Search

Back of queue crashes on Interstates are a major concern for all state transportation departments. In 2020, Indiana DOT begin deploying queue warning trucks with message boards, flashers and digital alerts that could be transmitted to navigation systems such as Waze. This study reports on the deployment and impact evaluation of digital alerts on motorist’s assistance patrols and 19 Queue trucks in Indiana. The motorist assistance patrol evaluation is provided qualitatively. A novel analysis of queue warning trucks equipped with digital alerts was conducted during the months of May-July in 2021 using connected vehicle data. This new data set reports locations of anonymous hard-braking events from connected vehicles on the Interstate. Hard-braking events were tabulated for when queueing occurred with and without the presence of a queue warning truck. Approximately 370 hours of queueing with queue trucks present and 58 hours of queueing without queue trucks present were evaluated. Hard-braking events were found to decrease approximately 80% when queue warning trucks were used to alert motorists of impending queues.

Current modeling practices for software focus on functional aspects for behavior and structure. We are developing techniques that examine these functional aspects along with architecture issues through modeling, analysis, and virtual integration for assurance of performance properties. For embedded cyber-physical systems, the approach enables identification and removal of defects early in the design phase for verification of integrability, assurance that non-functional requirements are met, and flexibility in modeling and analysis at multiple levels of system fidelity.

The software architecture community has played a crucial role in the development of mobile software. Many of the ideas used in the design of these systems came from traditional software architecture and those ideas have contributed to mobile computing becoming ubiquitous. Mobile applications in the context of smart cities are very challenging since they need to operate within the power, processor, and capacity limitations of mobile devices, the exacting demands of life critical smart city requirements, and the constantly changing and exposed environment which may not always be trusted. Since there are no widely accepted design models for this type of software, developers must resort to primitive design decisions to meet all the needs of these applications, which takes additional time and expertise. For this reason, this study aims to investigate the design process for mobile applications in the context of smart cities. In order to address the lack of verified information about designing mobile apps, we conducted a multi-case study with 9 applications from 4 different development groups to build a grounded theory. The applications were reverse engineered to expose the architecture of each application. Based on all the data, an initial grounded theory was constructed to explain how the selected design process produces an app with the desired characteristics. The resulting theory offers explanations for how software engineering teams design mobile apps for smart cities. This knowledge will serve as a basis to further understand the phenomena and advances towards more effective design and development process definitions.

The list of applications classified as safety critical is growing due to emerging contexts such as the Internet of Things that touch the everyday activities of millions of people through smart devices like home automation systems and connected vehicles. These consumer products require high reliability but must be priced competitively. Traditional system development strategies are costly, in part, because traditional verification activities find only a small percentage of defects early in a project and because when discovered late in the development life cycle their repair requires changes to dependent code as well. Our development approach leverages early system architecture knowledge to jump start an architecture-centric development strategy that iteratively establishes traceability among the requirements, architecture, and verification artifacts. A virtual integration strategy makes the current state of the system under development available for analysis early in the product development life cycle. The approach is implemented using the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) embodied in the Open Source AADL Tool Environment (OSATE). The Architecture-Led Incremental System Assurance (ALISA) toolkit, the latest contribution of our team at the Software Engineering Institute, builds on AADL to provide the constructs and tools for an engineer to specify the integrated system, and to define verification activities that ensure satisfaction of the specification. The results from using the languages and techniques in pilot projects have shown very large cost and time savings, important to holding down costs for consumer-level Internet of Things systems. In this paper we focus on the architecture-led development process and illustrate the support given by ALISA.

The research presented in this article considers how residual risk impacts project performance and: (1) evaluates the impact of specific categories of residual risks (actor, technology, task, and structure) on project performance; and (2) demonstrates the mediation role of categorical problems caused by residual risk on project performance. Data from 92 projects analyzed using partial least squares found support for mediation, and not direct effects between: (1) actor project problems and the effects of actor residual risk; (2) task project problems and the effects of task residual risk; and (3) technology project problems and the effects of technology residual risk on information systems development (ISD) project performance.

When developers contribute to an open source software ecosystem project, they follow practices defined by governing authorities, architects, maintainers, committers, and other stakeholders. Many of these practices are incorporated into training videos and guidelines for newcomers to guide the work of contributors, including architectural practices that influence the quality of the software product and the health of the open source ecosystem. This research is investigating architectural practices intended to orient and train newcomers during their first contacts with the ecosystem. This includes using the software architecture to trace a picture of how the education artifacts have been built to achieve a healthy ecosystem. This research identifies architectural practices spread by some training resources and analyzes how these practices contribute to achieving a healthy ecosystem. Our research method consisted of a qualitative study conducted with data obtained from various training sources. The findings show the connection between existing education for newcomers and their possible impact to achieve healthy open source ecosystems.

BACKGROUND Medulloblastoma is the most common yet challenging paediatric brain tumour. No longer considered a single disease entity, medulloblastoma is comprised of at least four distinct genetically and molecularly defined subgroups. OBJECTIVES Retrospectively assess the performance and outcomes of all patients diagnosed with medulloblastoma between 1990-2017 according to molecular subgroups. METHODS After obtaining ethical approval, confirming sample adequacy, 76 samples (FFPE and Fresh Frozen) were retrieved from the two Victorian children’s oncology providers, Monash Children’s Hospital and The Royal Children’s Hospital. Blinded review of histology and immunohistochemistry using subgroups specific antibodies (INI1, CTNNB1, GAB, YAP, DKK1, SFRP1), is performed by a neuropathologist. For molecular determination of the subgroups, DNA extraction and restoration (FFPE samples only), and bisulphite modification is performed prior to analysis on the Infinium MethylationEPIC BeadChip, containing >850k methylation sites, performed at the Australian Genome Research Facility. Whilst several methods exist, Methylation Array is the current gold standard for subgroup analysis. Data analysis is performed using the Heidelberg groups (MolecularNeuropathology) algorithm and locally using R-studio. Molecular information is paired with clinical variables and international data (where available). RESULTS 24 samples analysed to date show no discrepancy with regards to incidence amongst subgroups, gender distribution, outcomes and international data. Further analysis will examine trends in mutational burden within subgroups, change in population trends with respect to incidence, relapse and survival. Acknowledgements: CCF, Australian Lions, Baileys Day.

Architecture is the fundamental structure of a system. That structure is based on the relationships among the modules that provide the behaviour of the system. These structures appear, with variations, in many systems that address related problems. Because software is so malleable, much of this variation is implemented in the software portion of the product. These different architectures have different performance characteristics such as different levels of reliability and safety. In this chapter we will survey some of the popular architectures for cyber-physical systems, the quality attributes enhanced and degraded by each architecture and analysis techniques that are used to evaluate these qualities in the context of actual applications. Our intent is to provide the type of knowledge needed for the transportation engineer to participate in developing or acquiring software for smart transportation systems.

Context: Testing plays an important role in the quality assurance process for software product line engineering. There are many opportunities for economies of scope and scale in the testing activities, but techniques that can take advantage of these opportunities are still needed. Objective: The objective of this study is to identify testing strategies that have the potential to achieve these economies, and to provide a synthesis of available research on SPL testing strategies, to be applied towards reaching higher defect detection rates and reduced quality assurance effort. Method: We performed a literature review of two hundred seventy-six studies published from the year 1998 up to the 1st semester of 2013. We used several filters to focus the review on the most relevant studies and we give detailed analyses of the core set of studies. Results: The analysis of the reported strategies comprised two fundamental aspects for software product line testing: the selection of products for testing, and the actual test of products. Our findings indicate that the literature offers a large number of techniques to cope with such aspects. However, there is a lack of reports on realistic industrial experiences, which limits the inferences that can be drawn. Conclusion: This study showed a number of leveraged strategies that can support both the selection of products, and the actual testing of products. Future research should also benefit from the problems and advantages identified in this study.

Decision Support Frameworks, information systems that guide business and organization choices, are often used to help planners and designers make complex choices. These frameworks provide a means of aggregating the data needed to successfully reach a decision while providing a means of logically analyzing the compiled information. The framework can also provide additional information to help acclimate a planner or designer to special considerations of a domain if they are unfamiliar with the area.Dynamic Software Product Lines, product lines which can self-adapt their architecture at run-time, are complex systems usually constructed to cope with high levels of run-time uncertainty. During construction, selecting an appropriate design from among the set of possible designs for a Dynamic Software Product Line is a non-trivial task, and no existing Decision Support Framework provides guidance for this process. In this paper, we present a framework, Structured Intuitive Model for Dynamic Adaptive System Economics, for comparing and selecting between designs for a Dynamic Software Product Line.

The health of the software ecosystems concerns to the growing and continuity to exist remaining variable and productive over time. Research on this area is becoming more important. Even today, no studies have been available summarizing the research on evaluation approaches for the health of software ecosystems. The objective of this study is to structure and analyze the available literature on this field identifying the state-of-the-art of the research. We conducted a systematic literature review to obtain an overview of the existing studies in this area. 23 studies were selected as primary studies by applying inclusion, exclusion and quality criteria. The findings show that the research area is quite immature. There are few approaches and tools to support the evaluation work. In these studies, only 3 reported a complete evaluation of the health of ecosystems, 5 studies were considered as initial proposals, and the others evaluated the health partially.

The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to experience rapid growth, and its influence is extending into previously unreached domains. However, some of these new domains impose specific limitations that complicate the design and implementation of IoT systems. Examples of such limitations are the exclusion of specific protocols, restrictions on the types of data that can be collected, requirements about what information can be transmitted to the public and controls around how that communication occurs. Capturing, representing and designing for these limitations as well as reuse is essential for the quick and successful deployment of such projects. In this paper, we present a case study of an IoT human in the loop monitoring system built for use within an industrial setting. We report our experiences with both designing the first deployment of the system as well as designing variation points into the software architecture to account for future iterations and deployment into other environments.

Software ecosystems have adopted many different strategies to achieve success and good health. The role of software architect is one of the main contributors to that success. Their activities are crucial for realizing the business strategy of their organization. Software ecosystems define multi-sided markets that require different strategies from a traditional two-sided market. The architectural practices in the multi-sided market must support the need for flexibility and rapid reaction. These new demands broaden our understanding of the software architect's role and the impact of their action on ecosystem structure. In particular the need to understand how to operate in a collaborative, cooperative environment to exploit competition. In this position paper, we discuss how software architect's actions influence the ecosystem health through their indicators: productivity, niche creation, and robustness.

Part 3: Licensing, Strategies, and Practices; International audience; Open source software ecosystems have adjusted and evolved a set of practices over the years to support the delivery of sustainable software. However, few studies have investigated the impacts of such practices on the health of these ecosystems. In this paper, we present the results of an ethnographic-based study conducted during the Latin-American KDE users and contributors meeting (LaKademy 2015) with the goal of collecting practices used within the KDE ecosystem and understanding how they affect ecosystem health. The analysis was based on softgoal interdependency graphs adapted to represent practices and relate them to non-functional requirements and goals. Our results provide a preliminary insight to understand how KDE ecosystem community interacts, which working practices have been adopted and how they affect ecosystem health.

This chapter introduces the concept of Systems Engineering and its role in designing systems for use in the Internet of Things (IoT), with particular emphasis on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Design is an essential step in the creation of a system as the design plots the course that later development steps will take. It involves the creation of an architecture that represents the system to be constructed, and this architecture is analyzed to ensure the system, as designed, is capable of successfully meeting requirements. Verification at this stage, as part of the architecture analysis, is important as it has been shown that the majority of errors (approximately 70%) are introduced in the design and are not caught until later development steps. In this chapter, we introduce an architecture description tool, the Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL), that facilitates the creation of architectures for embedded systems, like those found in the IoT and ITS. We provide an overview of the capabilities of the language and show how the architectures designed in AADL can be verified against the requirements.

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) has facilitated an explosion of everyday items now augmented with networking and computational features. Some of these devices are developed using a Software Product Line (SPL) approach in which each device, or product, is instantiated with unique features while reusing a common core. The need to rapidly develop and deploy these systems in order to meet customer demand and reach niche markets first requires shortened development schedules. However, many of these systems perform roles requiring thorough verification, for example, securing homes. In these systems, the detection and correction of errors early in the development life cycle is essential to the success of such projects, with particular emphasis on the requirements and design phases where approximately 70% of faults are introduced. Tools such as the Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) and its verification utilities aid in the development of an assured design for embedded systems. However, while AADL has excellent support for the specification of SPLs, current verification utilities for AADL do not fully support SPLs, particularly SPL models utilizing composition. We introduce an extended version of AGREE, a verification utility for AADL, with support for compositional verification of SPLs.

Many software ecosystems have achieved success in recent years. Practices adopted by them are responsible for guiding their evolution and keeping the ecosystem health. However, there is not an accepted quality process model, framework or method for evaluating the essential practices that are commonly used in a software ecosystem. This paper proposes an evaluation method for software ecosystem practices and a research plan for developing such a method. We focus on the practices and metrics that can improve various facets of the ecosystem, and contributes to achieving good health for the ecosystem. These practices and metrics are modeled by three views of the ecosystem: community, business and technical. We illustrate an initial representation that summarizes the steps of the method and the identification of key areas that are relevant to the practices.

Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) have emerged over the past two decades as a means to abstract details of large-scale systems in order to enable better intellectual control over the complete systems. Recently, there has been an explosion in the number of ADLs created in the research community. However, industrial adoption of these ADLs has been rather limited. This has been attributed to various reasons, including the lack of support of some ADLs for: variability management, requirements traceability, architectural artefact reusability and multiple architectural views. To overcome these limitations, this paper is a report on ALI, an ADL that was designed to complement existing work by adding mechanisms to address the aforementioned limitations. The ALI design principles, concepts, notations and formal semantics are presented in this paper. The notation is illustrated using two distinct case studies, one from the information systems domain " an Asset Management System (AMS); and another from the embedded systems domain - a Wheel Brake System (WBS).

The software product line engineering strategy enables the achievement of significant improvements in quality through reuse of carefully crafted software assets across multiple products. However, high levels of quality in the software product line assets, which are used to create products, must be accompanied by effective and efficient test strategies for the products in the software product line. The goal of this study is to understand which strategies for testing products in software product lines have been reported in the literature, enabling discussions on the significant issues, and also pointing out further research directions. A systematic literature review was carried out that identified two hundred seventy-three papers, published from the years 1998 and early in 2012. From such a set of papers, a systematic selection resulted in forty-one relevant papers. The analysis of the reported strategies comprised two important aspects: the selection of products for testing, and the actual test of products. The findings showed a range of strategies, dealing with both aspects, but few empirical evaluations of their effectiveness have been performed, which limits the inferences that can be drawn.

OBJECTIVE To compare vocational aspirations and outcomes of participants in the 10-week Leadership Program for Veterinary Students at Cornell University. DESIGN Survey. SAMPLE Veterinary students who participated in the program between 1990 and 2013. PROCEDURES Questionnaires that sought information about the career aspirations of participants at the beginning and end of the program were reviewed, along with records documenting the career progression of participants, audio recordings of interviews conducted with students, and notes of vocation-oriented counseling sessions held during each year's program. RESULTS At the conclusion of the program, 143 of 174 (82%) participants indicated they were more likely than not to undertake research training after completing their veterinary degree, compared with 106 of 174 (61%) at the beginning. Participation also stimulated interest in residency training and industry, but did little to promote interest in careers in government or the military. The percentage of participants who indicated they were more likely than not to pursue additional training in private practice decreased from 97 of 174 (56%) at the beginning of the program to 75 of 174 (43%) at the end. Information on career progression was available for 391 individuals, of whom 177 (45%) were pursuing careers of the kind envisioned by the program. However, 189 (48%) participants had a career in general or specialty clinical practice. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE The Leadership Program appeared to have a short-term influence on careers anticipated by program participants. However, a substantial proportion pursued careers in clinical practice after graduation.

The development of safety-critical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is expanding due to the Internet of Things' promise to make high-integrity applications and services part of everyday life. This expansion is seen in the dependencies some connected vehicles have on cloud services that provide guidance and accident avoidance / detection features. Such systems are safety-critical since failure could result in serious injury or death. Due to the severe consequences of failure, fault-tolerance, reliability and dependability should be primary driving qualities in the design and development of these systems. However, the cost of the analysis, evaluation and certification activities needed to ensure that the possibility of failure has been sufficiently mitigated is significantly higher than the cost of developing traditional software. Our group is exploring the addition of dynamic adaptive capabilities to safety-critical systems. We postulate that dynamic adaptivity could provide several enhancements to safety-critical systems. It would allow systems to reason about the environment within which they are sited and about their internal operation enabling decision making that is context-specific and appropriately prioritized. However, the addition of adaptivity with the associated overhead of reasoning is not without drawbacks particularly when hard real-time safety-critical systems are involved. In this brief position paper, we explore some of the questions and concerns that are raised when dynamic adaptive behavior is introduced into safety-critical systems as well as ways that the Architecture Analysis \& Design Language (AADL) can be used to model / analyze such systems.

ContextIn software development, Testing is an important mechanism both to identify defects and assure that completed products work as specified. This is a common practice in single-system development, and continues to hold in Software Product Lines (SPL). Even though extensive research has been done in the SPL Testing field, it is necessary to assess the current state of research and practice, in order to provide practitioners with evidence that enable fostering its further development.ObjectiveThis paper focuses on Testing in SPL and has the following goals: investigate state-of-the-art testing practices, synthesize available evidence, and identify gaps between required techniques and existing approaches, available in the literature.MethodA systematic mapping study was conducted with a set of nine research questions, in which 120 studies, dated from 1993 to 2009, were evaluated.ResultsAlthough several aspects regarding testing have been covered by single-system development approaches, many cannot be directly applied in the SPL context due to specific issues. In addition, particular aspects regarding SPL are not covered by the existing SPL approaches, and when the aspects are covered, the literature just gives brief overviews. This scenario indicates that additional investigation, empirical and practical, should be performed.ConclusionThe results can help to understand the needs in SPL Testing, by identifying points that still require additional investigation, since important aspects regarding particular points of software product lines have not been addressed yet.

A software product line is a set of software-intensive systems sharing a common, managed set of features that satisfy the specific needs of a particular market segment or mission and that are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way in place. Organizations adopting product development strategies that include a software product line have achieved impressive results, reducing product cycle time and increasing productivity by an order of magnitude. The software product line strategy is a blend of business and technical actions that lets an organization satisfy a wide range of customers, gain leverage with suppliers, meet the threats of substitute products, and deter other companies seeking to enter the market. The strategy is robust over a wide range of technologies, domains, and organizations of different structures, cultures, and goals. Service-oriented architectures, agile development methods, and open source business models have all played roles in successful product line organizations.

A recent preliminary report of a study to determine the patterns of invasion of squamous cell carcinoma to the nonirradiated edentulous mandible indicated that tumor entered mainly through the residual alveolar occlusal ridge. This study has now been extended and includes both nonirradiated and irradiated mandibles. Of a total of 46 nonirradiated mandibles (10 partially dentate and 36 edentulous) invaded by tumor, 41 were invaded through the occlusal surface. This confirms the findings of the preliminary report. These findings indicate that there is a rational basis on pathologic grounds for adopting a conservative approach to the nonirradiated mandible. In 16 irradiated mandibles, the routes of tumor entry were found to be much more variable than in the nonirradiated mandible. In 16 irradiated mandibles, the routes of tumor entry were found to be much more variable than in the nonirradiated mandible, and multiple foci of tumor invasion of the bone were often present wherever tumor in adjacent soft tissues approached the bone. This variability of tumor entry means that a conservative approach to mandibular excision cannot be pursued in the previously irradiated mandible and full-thickness segmental resection is necessary if bone involvement appears likely.

Careers in the pharmaceutical industry were revealed in modules facilitated by senior scientists from companies that sponsor the Cornell Leadership Program for Veterinary Students. One module was structured as a series of interviews for different positions in industry, the other as a competition between hypothetical companies created by students. The interview-based module stimulated wide-ranging discussion of the activities and responsibilities of veterinarians employed in a discovery-intensive pharmaceutical firm and of the characteristics such companies seek in prospective employees, from both professional and personal perspectives. The second module explored the drug discovery and development process from the perspective of animal-health companies that are competitors in the market for animal health care products. The exercise provided insights into the manner in which companies discover new chemical entities, screen candidate drugs, allocate resources, and pursue the development of products through testing, licensing, and distribution.

A two-year-old boy was brought to his paediatrician for noisy respiration and difficulty breathing during sleep. He had a history of loud snoring and difficulty breathing, which had worsened over the past six to eight months. His sleep was described as restless, and the parents indicated they had observed obstructive apneas in which breathing efforts continued but the snoring stopped for a few seconds. Trials of oral antibiotics and nasal steroids had not resolved the problem. The child was born at 29 weeks’ gestation as the second of triplets. He had had bilateral inguinal herniorrhaphies, but no long-term sequelae of preterm birth had become apparent. Physical examination performed during wakefulness revealed a child in no distress but was remarkable for tonsillar hypertrophy and mouth breathing. There was nasal congestion, and breath sounds were equal and clear. The cardiac examination was normal, with weight just above the 5th percentile for corrected age. A lateral neck radiograph documented adenoidal enlargement. A test was performed that confirmed the child’s diagnosis.

The Internet of Things (IoT) integrates a variety of cyber-physical systems; systems that are safety-critical and those that are not. Each of these systems is composed from assets that may have been intended to integrate successfully, but they have not necessarily been verified as doing so before the product is instantiated. Because assets are commonly shared among a family of cyber-physical products, Software Product Line (SPL) methods are crucial for the success of these systems if they are to be built economically without compromise to safety. Verification of the SPL architectures will help to ensure the safety of these systems is not compromised by any of the numerous assets that can be swapped in and out as new products are configured. The contribution of this work is an illustration of how software architectures might be annotated embedding verification information of the architecture supporting a compositional approach to verification.In order for verification of the SPL to be successful, the verification properties of one asset must seamlessly integrate with the verification properties of other assets in the SPL family. We introduce a method using two languages which are annexes of the Architecture Analysis & Description Language (AADL), AGREE and Resolute, that can be used to verify a variety of properties of the system described by the AADL model. Our technique allows for definition of constraints that can be proven as being met when the products are instantiated, however, the languages are not entirely sufficient. Our work shows both working cases and the limitations of verification of the architecture.

Software ecosystems often form around a platform which is defined by a reference architecture. None of the existing architecture evaluation methods evaluate the unique aspects of the architectures that drive a software ecosystem. These architectures emphasize properties, such as Extensibility, Flexibility, and Scalability, that should be considered during an architecture evaluation. An evaluation method must also allow stakeholders, who are spread around the world, to participate in the evaluation. To address these issues, this paper proposes a method, Architectural Analysis Method for Evolving Ecosystems (AAMEE), to evaluate the architecture that is the basis for a software ecosystem. AAMEE, a variant of ATAM, analyzes architectural scenarios covering both the platform and product architectures in the ecosystem. The method has been piloted through its application to the architecture of the Noosfero ecosystem. We report some lessons learned.

Mapping the technical and business activities and steps required for successful organizational adoption.

The transportation ecosystem is currently in a transition phase from non-electrified to electrified, from isolated to connected, and from non-automated to automated. During this transition new disruptive technologies replace existing ones but quickly become obsolete themselves. Safety and efficiency become even more important as the driver has less input into driving decisions and more difficult to achieve since many of these decisions rely on software technologies which are not as familiar to automotive engineers as the usual mechanical solutions. In the rush to deploy solutions with the latest technology the quality of the software can suffer. The objective of this work is to suggest changes needed in current automotive software engineering to meet the levels of quality demanded by autonomous, connected vehicles. One of the biggest changes is that vehicle and infrastructure technology needs to be developed in context. Strategic decisions concerning which technologies to integrate and the development processes to use require an understanding of the emerging markets. The development method outlined here provides an organization with guidance on using ecosystem roadmaps and a high integrity software development process to accommodate emerging technologies and ever shorter product cycles. In part this is accomplished by fitting those technologies into validated architectures and using techniques that detect defects early. The result is an environment in which safety-critical products are developed more effectively and efficiently.

The rapid progress of medical technology has resulted in more opportunities to maintain the life of infants in serious and potentially life threatening situations. Whether to treat such infants is a common dilemma. The burden of these difficult decisions rests almost equally on distraught parents and relatives and on the professional staff of neonatal units. Sometimes, either parents or care teams choose to seek a decision from the courts. Ways of reaching the best possible and most inclusive consensus decisions are examined in this review.

In traditional software engineering project management, managers provide focused guidance to a team responsible for producing a specific result in a specified amount of time. Today, however, organizations are increasingly taking a product line approach to software to exploit product commonalities. Software product line organizations have unique practices and project definitions. These unconventional features offer new challenges and directions for traditional project management. How does the traditional concept of a project - a temporary endeavor aimed at creating a unique product or service - hold up under this new paradigm? In this article, we discuss this question, along with how the idea of a "project" and project management techniques must expand to fit a product line context. In particular, we show how the "overall guidelines, policies, and procedures" that Thayer and Pyster spoke of some years ago remain crucially important in product line organizations today.

Adenotonsillectomy (T&A) has established effectiveness for the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). However, more than 20% of children with OSA have respiratory compromise requiring medical intervention in the postoperative period. The reasons for this complication are not well-defined. We aimed to compare the nature and severity of sleep-disordered breathing in children with mild and severe OSA on the first night following adenotonsillectomy. Ten children were classified into groups of mild and severe OSA, based on preoperative testing. On the first night after T&A, they underwent polysomnography, including electroencephalograph, submental electromyography, bilateral electro-oculograms, monitoring of respiratory movements, heart rate, ECG, and oxygen saturation. Sleep-disordered breathing was assessed by the apnea-hypopnea index, the SaO 2 nadir, and the desaturation index, including dips in saturation below 90% (DI 9 0 ). Sleep quality was assessed by sleep efficiency, time spent in each sleep state, and respiratory arousal index. Obstructive events occurred postoperatively in all children, but were more frequent in those with severe OSA preoperatively: the median (interquartile range) mixed/obstructive apnea/hypopnea indicies were 6.9 (2.2-9.8) events/hr and 21.5 (15.1 -112.1) events/hr for the mild OSA group and the severe OSA group, respectively (P=0.009). Obstructive events were the major cause of desaturation during sleep postoperatively. Sleep quality was severely disrupted in both groups, with reductions in both slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. In conclusion, despite removal of obstructing lymphoid tissue, upper airway obstruction occurred on the first postoperative night in children with OSA. This study is the first to demonstrate the mechanism of respiratory compromise after adenotonsillectomy, a common postoperative complication in children with severe OSA.

Product line engineering has become an important and widely used approach for efficiently developing portfolios of software products. The idea is to develop a set of products as a single, coherent development task from a core asset base (sometimes called a platform), a collection of artifacts specifically designed for use across a portfolio. This approach produces order-of-magnitude economic improvements compared to one-at-a-time software system development. Because the product line approach isn't limited to specific technical properties of the planned software but rather focuses on economic characteristics, high return on investment has become the anthem of the approach's protagonists. Our software product line cost model can calculate the costs and benefits (and hence the ROI) that we can expect to accrue from various product line development situations. It's also straightforward and intuitive.

This panel will address issues surrounding software ecosystems. We have chosen individuals who will present a differing set of views on the topic.

A software product line (SPL) is a set of products that is produced by an organization or organizations using shared assets. My position in the context of this workshop is that students cannot fully grasp the concepts of SPL until they see the interplay between the technical aspects of product design and implementation with the business aspects of planning a set of products as a unit instead of a single product at a time. We developed the Arcade Game Maker Pedagogical Product Line (PPL) as support for software product line education. The PPL has been used by several organizations and in various instructional and research contexts. I will relate several experiences in the construction and use of the PPL. The PPL has served its purpose well and continues to be used.

The objective of this research is to identify issues that arise when software systems from different ecosystems are composed into a system of systems. Whether it is an explicit, managed ecosystem or the implicit ecosystem of collaborators, competitors, and users that surrounds any organization, the community of organizations has momentum in a particular direction. When a system of systems is composed using systems from each of several ecosystems the differences in communities can prevent satisfactory integration. We examine the case of a portion of the infrastructure needed to support automated driving. We use Maier's criteria that identify challenges for systems of systems as starting points for investigations into differences among ecosystems. We found points of commonality that tie together the ecosystems include use of common standards, membership by large organizations in multiple ecosystems, and influences of the outside business environment. We also found points of variation including whether the systems have compatible real-time expectations, terms of licenses, frequency of new releases, and architectural assumptions. Developers of a system of systems benefit from being aware of the similarities and differences among the ecosystems from which their systems originate because both the similarities and differences help developers anticipate the evolutionary trajectories of the individual systems.

In the past 70 years, science research methods have expanded from test tubes and beakers to include simulations in software. Scientific software is produced in a larger environment of collaboration that includes not only software developers, but also scientists who both use and extend the software for their research endeavors. The objective of this research is to understand the factors that promote and inhibit ecosystem formation and sustainment specific to scientific research software development. We have identified a set of relevant problems inhibiting sustainability in the scientific software context, including development, evolution and maintenance, as well as funding and leadership. We have collected data and used existing business, software, and innovation analysis techniques to examine the artifacts from several scientific research projects. We interviewed significant actors in select scientific ecosystems. We describe the differences between scientific software ecosystems and commercial software ecosystems, our initial results from interviews and data analysis, and we provide a set of recommendations and approaches towards handling software sustainability. Data suggests an ecosystem strategy can contribute to the survivability and sustainability of research software; however, such a strategy, which may distract from sustainability, requires thought and effort be given to establishing and nurturing the ecosystem, which in turn distract from the research mission. At this stage these initial results point us to future potentially fruitful investigations.

Quality attributes are important to creating, understanding, and evaluating software architectures. The architectural attributes and challenges for ecosystem architectures are different from one-off systems. The study of those aspects that influence quality attributes in this new environment can help to understand these architectures. In previous work, we hypothesized that the architecture for an ecosystem should be extensible, scalable, and flexible and reported initial investigations into extensibility and scalability. In this paper, we report on our investigation into flexibility. We analyze various features that impact how to design flexible architectures. We highlight that flexibility for ecosystems is not only a technical issue, but a business issue as well. We classified features that affect flexibility into business and technical dimensions. We adapted a software system metric for flexibility to measure the flexibility of an ecosystem's architecture.

Socio-technical ecosystems represent a complex and dynamic system of development distributed over individuals and organizations that act as collaborators, competitors, suppliers and users that mimic the predator-prey relationships in a natural ecosystem. Understanding the health of an ecosystem provides strategic information on the state and trajectory of that ecosystem. This paper instantiates and evaluates one proposed conceptual ecosystem health framework in the context of a research consortium managing the production of network analysis tools. We populated the conceptual ecosystem health framework with specific measures and applied that instantiation of the framework to the network analysis ecosystem surrounding the Cytoscape Consortium. We identified issues in both the ecosystem health framework and the Cytoscape Consortium that will drive our investigation and collection of data in the future. Current means of assessing ecosystem participants lack sophistication necessary to accurately quantify and reason about the impacts of orchestration and strategic planning in ecosystem health analysis, in addition to understanding the impacts of different types of actors participating in ecosystems.

To estimate the short-term variability and correlates of variability in pure-tone thresholds obtained using audiometric equipment designed for occupational use, and to examine the justification for excluding 8 kHz as a mandatory threshold in occupational hearing conservation programs.Pure-tone thresholds and other hearing-related tests (e.g. noise dosimetry, otoscopy, middle-ear assessment) were conducted with a group of 527 adults between 20 and 69 years of age. Five measurement visits were completed by participants within 14 days.The 50% critical difference boundaries were - 5 and 0 dB at 4 kHz and below and - 5 and 5 dB at 6 and 8 kHz. The likelihood of spurious notches due to test-retest variability was substantially lower than the likelihood of failing to detect a notched configuration when present. Correlates of variability included stimulus frequency, baseline threshold, acoustic reflectance of the ear, average noise exposure during the previous eight hours, age, and the tester's level of education in audiology.The short-term variability in 8-kHz pure-tone thresholds obtained with the TDH-39P earphone was slightly greater than at other frequencies, but this difference was not large enough to justify the disadvantages stemming from the inability to detect a 6-kHz notch.

This material is based on work funded and supported by Department of Homeland Security and is also available at FirstResponder.gov in the Technology Documents Library. This report presents four best practices for the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) program. These best practices were identified through interviews with emergency management agencies across the United States. The WEA "Go Live" Checklist identifies key steps that an emergency management agency should perform when implementing WEA in a local jurisdiction and provides guidance for completing each action. The WEA Training and Drilling Guide identifies the steps for preparing staff to use WEA and includes suggestions shared by alerting authorities that have implemented WEA. The WEA Governance Guide identifies steps for using or preparing to use WEA to ensure coordination between participating alerting agencies. The WEA Cybersecurity Risk Management (CSRM) Strategy describes a strategy that alert originators can use throughout WEA adoption, operations, and sustainment, as well as a set of governance activities for developing a plan to execute the CSRM. Because best practices will evolve as WEA matures and becomes more widely used, an appendix provides information on how a best practice–driven organization can search for best practices, adapt them to the local context, and adopt them for everyday use.

On a global level, “the tailpipe” accounts for 25% of CO2 emissions and it is well documented that small island states bear the brunt of climate change, especially rising sea level threats, increased storm activity and beach and land erosion. This paper considers the perception and cost benefits of electric vehicles on the road - can electric vehicles boost a heavily reliant tourist economy and assist in reducing Barbados' foreign exchange burden? The paper also explores the utility perspective - and asks an important question, can electric vehicles and solar energy contribute to supporting the grid in small island states? As the utility on the island seeks to reduce its dependence on imported oil by increasing the penetration of renewable energy Barbados is now presented with the opportunity to carry out a holistic view of its energy landscape and shape opportunities to integrate both centralised and distributed clean power generation alongside consumer demand-side drivers.

Product architecture derivation is a crucial activity in Software Product Line (SPL) development since any inadequate decisions made during the architecture design directly impact on the non-functional properties of the product under development. Although some methods for architecture derivation have been proposed in the last few years, there is still a need for approaches that model the impact among architectural design decisions and quality attributes and use this information to drive the derivation of high-quality product architectures. This paper, presents a set of guidelines for the definition of pattern-based quality-driven architectural transformations in a Model-Driven SPL development environment. These guidelines rely both on a multimodel that represents the product line from multiple viewpoints as well as on a derivation process that makes use of this multimodel to derive a product architecture that meets the quality requirements. The feasibility of the approach is illustrated using a case study on the automotive domain.

The effects of clenbuterol in preserving the form and function of muscle after unilateral sciatic nerve division and epineural repair were investigated in a rat model. The drug (a β2-adrenoceptor agonist) was administered daily for six weeks by gastric gavage (10 μg/kg body weight), interrupted every 5 days by a 2 day omission of dosing to avoid drug desensitization. Clenbuterol reduced the loss of wet weight, total protein, muscle fibre cross sectional area and (in part) contractile forces in denervated hindlimb muscles, with most effects lasting until reinnervation. The effects were dependent on muscle type, with slow-twitch oxidative muscle (soleus) and mixed-fibre (gastrocnemius) showing greater sensitivity to the drug than fast-twitch muscle (extensor digitorum longus). Anabolic effects on the contralateral innervated muscles tended to be small. The results suggest a potential for the adjuvant use of selective β-adrenoceptor agonists in the management of peripheral nerve injuries in humans.

There are many applications in use today, that are driven by a command line interface, rather than a graphical interface. Most of these applications are robust, popular and proven in general usage. The convenience and ease of use that a graphical interface provides might make these applications available to a wider range of users. Previous approaches for integrating a graphical interface into command driven software have focused on using a pipe variation to negotiate communication between two processes. The advantage of using a pipe is that communication can be established without knowledge of the source code for the command driven application; the disadvantages are that, the linkage can be slow and for some large applications, the system may stall. In this work, we describe a technique that exploits ostreams and subtyping to integrate a graphical interface into a command driven application. The technique we propose does not create a new process to construct the communication linkage nor does it require a sentinel to terminate the linkage. We use this technique to integrate a graphical interface into legacy code and a grader program that maintains a list of student grades. The grader program is coded in C++, exploits the Command and Envelope-Letter patterns, and uses the standard library containers, algorithms, and iterators to implement much of its functionality.

The authors' development process integrates portions of an iterative, incremental process model with a quality assurance process that assesses each process phase's quality and a measurement process that collects data to guide process improvement. The process's goal is to produce the high quality and timely results required for today's market without imposing a large overhead on a small project.

We present results from an inviscid unsteady one-dimensional model of the discharge, from a cylindrical container into vacuum, of initially homogeneous, high-pressure, high-temperature ideal gas. In this study (Part I), the discharge is begun, by displacement of a diaphragm at one end of a cylindrical chamber, only after the burn of the contents is complete; in a companion study (Part II)-published separately, the venting is initiated during flame propagation across the reactive-gas mixture. Of particular interest are the integrals over time of the momentum and the mass discharged from the container exit, and the ratio of the momentum-discharge integral to the mass-discharge integral-this ratio is essentially the specific impulse. We address first the case of simple, nozzleless blowdown, in which the cross-sectional area of the container exit, A', is equal to the cross-sectional area (V/L) of the plenum of the cylindrical container; we consider the complete time evolution for the case of a massless diaphr...