Handling inconsistency is an increasingly important issue in data and knowledge engineering. A number of logic-based proposals have been made for handling aspects of inconsistency in beliefs (where we use beliefs as a general term to encompass representations of the real world) including belief revision theory, truth-maintenance, argumentation systems, and knowledgebase merging. In contrast, th...

Skyline operation is typical multicriteria decision making well documented in data engineering. The assumption of skyline operation is settled human preference, which may be subject to huge challenges in practical decision-making applications because it simplifies preference scenarios that are usually dynamic. This study establishes the mathematical formulation of dynamic preference in real set...

Measuring source code maintainability has always been a challenge for software engineers. To address this problem, a number of metrics-based quality models have been proposed by researchers. Besides expressing source code maintainability in terms of numerical values, these models are also expected to provide explicable results, i.e. to give a detailed list of source code fragments that should b...

This paper presents a view of software engineering as it is in 1979. It discusses current software engineering practice with respect to lessons learned in the past few years, and concludes that the lessons are currently not heeded roughly half of the time. The paper discusses some of the factors which may account for this lag, including rapid technological change, education shortfalls, technolo...

This paper presents a knowledge-based approach to evolving and re-engineering large legacy systems. It describes an AI application to one special area in software maintenance-upgmdiig existing software to new technology standards. This approach assists tie human engineers in the conversion of software systems by automating the tedious and knowledgeintensive conversion process. The research show...

We present an assessment of an empirical study aiming at building effort estimation models for corrective maintenance projects. We show results from the application of the prediction models to a new corrective maintenance project within the same enterprise and the same type of software systems used in a previous study. The data available for the new project are finer grained according to the in...

The rapid advancement of information and communication technologies has resulted in a variety of maintenance support systems and tools covering all sub-domains of maintenance. Most of these systems are based on different models that are sometimes redundant or incoherent and always heterogeneous. This problem has lead to the development of maintenance platforms integrating all of these support s...

Requirements continue to be a major source of problems during development and maintenance of software-intensive systems. Requirements engineering researchers, educators, and practitioners seek to create, identify, and transfer solutions to these problems into practice. However, the lack of mechanisms to integrate these efforts negatively impacts their effectiveness in improving the state-of-the...

In the classical approach to determine how many spare parts to stock, the spare parts shortage costs or the minimum fill rate is a key factor. A difficulty with this approach lies in the estimation of these shortage costs or the determination of appropriate minimum fill rates. In an attempt to overcome this problem, we propose to use the data gathered in reliability centered maintenance (RCM) s...

Traditionally, the use of good techniques to improve software modularity, such as advanced separation of concerns, has no impact in the user experience, for example while navigating Web software. While the intent of these techniques is to simplify evolution and maintenance, navigation design quality is often seen as an unrelated concern. In this paper we present a novel approach for improving n...