Communicating complexity: interactive model explorers and immersive visualizations as tools for local planning and community engagement

Models that capture relationships between a variety of social, economic, and environmental factors are useful tools for community planning; however, they are often complex and difficult for diverse audiences to understand. This creates challenges for participatory planning and community engagement. Conducted in the community of Squamish (British Columbia, Canada), this study develops and examines tools for communicating outcomes of a community scenario modelling exercise to diverse stakeholders. These tools are ( i) a “model explorer” and ( ii) realistic, immersive visualizations. The model explorer is an online, HTML5-based tool that can be used to learn about the model, view community scenario maps, and explore potential outcomes of the scenarios. The visualizations are virtual environments that are navigated from the first-person perspective, and they were developed using a combination of ArcGIS, Trimble SketchUp, Adobe Photoshop, and the Unity3D game engine. A local government and community stakeholder focus group and public open house event were held to solicit feedback on the scenarios and tools. Findings of the research suggest that the two types of tools can be used in a complementary fashion, and tool integration can better harness their respective strengths in a manner that comprehensively communicates the implications of different development pathways to diverse community members.

Tool Support for Co-Simulation-Based Analysis

The development of collaborative embedded systems (CESs) requires the validation of their runtime behavior during design time. In this context, simulation-based analysis methods play a key role in the development of such systems. Simulations of CESs tend to become complex. One cause is that CESs work in collaborative system groups (CSGs) within a dynamic context., which is why CESs must be simulated as participants of a CSG. Another cause stems from the fact that CES simulations cover various cyber-physical domains. The models incorporated are often managed by different tools that are specialized for specific simulation disciplines and must be jointly executed in a cosimulation. Besides the methodological aspects, the interoperability of models and tools within such a co-simulation is a major challenge. This chapter focusses on the tool integration aspect of enabling co-simulations. It motivates the need for co-simulation for CES development and describes a general tool architecture. The chapter presents the advantages and limitations of adopting existing standards such as FMI and DCP, as well as best practices for integrating simulation tools and models for CESs and CSGs.

Software product management: planning tool integration

The article discusses the problems of using software for project management and calculating the complexity of design work on the example of planning projects for the production of software products. Approaches to using project management standards and the project subject area to form a work breakdown structure, calculating the complexity of individual work packages and the project as a whole are investigated, requirements for integration software are formulated.