Eswaran Subrahmanian

Guest Editorial: Special issue on Engineering Informatics

The paper titled “Engineering Complex, Information-based,Networked Industrial Systems: A Research Roadmap” by Albert Jones et al argues for a new and different approach to design and understand what they termed as complex information-based networked industrial _CINI_ systems. The authors borrow concepts and principles from physical systems and living systems to model and simulate CINI systems. They describe the four major model building activities of engineers that relate to CINI systems, namely, topology, behaviour, decisions, and information.

The Pugh Controlled Convergence Method: Model-based evaluation and implications for design theory

This paper evaluates the Pugh Controlled Convergence method and its relationship to recent developments in design theory. Computer executable models are proposed simulating a team of people involved in iterated cycles of evaluation, ideation, and investigation.

Sustaining Engineering Informatics: Toward Methods and Metrics for Digital Curation

Ensuring the long-term usability of engineering informatics (EI) artifacts is a challenge, particularly for products with longer lifecycles than the computing hardware and software used for their design and manufacture.Addressing this challenge requires characterizing the nature of EI, defining metrics for EI sustainability, and developing methods for long-term EI curation.In this paper we highlight various issues related to long-term archival of EI and describe the work towards methods and metrics for sustaining EI We propose an approach to enhance the Open Archival Information System (OAI

Annotation in design and product engineering: an introduction to the special issue

The annotation of a document involves the embedding of data such as a textual note, a symbol or structured data in an original document at a specific location.The scope of annotations has been considerably enlarged by the latest developments in digital technologies allowing the manipulation of 3D geometry through a simple web browser and the combination of geometrical information with more complex semantic structures.The goal of this special issue is to explore a number of these particular challenges of the application of annotation in design and product engineering.