New Patterns of Management.

To engineer the modern large, complex, interdisciplinary systems-of-systems (SoS), the collaborative world teams must “speak” the same language and must work on the same “matter.” The “matter” is the system model and the communication mechanisms must be supported by standard, flexible, and friendly modeling languages. The evolving model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approach is leading the way and is expected to become a standard practice in the field of systems engineering (SE) in the next decade. As an emerging paradigm for the systems of the 21st century, it seems useful to overview its current state of the art concerning the developing standards, the embryonic formalisms, the available modeling languages, the methodologies, and the major applications.

Model-Based Systems Engineering: An Emerging Approach for Modern Systems

UML has been described by some as “the lingua franca of software engineering”. Evidence from industry does not necessarily support such endorsements. How exactly is UML being used in industry - if it is? This paper presents a corpus of interviews with 50 professional software engineers in 50 companies and identifies 5 patterns of UML use.

https://homepages.dcc.ufmg.br/~figueiredo/disciplinas/papers/icse13petre.pdf

UML in practice

People often form and retrieve memories in the company of others. Yet, nearly 125 years of cognitive research on learning and memory has mainly focused on individuals working in isolation. Although important topics such as eyewitness memory and autobiographical memory have evaluated social influences, a study of group memory has progressed mainly within the provinces of history, anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. In this context, the recent surge in research on the cognitive basis of collaborative memory marks an important conceptual departure. As a first aim, we review these empirical and theoretical advances on the nature and influence of collaborative memory. Effects of collaboration are counterintuitive because individuals remember less when recalling in groups. Collaboration can also lead to forgetting and increase memory errors. Conversely, collaboration can also improve memory under proper conditions. As a second aim, we propose an overarching theoretical framework that specifies the cognitive mechanisms associated with the costs and benefits of collaboration on memory. A study of the reciprocal influences of the group and the individual on memory processes naturally draws upon several disciplines. Our aim is to elucidate the cognitive components of this complex phenomenon and situate this analysis within a broader interdisciplinary perspective.

Collaborative Memory: Cognitive Research and Theory.

The literature on transactive memory (TM) continues to grow in several interrelated scholarly fields. Although this increased interest in TM systems has been beneficial, it has also led to a plural...

Transactive Memory Systems

Over the past three decades, the forces of globalisation – economic, political and cultural – have significantly affected institutions and people across the world: altering in some ways the very terrain of public and private life. Public education has in no small way been challenged by new realities and new demands in an increasingly interdependent yet competitive world environment. School principals are uniquely positioned as formal leaders of diverse and complex educational systems to mediate the often times opposing forces of globalisation and localism with their communities. This article examines school leaders’ understanding of their work and their work role priorities, especially with regard to teaching and learning, within a policy environment characterised by increasingly convergent policy and leadership discourse. Two major questions are addressed, theoretically and empirically: in what ways do school principals in Sweden, which has strong democratic traditions, address the tension between localism and national interests and the press for conformity to new global imperatives and demands; and to what degree, if any, has globalisation created a new hegemony in school leadership? It is concluded that school principals in Sweden respond to questions about their schools without any reference to new global imperatives and demands. Their attention was generally related to national demands. Also, we see no clear evidence that globalisation has created a new hegemony in school leadership in Sweden.

Successful principalship: the Swedish case

A naturalistic study investigated how memory tasks affected group productivity for two individuals working in three kinds of group constellations: old married couples, old non-friend pairs, and nominal groups of two individuals working on their own. The retrospective memory task was to recall episodic information given on a visit to a university campus. The prospective memory task was to remind the participants of actions to be performed during the visit. The prospective memory tasks were event-based or time-based. The delay or retention interval was also manipulated. In addition, an interview on how the elderly handled remembering during daily life was included. The results suggest that: (1) dyads suffered from collaboration relative to the predicted potential, replicating earlier research; old married couples did not reduce the same productivity loss as clearly as friends did in former studies; the couples who claimed that they used a transactive memory system, however, achieved the same productivity as the nominal pairs (i.e. the predicted potential; (2) the task effects produced unexpected results, some of which could be accounted for by the naturalistic setting used. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Do elderly couples have a better prospective memory than other elderly people when they collaborate

A Unified Modeling Language-Systems Modeling Language (UML-SysML) subset was the modeling notation selected for an aerospace systems engineering project at Saab Aerosystems. In this paper, the rationale for selecting UML-SysML is given, along with a description of the situation at the project planning stage regarding business conditions, method and tools support. The usage of use case, sequence, and activity diagrams are described as well as definition of functional chains with SysML. Furthermore, the connections to system implementation activities including code generation and simulation are discussed. The advantages and disadvantages of using UML-SysML from experience in an industrial context are reported. It is also described how UML-SysML is related to industrial research projects in the Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods and tools area. Introducing UML-SysML with a methodology and a supporting toolset in an operative organization require a clear strategy, including planning, just-in-time training, and mentor support. Finally, industrial needs for further development of SysML are discussed. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Experience from introducing Unified Modeling Language-Systems Modeling Language at Saab Aerosystems

Successful principalship - The Swedish Case

This paper presents a formalized approach to specify and implement design matrix support for systems engineering applications that structure large and complex product models. Design matrixes can clearly visualize the relationships between large amounts of hierarchically structured engineering objects and higher level systems engineering design objects like requirements and functions in the product model. Examples of structures that can be lied out along the X and Y axis of a design matrix are stakeholder trees, requirement trees, function-means trees, product concept trees, and implementation trees. The cells of the design matrix visualize how corresponding objects at the axes relate to each other. One benefit with configurable design matrixes is that the information content and layout of a design matrix can be specified by a user, and all software implementation effort is handled automatically by a generic software framework that is included in the engineering application. The paper provides an overview of the theory behind a formal specification language for configurable design matrixes. It gives examples of design matrix specifications and screen shoots of instances of these design matrixes generated by a prototype engineering application called FMDesign. The examples of different types of design matrixes are taken from a aircraft product model of a small business jet. A formal software specification of the design matrix specification language and the example engineering application is provided in UML class diagrams.Copyright © 2006 by ASME

Olof Johansson

Papers

Successful principalship: the Swedish case

Do elderly couples have a better prospective memory than other elderly people when they collaborate

Experience from introducing Unified Modeling Language-Systems Modeling Language at Saab Aerosystems

Successful principalship - The Swedish Case

Configurable Design Matrixes for Systems Engineering Applications