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Business Rules Explicitation in Inland Shipping

Planning of transport through inland shipping is complex, highly dynamic and very specific. Existing software support is focusing on road transport planning and/or is merely a visual representation of shipments to be manually assigned to particular vessels. As a result inland shipment planning is time-consuming and highly relies on the personal skills of the planner. In this paper we present a business rules based model that aims to further support inland shipping organizations in their shipment planning by identifying the characteristics and constraints that are of interest and the related explicated business rules. The model is derived from transport-related literature, explorative expert interviews and transport management software vendors. The usability and applicability of the model is subsequently successfully empirically tested using identified performance measures through a case study at a major European inland shipping broker

Neuroscientific tools in the cockpit:towards a meaningful decision support system for fatigue risk management

Fatigued pilots are prone to experience cognitive disorders that degrade their performance and adherence to high safety standards. In light of the current challenging context in aviation, we report the early phase of our ongoing project on the re-evaluation of human factors research for flight crew. Our motivation stems from the need for aviation organisations to develop decision support systems for operational aviation settings, able to feed-in in the organisations’ fatigue risk management efforts. Key criteria to this end are the need for the least possible intrusiveness and the added information value for a safety system. Departing from the problems in compliance-focused fatigue risk management and the intrusive nature of clinical studies, we report a neuroscientific methodology able to yield markers that can be easily integrated in a decision support system at the operational level. Reporting the preliminary phase of our live project, we evaluate the tools suitable for the development of a system that tracks subtle pilot states, such as drowsiness and micro-sleep episodes.

Adoption and implementation of the decision model and notation standard

In 2015, the Object Management Group published the Decision Model and Notation with the goal to structure and connect business processes, decisions and underlying business logic. Practice shows that several vendors adopted the DMN standard and (started to) integrate the standard with their tooling. However, practice also shows that there are vendors who (consciously) deviate from the DMN standard while still trying to achieve the goal DMN is set out to reach. This research aims to 1) analyze and benchmark available tooling and their accompanied languages according to the DMN-standard and 2) understand the different approaches to modeling decisions and underlying business logic of these vendor specific languages. We achieved the above by analyzing secondary data. In total, 22 decision modelling tools together with their languages were analyzed. The results of this study reveal six propositions with regards to the adoption of DMN with regards to the sample of tools. These results could be utilized to improve the tools as well as the DMN standard itself to improve adoption. Possible future research directions comprise the improvement of the generalizability of the results by including more tools available and utilizing different methods for the data collection and analysis as well as deeper analysis into the generation of DMN directly from tool-native languages.

The design and use of open online modules for blended learning in STEM education

Blended learning, a teaching format in which face-to-face and online learning is integrated, nowadays is an important development in education. Little is known, however, about its affordances for teacher education, and for domain specific didactical courses in particular. To investigate this topic, we carried out a design research project in which teacher educators engaged in a co-design process of developing and field-testing open online learning units for mathematics and science didactics. The preliminary results concern descriptions of the work processes by the design teams, of design heuristics, and of typical ways of collaborating. These findings are illustrated for the case of two of the designed online units on statistics didactics and mathematical thinking, respectively.

The perception of teachers on usability and accessibility of programming materials for children with visual impairments

More power

The last decade has seen an increasing demand from the industrial field of computerized visual inspection. Applications rapidly become more complex and often with more demanding real time constraints. However, from 2004 onwards the clock frequency of CPUs has not increased significantly. Computer Vision applications have an increasing demand for more processing power but are limited by the performance capabilities of sequential processor architectures. The only way to get more performance using commodity hardware, like multi-core processors and graphics cards, is to go for parallel programming. This article focuses on the practical question: How can the processing time for vision algorithms be improved, by parallelization, in an economical way and execute them on multiple platforms?