While most design firms, professional artists, and educational programs continue to use conventional graphic modalities to communicate design intent and aesthetic expression, recent developments in computer graphics promise to revolutionize attitudes artists and designers now hold toward their work. Artists and designers will have to adopt new attitudes regarding the information utility of opti...

In analysis of the business and the system requirements, the identified elements are modeled using notations that fully describe their characteristics. Nevertheless, implicit relationships often exist between different types of elements that subsequently have to be identified and explicitly represented during the design of the system. This requires an in-depth analysis of the generated models o...

When applying RFID in production, it needs to be integrated into the used IT systems. However, till today system designers cannot rely on a standard solution for integrating RFID technology in manufacturing software systems. Each manufacturer has to deal with the same challenges: No consolidated findings on how to integrate RFID into the IT infrastructure exist. The consequence is that each IT ...

The Manager-Workers pattern is an architectural pattern for parallel programming, used when a design problem can be understood in terms of activity parallelism. This pattern proposes a solution in which the same operations are performed simultaneously and independently on different pieces of data. Operations carried out by each component are independent of operations by other components.

Quality goals have to be under a special consideration during software architectural design. Evolvability constitutes a quality goal with a special relevance for business critical systems. Architectural patterns can significantly contribute to the satisfaction of quality goals. But architectural design decisions regarding these goals have to be made in a systematic, methodical way and concernin...

High-technology electronic devices are based on highly specialized core materials that make their operation possible : semiconductors. Unfortunately, the range of material properties that make high-technology devices work is extremely narrow, since the sheer number of useful semiconductors is small. Hence, a major challenge has been to predict and develop new, potentially useful semiconductors....

The usefulness of fiber reinforced concrete (FRC) in various civil engineering applications is indisputable. Fiber reinforced concrete has so far been successfully used in slabs on grade, shotcrete, architectural panels, precast products, offshore structures, structures in seismic regions, thin and thick repairs, crash barriers, footings, hydraulic structures and many other applications. This p...