GUIDE

Graphical User Interfaces for Industrial and Engineering Applications

Researchers: 

Dr. A. Specker, J. Treichler, Prof. P. Schönsleben

Partners:

Two Swiss industrial companies

Financed by:

Center of Integrated Production Systems (ZIP) at the ETH Zurich

The project GUIDE is a interdisciplinary project, financed by the Center of Integrated Production Systems. The focus of all projects in this center is a sociotechnical approach. This approach means, that human aspects, technic and organisation shouldn't be optimized on another rather than in their interdependence. The aim of this project was, to make use of innovative graphical representiatons for industrial software, especially production planning and control. During the project, a user-centered software engineering has been developed. It is claimed that existing schemata and scripts of different mental representations should be evaluated in a first step of software engineering. In order to trap existing scripts and schemata with respect to an existing activity a special interview context and an object-oriented modeling method has been proposed. Two projects showed that the mentionded hypothesis is a mean to achieve good results and that this way of cognitive software engineering deserves support from empirical results. The main part of the project was finished by January 1997 and published in the doctoral thesis of A. Specker.