Kathleen M. Swigger

GATES: an airline gate assignment and tracking expert system

A description is given of GATES, an expert system that assigns gates to arriving and departing flights at New Yorks John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK). GATES uses flight information and knowledge about current constraints to produce possible gate assignment schedules. GATES is a constraint-satisfaction expert system. To make its decisions, it uses two types of production rule: permissive rules and conflict rules. Permissive rules determine when its appropriate to consider a particular gate for a particular flight, and permit the system to search the next level of rules to obtain an assignment. Conflict rules determine when particular flights cannot be assigned to particular gates. System operators can modify schedules by retracting rules, adjusting tolerances, and deleting information. The system was developed for a PC, thereby providing an efficient and flexible user environment. The approach is extensible to various engineering and industrial problems where limited resources and weakly defined constraints exist and in which scheduling must occur.<<ETX>>

Online collaboration: Collaborative behavior patterns and factors affecting globally distributed team performance

Studying the collaborative behavior of online learning teams and how this behavior is related to communication mode and task type is a complex process. Research about small group learning suggests that a higher percentage of social interactions occur in synchronous rather than asynchronous mode, and that students spend more time in task-oriented interaction in asynchronous discussions than in synchronous mode. This study analyzed the collaborative interaction patterns of global software development learning teams composed of students from Turkey, US, and Panama. Data collected from students chat histories and forum discussions from three global software development projects were collected and compared. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis methods were used to determine the differences between a groups communication patterns in asynchronous versus synchronous communication mode. K-means clustering with the Ward method was used to investigate the patterns of behaviors in distributed teams. The results show that communication patterns are related to communication mode, the nature of the task, and the experience level of the leader. The paper also includes recommendations for building effective online collaborative teams and describes future research possibilities.

Effects of culture on computer-supported international collaborations

This paper discusses results of a case study from an on-going project to investigate how cultural factors, as identified by the Cultural Perspectives Questionnaire (CPQ), affect the performance of distributed collaborative learning teams. The results indicate that a teams cultural composition is a sign1ificant predictor of its performance on programming projects. Cultural attributes most strongly correlated to group performance included those related to attitudes about organizational hierarchy, organizational harmony, trade-offs between future and current needs, and beliefs about how much influence individuals have on their fate. Moreover, the type of programming task affected the strength of the relationship between individual cultural attributes and performance. Participants in the study included computer science students from the University of North Texas (Texas, USA) and students from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Students were divided into culturally diverse work-teams and assigned programming projects to be completed using special collaborative software. The programming tasks ranged from simple design projects to more complicated programs that required extensive collaboration. Cultural distinctions between work-teams were based upon the students responses to the CPQ. Project performance was evaluated with respect to programming accuracy, efficiency, completeness, and style. The results presented here have important implications for the formation of distributed collaborations and, in particular, to educational institutions offering distance-learning programs that require team projects.

Design of Sensor-Embedded Radio Frequency Identification (SE-RFID) Systems

Sensor-embedded radio frequency identification (SE-RFID) is introduced to enhance the sensing functions of the current RFID systems. Two innovative architectures for SE-RFID systems are proposed and analyzed; the preliminary simulation of the proposed SE-RFID systems based on EDA software has been conducted successfully. An effort to design, simulate and develop a real-time health monitoring system (HEMS) based on SE-RFID is now under way

Structural factors that affect global software development learning team performance

A team performance model provided an organizing framework for studying multi-cultural distributed learning teams. Structural equation modeling was used to test for relationships among individual, cultural and attitudes about collaborative work factors and team performance. The paper describes this model and its theoretical basis and reports on results from two pilot projects involving 152 students from the US, Panama, UK, and Turkey. While the model shows satisfactory fit, the results suggest that other factors may also influence how well students work together on global software projects. Future research, followed by model development, should incorporate these factors to capture the complexity of the educational and training environments.

The temporal communication behaviors of global software development student teams

This paper examines the global software development process by using content analysis techniques, as described in an earlier study (Serce et al., 2011), to determine time-variant patterns of communication behaviors among student teams engaged in a global software development project. Data gathered from two software development projects involving students in the US, Panama, and Turkey were used to determine how globally distributed team behavior is temporally patterned in complex ways. A formal, quantitative methodology for time variant analysis of the transcripts of global software student teams based on content analysis is established. Results from the analysis suggest a positive correlation between a teams temporal communication patterns and project outcomes as well as a relationship between variations in communication behaviors and different phases of the software development cycle. The research also found that the temporal variations in communication behaviors between software phases were similar for the two projects. Such findings are intended to strengthen the case for developing new temporal measures for analyzing groups and teams.

Exploring Collaboration Patterns among Global Software Development Teams

This study examines communication behaviors in global software student teams. The authors of the paper characterize the types of communication behaviors that occur when student teams are engaged in a software development project. The authors present findings from a one-semester study that examined factors contributing to successful distributed programming interactions among students enrolled at the University of Atilim (Turkey), Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá, University of North Texas, and Middlesex University (UK). Using content and cluster analyses techniques, we identified distinct patterns of collaboration and examined how these patterns were associated with task, culture, GPA, and performance of collaborative teams. Our results suggest that communication patterns among global software learners may be related to task type, culture and GPA. It is hoped that these findings will lead to the development of new strategies for improving communication among global software teams.

A Comparison of Team Performance Measures for Global Software Development Student Teams

One of the most difficult tasks for global software development researchers is quantifying the performance of groups and students who participate in these distributed projects. There has been much debate about which factors better correlate with team performance and which best describe a successful team. The purpose of this paper is to compare the different approaches that have been used to evaluate the performance of global software learners and show how these techniques can affect research results. Using data from student groups engaged in global software development projects for the past year, the authors apply a number of different assessment methods and show their effects on different performance indicators. Our study suggests that the selection of appropriate measures to evaluate team performance can dramatically affect how one identifies successful teams.

Global teams: futuristic models of collaborative work for today's software development industry.

This paper emphasises the importance of global teams in the field of software development. The paper presents an approach for setting up pilot studies simulating those key features that make global software development teams particularly attractive to exploit and challenging to manage. The underlying research is supported by a research project funded by the US National Science Foundation with the participation of universities from US, Turkey, Panama and the UK. The paper provides detailed guidelines for setting up simulations resembling globally dispersed software development teams and discusses preliminary data of two pilot studies with involving collaboration between teams residing in the US and the UK. Key concerns of this research are those factors affecting collaborative work when global teams are involved. Such factors include differences caused by distance, culture, time zones and technology.

Teaching Students How to Work in Global Software Development Environments

Given that outsourcing has become a fact of life, it is becoming increasingly obvious that we need to ensure that computer science students are taught the necessary skills to cope with global software development. Unfortunately, the enormous amount of time that it takes to coordinate and support such activities can deter even the most devoted educator. This paper describes a course that used a computer supported collaborative tool help teach distributed teams from Turkey and the US how to work together to solve programming problems. The system contains both collaborative tools that support groups, as well as course management software for helping instructors with administrative tasks. Examples of the usage of the system and data collected from the undergraduate computer science course that used the software are presented. Based on that experience, future plans to refine the system for early detection of problem teams, and the advantages of implementing the software as a Web service are also discussed. This information is designed to provide support for effective multi-institutional learning courses