Eric Domeshek

Web-Based Design Coordination

This paper reports on a web-based groupware tool intended to support large distributed teams of engineers in modern engineering design practice. The Advanced Design Coordination Tool (ADCT) presents itself to members of a design team as a shared on-line set of engineers’ notebooks with flexible editing, filing, viewing, browsing, and searching capabilities. Additionally, its use of product, process, and decision representations referencing an explicit domain ontology, and tied together by dependency links, introduces artificial intelligence technology that enables capabilities beyond simple unstructured design history capture. The resulting repository can capture a rich and structured design rationale, which, with the system’s state management and versioning capability, enables recording active as well as rejected alternatives. The system currently exploits the captured data to improve team coordination: it applies dependency processing algorithms to automatically generate notifications to appropriate team members, based on changes to design notes or the detection of design conflicts. Over time, the accumulation of structured design histories with rationales should provide the basis for a knowledge repository that can proactively offer advice on new design challenges. This paper first sketches the context that makes this tool desirable, and then describes the system’s design and key capabilities. We finish with a discussion of limitations and future enhancements.Copyright

ITADS: A Real-World Intelligent Tutor to Train Troubleshooting Skills

Real-world intelligent tutoring systems are important ambassadors for promoting wide adoption of the technology. Questions about affordability, quality control, operational readiness, training effectiveness, and user acceptance are significant in this context. This paper describes ITADS, an intelligent tutor developed to provide a problem-based, experiential learning tool to complement schoolhouse training. The goal was to train US Navy Information Systems Technology support staff in troubleshooting skills through the use of realistic simulations and automated assessment and feedback. This paper describes the tutoring system and a preliminary validation study of its training effectiveness. The results demonstrate that the system is effective in improving troubleshooting knowledge and skills. The ITADS system was successfully developed in twenty-six months from requirements to validation, following strict systems engineering procedures. The results of the training effectiveness study indicate that the ITS also leads to significantly improved performance among Navy IT recruits in troubleshooting tasks.

OODLE: a prototype Object-Oriented Design Learning Environment

Stottler Henke Associates Inc.s Object-Oriented Design Learning Environment (OODLE) is an early prototype intelligent tutoring system aimed at teaching object-oriented design skills by coached practice with realistically complex design problems. OODLEs pedagogical approach is based on the instructional practices of Craig Larman, author of Applying UML and Patterns.