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In recent years, how to apply immersive virtual reality technologies in education, psychological therapies and so on has increasingly been the object of study in recent years. In this study, we develop an interactive training application prototype of the full-color powder-based three-dimensional printing (3DP). The purpose of the application is to solve the problems encountered in the teaching, training and practicing 3DP in the university. These problems include the complicated operating processes, the discomfort of the respiratory tract caused by dust flying, the insufficient space not suitable for multi-person training, the high cost of consumables and so on. These limitations lead to the training stagnation and teaching inefficiency. To overcome these challenges, we develop the 3DP virtual laboratory by integrating immersive virtual reality technology and pedagogical content knowledge of 3DP. In brief, our main goal is to achieve the objective so that users can be familiar with the whole processes and know the usual troubleshooting techniques as they complete the different quests of the 3DP virtual laboratory before operating the real 3DP machine. Therefore, we implemented multimodal human-computer interactions for immersive virtual reality in the consideration of pedagogical content knowledge of 3DP. In addition, we can discuss the conceptual models of multimodal interactions in virtual reality development and users’ experiences from students’ feedback for the further development of the 3DP virtual laboratory.

This article summarizes the state of the art in software specification & design methods, which assist developers in constructing the models of the problem domain and of the system and in writing requirements and design specifications. The typical methods such as structured methods and object-oriented methods are summarized. The new discipline called “Method Engineering”, engineering for constructing methods, is briefly presented.

In the last years, an increasing number of computing systems are being realized by taking advantage of autonomous agents. Traditional software engineering methodologies are insufficient to be used in the development of such systems because of the particular characteristics of autonomous agents. Therefore, a lot of work has been done to extend traditional software engineering methodologies for agent systems and its result has been the definition of new methodologies of agent-oriented software engineering. This chapter introduces the basic concepts of agent-oriented software engineering showing the new artefacts that we introduced to analyze, design and implement multi-agent systems. In particular, we present a set of agent-oriented diagrams that support the modeling of: (i) the architecture of the multi-agent system, (ii) the ontology followed by agents and (iii) the interaction protocols used to coordinate agents. These artefacts are described, exploiting an UML-based notation that exploits stereotypes to provide agent-oriented semantics to class and collaboration diagrams.

Design patterns are considered one of the most valuable tools to produce quality designs and a general-purpose technique to improve a design is to identify all pattern realizations and to apply well-known rules to improve them. This technique requires finding all pattern realizations used in a design and it is a rather tedious task. This paper shows the work in the literature on assistants for programmers and software architects and presents a system called IDEA (Interactive DEsign Assistant). IDEA is an interactive design assistant for software architects meant for automating the task of finding and improving the realizations of design patterns. Basically, IDEA is capable of automatically (i) finding the patterns employed in a UML diagram and (ii) producing critiques about these patterns. The core of IDEA is the module that automatically detects the pattern realizations found in the model that the architect is producing. When this module finds a pattern realization, a set of design rules are verified to test if the design could be improved. Any violation to these rules fires a critique that is proposed to the engineer as a possible design improvement. Currently, a prototypal implementation of IDEA is integrated with two popular CASE tools.

Requirements gathering and analysis is the most important phase of software development. If done properly, it reduces future maintenance costs. It can also stop projects that are unlikely to succeed before costs have become excessive. Different software systems require different approaches to requirements engineering. A mature requirements process can be based on a generic requirements process from which specialized processes can be adapted. We discuss such a generic process. The aim is to achieve for requirements engineering a capability level that is comparable to Level 3 of the Capability Maturity Model of SEI for the software process in general. We survey in some detail the parts of the process that deal with project purpose and feasibility, the techniques of requirements gathering, and the representation of requirements.

Researchers have argued that current Web modelling languages have various limitations including disconnection between business models and technical architectures and also disconnection between functional architecture and information architecture. Addressing the problem; Web Information Exchange Diagrams are developed in two flavours, WIED and WIED-UML. WIED-UML is developed to primarily address the problem of disconnection between functional architecture and information architecture. However, we argue that it, doesn’t really address the issue, because WIED-UML is developed on a set of different UML-Unified Modelling Language notations which don’t have semantic conformity with current UML metamodel. Creating transformation rules between models not conforming to common metamodel vocabulary, would not lead to an elegant solution. Hence in this paper, we propose a solution, using UML 2.0 Profile for WIED. We demonstrate it by an example and argue that it is a potential improvement of generic WIED model besides eliminating the requirement for non-standard WIED-UML.

A general and integrated method to develop grid workflow applications based on UML is introduced in this paper. Specifying grid workflow vocabularies with UML is illustrated firstly by graphical presentation of grid workflow vocabulary for the ASCI. On the basis of BPEL4WS and GSFL, the problem of specifying Open Service Workflow Language (OSWFL) with UML to design workflow applications in WSRF is addressed. Secondly, it shows that UML can be customized through a ‘UML Profile’ for graphical presentation of grid workflow applications. Lastly, through extension of BPEL4WS mapping, the problem that how to automatically generate a concrete OSWFL application instance from a UML model meeting the profile is explained. In general, both modeling of grid workflow vocabularies and grid workflow applications can be implemented with UML, and the XML-based OSWFL Schema generated from UML vocabulary model can be used to validate the OSWFL application instance, therefore, a special model checking language is avoided.

This paper introduces a novel sketch-based CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Works) system for UML design. Being different from traditional CSCW and CAD systems, our system uses free hand sketch as user interface, which will fully exploit the advantages of sketch — natural, convenient, and more capable of handling brainstorm. When using sketch as interface in CSCW systems, two problems have to be solved first: (1) how to store, edit and exchange sketch-based document consistently; (2) how to visualize sketch-based document. To solve the first problem, we propose a new document format SKETCH, which is able to represent sketches and related semantics. To solve the second problem, we propose an ontology-based conceptual model which is helpful of recognizing sketches and providing uniform visualization of sketches. To demonstrate our ideas, we have developed a prototype system that can support simple UML Class Diagram design in collaborative environment. It shows us good results, but still, more works are going to be done in the future.