This paper summarizes the current state of the art and recent trends in software engineering economics. It provides an overview of economic analysis techniques and their applicability to software engineering and management. It surveys the field of software cost estimation, including the major estimation techniques available, the state of the art in algorithmic cost models, and the outstanding research issues in software cost estimation.

Software engineering economics

Despite the increased number of publications in the area during the last two decades, there is no unified notation and systematic framework for chemical production scheduling. In this article, we first develop a framework for the description of scheduling problems in the chemical industries. While building upon ideas used in discrete manufacturing, the proposed framework accounts for features such as material handling restrictions which are critical in chemical production scheduling. Second, we present a classification of the various modeling approaches that have been presented in the process systems engineering literature. Our classification is broader than previous schemes because it accounts for more attributes, and it also offers a broader discussion of the modeling of time. We believe that our analysis will enhance the understanding of chemical production scheduling and lead to further advances in the area. © 2012 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 58: 1812–1828, 2012

General framework and modeling approach classification for chemical production scheduling

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) is emerging as an advanced service-oriented manufacturing model for the manufacturing industry. It is changing the way manufacturing enterprises organize production activities in that tangible and intangible manufacturing resources encapsulated as virtualized manufacturing services are provided to customers. In this background, CMfg task semantic modeling and description is proposed to address different challenges such as matching with manufacturing services. Firstly, some of the essential features of CMfg tasks are briefly discussed and classification as well as the modeling requirements of CMfg tasks is also investigated, and then this paper proposes the modeling framework of CMfg task to solve the general CMfg task ontology (GCMT_Ontology) construction and the task sub-ontology matching from GCMT_Ontology. In GCMT_Ontology construction process, the original CMfg task ontology (OCMT_Ontology) is built from the CMfg task description model, and then an ontology learning approach is advanced to perfect the GCMT_Ontology with graph-based semantic similarity algorithm. In task sub-ontology matching process, semantic feature values of concepts are calculated to extend the semantic content of the task document, and the extended concepts are input to find the sub-ontology by computing minimum connected sub-graph. Finally, the proposed framework is realized in a prototype system, and an example of cement grinding mill assembling task is carried out in a group enterprise to illustrate the application. The results show that the proposed method improves enterprise collaboration and interoperation effectively.

Manfred Theiíen

Papers

An ontology based approach for operational process modeling