communities of the two ethnolinguistic groups. Using a combination of methods from crop science and cultural anthropology, we investigate patterns of historical and contemporary relationships between crop genetic diversity and cultural and social factors. The spatial genetic structure reveals patterns of ethnolinguistic differentiation and admixture that reflect deep affinities between cultures and crops, but the seed systems of the two communities are also open to exchange and gene-flow. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding cultural factors for genetic resource conservation, as well as for plant breeding and seed system development efforts.

X-ray Computed Tomography Inspection of Novel Ceramic Matrix Composites

Novel Ceramic Matrix Composites (CMCs) offer the promise of more highly performing structures, especially in aerospace applications, due to their excellent mechanical properties at elevated temperatures with respect to their density and their corrosion resistance. However, the development of such materials requires careful characterisation, and any deployment on an aircraft necessitates an appropriate nondestructive testing capability. This work sought to deploy and refine the method of Xray Computed Tomography (CT) in aid of the development of a novel CMC and subsequent deployment in a flying component. The target application was part of the exhaust system of a civil aircraft’s auxiliary power unit. The work included material characterisation at coupon-level, as well as technique development with a view towards the target application. For the former, high-resolution scans were performed in a range of configurations, including during tensile testing, to provide an understanding of microstructure and failure behaviour. For the latter, novel system configurations were explored to try to deal with the challenge of a large, thin-walled structure. Additionally, alternative or complimentary non-X-ray testing methods were trialled, notably including terahertz (THz) imaging. The material characterisation demonstrated the potential for the novel material to meet the requirements of the application. The terahertz imaging in a through transmission configuration was the most capable of the non-radiographic methods tested, providing an image that correlated very well with the reference CT scan, whilst the system development efforts yielded a configuration optimised for this class of 3D X-ray imaging applications.

Healthcare system development in the Middle East and North Africa region: Challenges, endeavors and prospective opportunities.

Countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have been investing in the development of their health systems through implementing reforms to improve health care delivery for their nations. However, these countries are still facing challenges in providing equitable, high quality healthcare services. There is limited published literature supporting the previous and ongoing attempts that have been made to improve health system performance in MENA countries. This review aims to describe experiences of health system development efforts in the MENA region, highlight progress, identify challenges that need be addressed and future opportunities to achieve responsive and efficient health systems. It also aimed to provide recommendations to further support these health systems toward evolution and performance improvement. A literature review was conducted by searching different databases including PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar and other electronic resources to identify articles and publications describing health systems development in the MENA region from 1975 to 2022. It also included grey literature, reports and policy and planning documents by international organizations. The identified references were reviewed to extract, analyze, organize and report the findings. The review revealed emerging evidence describing governmental initiatives to introduce health system reforms at different levels in the MENA countries. These include initiatives targeting the various elements controlling health system reform: financing, payment, organization, regulation and behavior of providers and consumers. There are several challenges facing the health systems of MENA countries including the rising burden of chronic diseases, inequitable access to health services, deficiency in health workforce, shortage in the use of effective health information systems and leadership challenges. The review identified several key areas that can benefit from further improvement to support health system reforms. These include improving the structure, organization and financing of health systems, health workforce development, effective data management and engagement of key stakeholders to achieve adequate health system reforms. The MENA countries have made significant steps to improve the performance of their health systems; yet achieving a comprehensive health reform will require collaboration of various stakeholders including health policy makers, healthcare professionals, and central to the success of the reform, the patients.

Strategic alignment of enterprise architecture management – how portfolios of control mechanisms track a decade of enterprise transformation at Commerzbank

ABSTRACT Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is commonly employed by large organisations to coordinate local information system development efforts in line with organisation-wide strategic objectives while simultaneously avoiding redundancies and inconsistencies. Even though EAM tools and processes have become increasingly mature over the past decade, many organisations still struggle to generate impact from their EAM initiatives. To this end, we describe how enterprise architects at Commerzbank, a major international bank, employed a control mechanism portfolio perspective to more effectively anchor EAM within the organisation. This approach allows to purposefully combine a wide range of different formal and informal EAM control mechanisms, thereby going beyond the formal, top-down driven mechanisms predominantly discussed in EAM literature. Furthermore, such EAM control mechanism portfolios provide an effective means to purposefully realign EAM in reaction to major strategic shifts. The application of this perspective is demonstrated by tracing the evolution of EAM at Commerzbank for more than a decade (2008 to 2018) through a turbulent and challenging competitive environment, resulting in several major strategic realignments that required corresponding adjustments in EAM. We believe that such consciously designed and diversified EAM control mechanism portfolios also provide a useful means for other large organisations to more effectively conduct EAM.

Credit policy and its heterogeneous effects on green innovations

We use the issuance of a new credit policy in China—the Green Credit Guideline (Guideline)—as a unique event and investigate its heterogenous effects on various green technology innovations for different firms in the world’s largest emerging economy. We find that all firms experience a significant increase in green technology innovations after the issuance of the Guideline. Companies with more considerable legitimacy deficiency in environmental compliance are more responsive to the Guideline. The larger increase in green technology innovations for companies with more legitimacy deficiency in environmental compliance is mainly driven by their higher productivity in applicational technology innovations after the Guideline was issued. All firms experience significant improvements in the effectiveness of investments, which is an important channel for increasing green technology innovations. Local legal system development and law enforcement efforts, firms’ political connections, and state ownership are essential mediating factors for green technology innovations, especially for firms with more legitimacy deficiency in environmental compliance. The Guideline positively affects both firm value and reputation, indicating that the new credit policy promotes impact investing.

Resilience Requirements Patterns

AbstractIn recent years, achieving resilience has become an important objective in many system development efforts. Resilience is defined as a system's ability to deliver required capability in the face of adversity. Developing resilient systems often depends on first establishing good resilience requirements. Resilience requirements are complex compound requirements and developing high quality resilience requirements is a challenge. In this paper we follow both a deductive and inductive approach to identify the critical content and structure of resilience requirements. We develop a pattern that represents that information and model that pattern in three forms, all containing the same information. The three forms are: 1) natural language, 2) entity‐relationship diagram, and 3) an extension to SysML. Having multiple forms makes the pattern easily developed, understood, and validated by stakeholders who are not modeling experts, while at the same time being formal, precise and computationally consumable. The resulting resilience requirements are consistent with systems engineering methodologies and are easily utilized in Model Based Systems Engineering and Digital Engineering environments.

Requirements for Model-Based Development Process Design and Compliance of Standardized Models

The planning of system development efforts is crucial to the successful realization of projects. However, development planning typically lacks systematic, engineering discipline, and consequently risks project and business success. Model-based process design is a potential information systems approach to addressing the increasing complexity of such planning. We characterize the ontology of development process design, based on real-life observations and scientific publications. We then synthesize the required ontology with the desirable characteristics of models, and derive key requirements for model-based development process design. Next, these requirements are used to evaluate the adequacy of three prominent, standardized model-based process design approaches—BPMN, OPM and SPEM. The findings reveal that the surveyed models are a partial fit, and do not promote sound process design. Finally, by generalizing the categorical evaluation results, possible root causes for the identified inadequacies are proposed. A new model design, which should rely on the formulated requirements set, is called for, in pursuit of a wider adoption of model-based design paradigms and better information systems realization to support the development of complex systems.

Using Systems Architecture Views to Assess Integration Readiness Levels

Systems integration is a central element of the complex systems development effort. The integration readiness levels (IRL) scale complements technology readiness levels (TRL) to assess the system development maturity, representing risk levels for integrating technologies in a system. The increasing complexity of systems, due to multiple interfaces and an information-centric architecture, demands new systemic approaches to analyze the architecture and communicate IRL assessments. Therefore, this article developed a methodology to apply IRL using architecture views through the design structure matrix and domain mapping matrix. A case study analyzed technology introduction impacts and different integration strategies for space systems from China–Brazil Earth Resources Satellite program at the system and system-of-systems levels. Through the design science method, results show the pragmatic evaluation and validation for the proposed method and for the IRL scale itself, by professionals of the case study projects. The research draws suggestions for holistic system analysis and managerial communication applications using the proposed method and suggests a rationale for IRL assessment of legacy systems.

İ.T.Ü. KOSGEB TEKNOPARKINDA KÜÇÜK VE ORTA ÖLÇEKLİ İŞLETMELERİN ARAŞTIRMA GELİŞTİRME FALİYETLERİ

Discussing the nature o f KOBİ, a short historical review o f the subject about discussing the nature of KOBI is given in the paper. The need far the structured approach is stressed, afterpresenting the recent developments in the field of a survey conducted in 1994 among 9 in İTÜ KOSGEB fîrms. “The general properties and some of the benefıts of structured approach far KOBİ development are summarized and structured tools and methodologies are reviewed" Finally, some structured System development efforts in Turkey are mentioned and some examples are presented.

Rotating Machinery Prognostics and Application of Machine Learning Algorithms

The internet of things (IOT) enabled presence of abundant sensors on smart machineries and the recent advance in deep learning is accelerating the development of predictive maintenance in production systems with less time and fair amount of effort. In this work a Deep learning Neural Networks (DNN) based bearing health monitoring system with index of similarity check is developed and tested for its effectiveness. The assessment procedure followed in here trains a DNN model on a time series data segmented to a vector size equal to number of data points per cycle as training and test data sets. Moreover the model measures the similarity of the test signal to an anchor signal selected from each fault class. The classification performance comparison done proves that DNN with fair depth and large data perform better and can be extended to other problems in intelligent maintenance systems development efforts. The proposed system is intuitive and has minimal complexity with uncompromised fault detection accuracy.

Integration of Parametric Cost Estimation with System Architecture - It's a dirty job but someone has to do it!

The rapid adoption and advancement of Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods and tools opens up new avenues of systems engineering practices. One of them is cost estimation. As a key enabler for affordability analysis and budgetary decision making, cost estimation is an essential component for all system development and sustainment efforts. However, cost estimation is typically a separate endeavor from the design and development effort, creating a professional “chasm” between the worlds of systems designers and of cost analysts, causing a disconnect between the system as designed and the cost and effort required to build it. This paper describes an approach to “tightly” integrate the existing practice of parametric cost estimation with the system architecture development process by leveraging MBSE and SysML to enable repeatable and efficient estimation of system development cost, and to allow system cost and affordability to be incorporated into the “digital thread” of the design while improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the cost estimation process. By expanding our previous work (Papke, Wang and Pavalkis 2017), this paper describes a new concept of operation (CONOP) for system development, enabled by the integrated SysML and COSYSMO modeling environment, that effectively connects the cost baselines to the technical baselines throughout the project life cycle. This new CONOP presents another step towards “pulling the digital thread” by making affordability and economic analysis an integral part of the system architecture.

Investigating illusions of agreement in group requirements determination

The success of information systems development efforts hinges largely on eliciting accurate requirements from users and other stakeholders. Requirements determination is difficult due to the complexity of the systems to be built, analysts’ and users’ cognitive and motivational challenges, and the highly politicized nature of many development efforts. The present research addresses a problem that arises from users’ motivations during the requirements determination process. Most past studies have focused on explicit conflicts that arise between systems analysts, users, and other organizational stakeholders. The present research is concerned instead with the opposite problem—illusions of agreement between participants in the systems development environment. Our study investigates a type of illusion of agreement known as the Abilene Paradox in requirements determination. The Abilene Paradox refers to situations in which each member of a group believes (incorrectly) that the other group members want to pursue a particular course of action, which leads everyone to avoid conflict by agreeing to the action publicly while disagreeing privately. We first provide theory underlying the paradox and review past literature. We then build theory to motivate our investigation and generate hypotheses. We then report results of a laboratory experiment utilizing group requirements determination efforts. Results indicated behavior consistent with the presence of the paradox and an illusion of agreement. These results have important implications for research and practice in requirements determination specifically and systems development in general. Our results contribute to both the requirements determination literature and the literature on illusions of agreement and social conformity.

Inequalities in child immunization coverage in Ghana: evidence from a decomposition analysis

Childhood vaccination has been promoted as a global intervention aimed at improving child survival and health, through the reduction of vaccine preventable deaths. However, there exist significant inequalities in achieving universal coverage of child vaccination among and within countries. In this paper, we examine rural-urban inequalities in child immunizations in Ghana. Using data from the recent two waves of the Ghana Demographic and Health Survey, we examine the probability that a child between 12 and 59 months receives the required vaccinations and proceed to decompose the sources of inequalities in the probability of full immunization between rural and urban areas. We find significant child-specific, maternal and household characteristics on a child’s immunization status. The results show that children in rural areas are more likely to complete the required vaccinations. The direction and sources of inequalities in child immunizations have changed between the two survey waves. We find a pro-urban advantage in 2008 arising from differences in observed characteristics whilst a pro-rural advantage emerges in 2014 dominated by the differences in coefficients. Health system development and campaign efforts have focused on rural areas. There is a need to also specifically target vulnerable children in urban areas, to maintain focus on women empowerment and pay attention to children from high socio-economic households in less favourable economic times.

Heat Exchanger Performance Impacts on Optimum Cost Conditions in Thermoelectric Energy Recovery Designs

Cost is just as important as power density or efficiency for the adoption of waste heat recovery thermoelectric generators (TEG). Prior work [1] has shown that the system design that minimizes cost (e.g., the $/W value) can be close to the designs that maximize the system’s efficiency or power density, however, it is important to understand the relationship between those designs to optimize TEG performance-cost compromises. Expanding on recent work [1, 2, 3] the impact of heat exchanger conditions on the optimum TEG fill factors and cost scaling of a waste heat recovery thermoelectric generator with a detailed treatment of the hot side exhaust heat exchanger has been investigated further. The effect of the heat lost to the environment and updated relationships between the hot-side and cold-side conductances [4] that maximize power output are considered. The optimum fill factor to minimize TEG energy recovery system costs is strongly dependent on the heat leakage fraction, σ, the mass flow rate of the exhaust, the hot-side heat exchanger effectiveness, heat exchanger UAh, and heat flux. These relationships are explored and characterized for typical exhaust gas-flow conditions to show the inherent design complexities. The heat exchanger costs often dominate the TEG cost equation and it is critical to fully understand the tradeoff between heat exchanger performance, optimum TEG fill factors, and cost to establish potentially optimum design points within the cost-performance design space. This work will explore the design tradeoffs and relationships within the cost-efficiency-power density design space for a typical thermoelectric energy recovery system application. The interplay between optimum TEG fill factors and heat exchanger design can impact system footprint, volume, and mass in weight-sensitive applications. Less-effective, low-cost heat exchangers may outperform higher cost alternatives from a market adoption perspective. This shift of emphasis acknowledging the interdependence of optimum TEG fill factors and heat exchanger performance has significant implications on thermoelectric waste heat recovery systems designs and their operation. In addition, preferred TEG design regimes exist that accommodate reasonable compromises in TE performance and cost. This effort highlights how the optimum fill factor–heat exchanger performance relations couple to these optimum TEG performance-cost domains based on TEG-system-level analyses and provides a focus for future system research and development efforts.

Promoting interactions between lecturers and students in classrooms via mobile technologies: An empirical study

The current study sets out to identify determinants affecting behavioural intention to use mobile technology in lecture classes. The research emphasizes the reason for using mobile technology during lectures with large number of students is to facilitate interactions among students and lecturers. The proposed conceptual framework has four main antecedents of behavioural intention: System perception, intrinsic motivation, system and information quality, and uncertainty avoidance. Sample data was collected from 396 tertiary students. Results from structural equation model on the sample indicated that behavioural intention was significantly influenced by system and information quality, followed by intrinsic motivator, and uncertainty avoidance. System perception was not significantly predictive of behavioural intention. The proposed model explained 54% of the variance in behavioural intention of mobile technology use in lecture classes. The study findings are indicative of the importance of system development efforts to ensure overall quality system design. The findings further suggest that mobile technology may serve as a tool to facilitate interaction among students and lecturers in large lecture classes.

Design prototyping methods: state of the art in strategies, techniques, and guidelines

Prototyping is interwoven with nearly all product, service, and systems development efforts. A prototype is a pre-production representation of some aspect of a concept or final design. Prototyping often predetermines a large portion of resource deployment in development and influences design project success. This review surveys literature sources in engineering, management, design science, and architecture. The study is focused around design prototyping for early stage design. Insights are synthesized from critical review of the literature: key objectives of prototyping, critical review of major techniques, relationships between techniques, and a strategy matrix to connect objectives to techniques. The review is supported with exemplar prototypes provided from industrial design efforts. Techniques are roughly categorized into those that improve the outcomes of prototyping directly, and those that enable prototyping through lowering of cost and time. Compact descriptions of each technique provide a foundation to compare the potential benefits and drawbacks of each. The review concludes with a summary of key observations, highlighted opportunities in the research, and a vision of the future of prototyping. This review aims to provide a resource for designers as well as set a trajectory for continuing innovation in the scientific research of design prototyping.

The HealthCare.gov project

This case describes the development of the HealthCare.gov website front-end, systems and databases supporting the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. In late October 2013, US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner appear before a Congressional subcommittee to apologize about system glitches. The case gives students an opportunity to consider project risks that affected this huge systems development effort, and to consider how to ensure that millions of uninsured or underinsured Americans would be able to sign up for affordable health insurance.

Tactile Situation Awareness System

Recent system development efforts have been made concerning a Tactile Situation Awareness System (TSAS). TSAS is a garment containing vibrotactile stimulators that provide aircraft flight control feedback to the torso. TSAS is intended to improve human factors during flight by reducing workload, increasing situation awareness, and reducing the likelihood of brownout mishaps. During simulation and flight tests, pilots using TSAS have demonstrated the ability to non-visually hover helicopters, while consistently reporting reduced workload and increased situation awareness. The current effort enlarged the surface area of the garment to extend the capability beyond hovering to include complete forward flight control (pitch and roll) so that the technology could be transitioned to the helicopter pilot community and effect a reduction of brownout mishaps. The following describes the delivery of this new suite of capabilities, including the cueing garments, avionics interfaces, and software compatible with military helicopter platforms.

Developing a Cost Overrun Predictive Model for Complex Systems Development Projects

While system complexity is on the rise across many product lines, the resources required to successfully design and implement complex systems remain constrained. Because financiers of complex systems development efforts actively monitor project implementation cost, project performance models are needed to help project managers predict their cost compliance and avoid cost overruns. This article describes recent research conducted by the authors to develop a cost overrun predictive model using five known drivers of complex systems development cost. The study identifies schedule and reliability, as the key determinants of whether or not a large complex systems development project will experience cost overrun.

Cost Scaling of a Real-World Exhaust Waste Heat Recovery Thermoelectric Generator: A Deeper Dive

Cost is equally important to power density or efficiency for the adoption of waste heat recovery thermoelectric generators (TEG) in many transportation and industrial energy recovery applications. In many cases, the system design that minimizes cost (e.g., the $/W value) can be very different than the design that maximizes the system’s efficiency or power density, and it is important to understand the relationship between those designs to optimize TEG performance-cost compromises. Expanding on recent cost analysis work and using more detailed system modeling, an enhanced cost scaling analysis of a waste heat recovery TEG with more detailed, coupled treatment of the heat exchangers has been performed. In this analysis, the effect of the heat lost to the environment and updated relationships between the hot-side and cold-side conductances that maximize power output are considered. This coupled thermal and thermoelectric (TE) treatment of the exhaust waste heat recovery TEG yields modified cost scaling and design optimization equations, which are now strongly dependent on the heat leakage fraction, exhaust mass flow rate, and heat exchanger effectiveness. This work shows that heat exchanger costs most often dominate the overall TE system costs, that it is extremely difficult to escape this regime, and in order to achieve TE system costs of $1/W it is necessary to achieve heat exchanger costs of $1/(W/K). Minimum TE system costs per watt generally coincide with maximum power points, but preferred TE design regimes are identified where there is little cost penalty for moving into regions of higher efficiency and slightly lower power outputs. These regimes are closely tied to previously identified low cost design regimes. This work shows that the optimum fill factor Fopt minimizing system costs decreases as heat losses increase, and increases as exhaust mass flow rate and heat exchanger effectiveness increase. These findings have profound implications on the design and operation of various TE waste heat recovery systems. This work highlights the importance of heat exchanger costs on the overall TEG system costs, quantifies the possible TEG performance-cost domain space based on heat exchanger effects, and provides a focus for future system research and development efforts.