Uldis Sukovskis

Quality of study programs: an ecosystems perspective

The quality of study programs is one of the issues that are essential in the turbulent global environment universities nowadays operate in. Quality may be considered in terms of different quality standards trying to follow their guidelines formally and practically. This paper takes a different view of the quality issue with respect to the study programs in the field of engineering, namely, the quality of the study program is considered from the ecosystem perspective and value exchange between different members of the ecosystem is taken as a central object of interest in defining and supporting the high quality of the program. While analysis of value exchange and detection of changes in the value provision and request are not a natural part of the university teaching process, appropriate models and support systems can help to understand the value exchange process in the educational ecosystem. The understanding of the value exchange process, in turn, helps to identify and monitor knowledge requirements for developing high quality study programs.

A Meta-Model Based Approach to UML Modelling

This paper is devoted to a meta-model based approach to UML systems modelling. The approach allows creating a system model by operating with artefacts from the problem domain, followed by generation of a UML model. The discussed approach is illustrated by generating UML models, using Use Case and Activity diagrams of the UML language.

Developing a mutually-recognized cross-domain study program in cyber-physical systems

The primary scientific targets of the European COST Action Multi-Paradigm Modelling for Cyber-Physical Systems (MPM4CPS) are: i) the conceptualization of techniques and tools for improving interoperability; ii) the development of new ontologies and formalisms (and the links between them) to deal with the heterogeneity; and, iii) to perform the integration of the problems resulting from several application domains, under a common MPM4CPS umbrella. The action also aims at crystallizing MPM4CPS contents into a suitable format for educational purposes. This entails to create the base for a European Master and PhD program in MPM4CPS involving several European leading Universities and setting up the respective discipline roadmap facing the challenge of development mutually recognized cross-domain expertise based study program in CPS. This paper offers a methodology for the creation of CPS expert profile for educational purposes, provides an analysis of results of an initial survey of experts in the field and sets up a discussion about the next steps of the research. The paper depicts the work in a progress.

Verification of BPMN Model Functional Completeness by using the Topological Functioning Model

BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) models are used to specify business knowledge in the language that is familiar for business people. They consist of multiple process diagrams that highlight different aspects of interaction among participants. Verification of BPMN models is important since graphical fragmentary presentation could be a source of errors such as incompleteness, deadlocks, livelocks, incorrect terminations etc. We consider verification of model completeness. The model is transformed to the topological functioning model (TFM) in order to check completeness of inputs, outputs and functioning cycles of the entire specified system. The proposed approach is dedicated to the verification of the model at the beginning of analysis, and it could be supplemented by other methods at the design stage. This approach is more dedicated to analysis of the whole system, than to the verification of the concrete fragment work.

Application of the two-hemisphere model supported by BrainTool: Football game simulation

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is an industrial standard for object-oriented software specification, which offers notational conventions for system modeling at the initial stage of software development. An actual problem is to develop a tool available for automatic generation of UML diagram from some form of the problem domain description. Authors have been introduced such a tool, called BrainTool and developed by a research group in Riga Technical University. BrainTool supports transformation of the problem domain presented as two-hemisphere model into several kinds of UML diagrams and give an ability to export these diagrams for further software development into UML compatible modeling tools and IDEs. Present paper demonstrates the comparison results of the manual UML class diagram creation for an abstract example of the football game simulation to the UML class diagram received by application of BrainTool for the same game basic scenario. These comparison results give a basis for discussion about ...