Simulation is a technique which has been widely used to analyse and optimize complex systems. Yet high licensing costs often limit its adoption, especially among Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and academic institutions. This paper presents SimToWin, an open-source discrete-event simulation (DES) framework, which combines SimPy library robustness, with a React graphical user interface. Users can model and run simulations through a drag-and-drop interface, without programming skills; while maintaining model transparency, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. This is a relevant aspect as many simulation practitioners are typically not programmers, e.g., an industrial engineer elaborating the production planning and scheduling, or a chief medical assessing different work schedule solutions. SimToWin supports stochastic variables, experiment replication, real-time monitoring, and flexible data import and export. Metrics and logs allow model performance measurements, which allow model verification and validation, and ultimately unlock informed decision-making. Future work will explore parameter configuration, integration with ERP and MES systems, the use of machine learning to automate scenario generation, and 3D visualization and animation. SimToWin provides a practical, scalable solution for process optimization, operational planning, and informed decision making on several domains.

This paper presents a 2026 update of a longitudinal review of general-purpose discrete event simulation (DES) solutions suitable for process design on manufacturing and service industries. The study follows previous editions published in 2006, 2011, and 2016, preserving the original objective of identifying the most relevant commercial simulation solutions without making qualitative judgments about their technical superiority. Instead, the evaluation is based on “popularity,” defined as the intensity of a solutions’ presence across multiple information sources. The methodology measures occurrences of simulation solution name and vendor name in web search results, scientific publications, academic databases, industry reports, and professional platforms. In comparison with the 2016 edition, the updated analysis also considers the expansion of digital ecosystems, including online communities, technical forums, and cloud-based environments. Although popularity does not guarantee quality or suitability for specific applications, sustained visibility may indicate market consolidation, community support, and long-term viability. The outcome of this study is an updated shortlist of commercial DES solutions which appear to be among the most relevant in 2026.

1Three Digital Operational Transconductance Amplifier (DIGOTA) topologies, i.e. the standard DIGOTA, a Schmitt-Trigger-Based DIGOTA (ST-DIGOTA) and a DIGOTA with a Floating-Inverter input stage (FI-DIGOTA), are designed for the first time in a 16nm CMOS FinFET technology and their performance is compared on basis of post-layout simulations. All the DIGOTAs operate at 300 mV power supply while driving a capacitive load of 350 pF. The standard DIGOTA presented the lowest silicon area (44 μm2) and a power consumption of 99.4 nW at 59 kHz Gain-Bandwidth Product (GBW). The ST-DIGOTA achieved the highest DC gain of 43.9 dB, at the cost of a 6X increased power (609 nW) and 14% larger area, while the FI-DIGOTA achieves the highest GBW (100.3 kHz) and Slew Rate (8 mV/μs) at 36X more power (3.67 μW) and 2.5x larger are than the standard DIGOTA.According to these results, an area-normalized large signal figure of merit (IFOMLA) of 117k, 19.2k and 1.8k (mV/μs)•pF/(nA• mm2) was accomplished along with an area-normalized small signal figure of merit (IFOMSA) of 1.42M, 236k and 23.6k kHz •pF/(nA•mm2) for the DIGOTA, ST-DIGOTA and FI-DIGOTA, respectively, where the first two topologies surpass the current state of the art.

There is a new economic paradigm that establishes the need for continuous updating, concern with customer satisfaction and the generation of products and services with higher added value in the software development organizations. The organizations execute projects with the objective of support their operations, to respond the strategic objectives or a challenge/idea, to resolve a problem or investment opportunities. The projects represent the business of software development organizations, thus, the decision making of which projects to be developed is very important. Within the scope of management of project portfolios these concerns are included‥ The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) developed “Management of Portfolios” (MoP), whose objective is to propose a set of practices for management of project portfolios. This paper presents input and output artefacts in portfolio practices from the OGC Standard for Management of Portfolios and the graphic representations are supported by the Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM).

Requirements elicitation is a crucial activity and one of the first steps in software development process. A popular way to capture and describe requirements is through UML use case models. Transforming require- ment specifications into software design models is a complex and error prone software development activity. Software design usually involves several models, each one representing a different perspective. One of those perspectives is the data perspective which can be modeled using a data model. Although of the importance of this model, few works has been done to derive a data model from use case model. The 4SRS (4-Step Rule Set) method generates a logical architecture of a software-based system, based on a use case model. This paper proposes an approach to adapt and extend the 4SRS method in order to generate a data model supporting the generated logical architecture and the elicited requirements based in a set of business process models.

Empirical studies are important in software engineering to evaluate new tools, techniques, methods and technologies in a structured way before they are introduced in the industrial (real) software process. Perform empirical studies in a real context is very difficult due to various obstacles, so, we intend to create a stable environment that allows us to perform reliably empirical studies with students. This paper describes a case study with 104 students grouped in seven teams that developed a software system (Web application) for a real costumer. In this study we used a model based on Use Case Points (UCP) to estimate the resources needed to develop a software system.

In this paper, we present a description of our developed adapter, which takes acts as a gateway between IEEE 1149.1 and IEEE 1149.7 test infrastructures. The referred adapter reduces the pins of the TAP from 4 to 2 and implements advanced capabilities, such as Parking State of a TAPC and the Reset and Selection Unit (RSU).

Software projects are always increasing their complexity. The complexity of projects arises due to the increased sophistication of software applications and of their implemented features. However, most of the projects are developed by small organizations. Since these companies have a reduced dimension, the number of individuals that constitute each software development teams will also be significantly reduced. This paper describes a Rational Unified Process (RUP) configuration composed by a reduced set of RUP roles. This configuration may easily be adopted by a small software development team during the project execution period. Additionally, we have characterized each role in this reduced model by identifying the corresponding activities in charge and by creating individual sheets detailing their responsibilities. An initial assessment of the effectiveness of this RUP configuration was performed using CMMI-DEV maturity level 2 (ML2) as a reference model.

Organizations are adopting multiple best practices models to improve overall performance. Their objective is to capture the cumulative added value of each model into one single environment. These multimodel environments raise several challenges, selection and composition of models are not straightforward tasks. This paper proposes an approach to help address these challenges by comparing models at a quantitative level. We propose a characterization of size of a model as a measure of scope coverage and detail of descriptions when compared to a reference model and model complexity in terms of architectural structural connectedness. An example of applying the proposed approach is described in an Industrial context where a multimodel process solution was evolved from CMMI-Dev level 3 to level 5.

The transformation of user requirements into system requirements models can be achieved using the 4 Step Rule Set (4SRS) method that transforms UML use case diagrams into system-level object diagrams. These diagrams represent the logical architecture of the system, integrating the system-level entities, their responsibilities and the relationships among them. The logical architecture captures the system functional requirements and its non-functional intentionalities. Although contributing to the formalization of the design of software architectures, the 4SRS method needs to be extended in order to support the design of the database subsystems that may be considered pertinent within the specified logical architecture. This paper presents the extension of the 4SRS method to support the construction of the class diagram that complements the logical architecture, and shows, through the presentation of a demonstration case, the applicability of the proposed approach.

Software inspections allow finding and removing defects close to their point of injection and are considered a cheap and effective way to detect and remove defects. A lot of research work has focused on understanding the sources of variability and improving software inspections performance. In this paper we studied the impact of inspection review rate in process performance. The study was carried out in an industrial context effort of bridging the gap from CMMI level 3 to level 5. We supported a decision for process change and improvement based on statistical significant information. Study results led us to conclude that review rate is an important factor affecting code inspections performance and that the applicability of statistical methods was useful in modeling and predicting process performance.

Devising a course for software professionals working in industry depends on several factors. In order to create a course that fulfils professionals' expectations, it is important to take account of the skills of the participants, the time available, and the specific topics to be covered. This paper presents the curriculum of a course in requirements engineering and management intended for software developers with a first-level academic degree in computing and experience in developing real software solutions. This context requires the course to concentrate on topics that were not taught in the participants' previous education and that can have a positive impact on their daily practices.

Raising the level of abstraction for software engineers to write applications is still an undergoing issue. So, models will most likely become the dominant artifact in the development of software. However, models are nothing without the framing of a methodology, like the software factories methodology, which includes the software product lines approach. In the context of software product lines, model-driven development imposes the structuring of the software development process around models adequate to each one of the moments within the software supply chain. The different moments are the different stages that comprise different development teams, as well as the target user of the different software family members. This multistage process is a powerful vision of software development in general when compared with the current software development processes' state-of-the-art and this is the vision that feeds the Ph.D. work presented in this paper. This work is concerned with the transformations that models must suffer in the particular context of software product lines development, inside each stage and in between stages.

Software is increasing in size and complexity. As a direct implication, organizations find it more difficult to achieve the desired product quality. Process improvement models are used to improve product quality. In recent years the combination of different improvement models is increasing. The main challenge in these environments is the interoperability of chosen models. An incorrect integration approach diminishes efficiency and effectiveness on applying these models. The general objective of this thesis is to identify principles and process characteristics for designing a system of processes at the architectural level. As a result of this research work, an improved understanding of improvement models interoperability is expected by identifying the technical and structural relationships between processes that will help architecting a system of processes.

Software development in highly variable domains constrained by tight regulations and with many business concepts involved results in hard to deliver and maintain applications, due to the complexity of dealing with the large number of concepts provided by the different parties and system involved in the process. One way to tackle these problems is thru combining software product lines and model-driven software development supported by ontologies. Software product lines and model-driven approaches would promote reuse on the software artifacts and, if supported by an ontological layer, those artifacts would be domain-validated. We intend to create a new conceptual framework for software development with domain validated models in highly variable domains. To define such a framework we will propose a model that relates several dimensions and areas of software development thru time and abstraction levels. This model would guarantee to the software house traceability of components, domain validated artifacts, easy to maintain and reusable components, due to the relations and mappings we propose to establish in the conceptual framework, between the software artifacts and the ontology.

Validation and verification are mandatory activities that software companies must perform when developing software products with a high degree of quality. Currently, more companies become aware that adopting CMMI (the software process maturity model developed by the Software Engineering Institute) can be a way to develop quality software. However, some companies are resistant to adopt CMMI maturity level 2 because they do not considerer this maturity level a benefit since its implementation is expensive and does not cover the validation and verification efforts. The simultaneous adoption of CMMI maturity level 2 with validation and verification process areas (from maturity level 3) lacks some methodological recommendations, since some dependencies exist between those two CMMI maturity levels. This PhD thesis will propose one approach to conciliate validation and verification practices with of CMMI maturity level 2 and by adopting ISO/IEC 29119 standard to fulfill a product lifecycle perspective.

Model driven approaches are shifting software development from a code based activity to a model based activity. Models can be refined and transformed from requirements into code specific to a platform. Although several model transformations can occur, they usually take place at a single development stage. In the case of software product lines, and particularly of software factories, the modeling of a system can occur at several stages, for instance, at the software house, at the systems integrator and at the final customer site. Basically, this requires that the model used at a particular stage can be refined at the next stage. In this paper, we explore the issues related to such an approach and we propose model transformation patterns that can be generically applied to models so that they can be used in multi staged modeling approaches. We show how to realize the approach with the Eclipse Modeling Framework and present an insurance case study.

Features have been widely used by the product line community to model variability. They represent the common and variable characteristics of the members of a product line. They are very well suited for the configuration of product line members. Outside the product line community, use cases are also widely used to model the functionality of systems at a similar level of abstraction but from a user perspective. Significant work has been done by several authors regarding the possible relationship between these two perspectives of a system. Nonetheless, this has been done in an informal way. In this paper we explore the relationships between these two perspectives and describe a possible approach to automate the transformation from UML use case to feature models.

This paper presents and discusses the syllabus of a second cycle degree on Software Engineering in which any student that finishes any undergraduate Computing degree (Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Information Technology, and Software Engineering) can enroll. In the first year, the degree is composed of two 30-ECTS modules, one dedicated to software analysis and design and the other devoted to software quality and management. Each module is composed of five curricular units, being one of them dedicated to the experimental integration of the module's topics. The second year allows two different paths to be followed by the students. The professional path includes a 30-ECTS industrial project, while in the scientific path students must write a 45-ECTS master dissertation. The degree is mainly structured to consider the Bologna Declaration that is now being used in Europe to recast all university degrees. Additionally, we also considered the Software Engineering 2004 Curriculum Guidelines and the Knowledge Areas described in the SWEBOK.

Software product lines and related approaches, like software factories, are starting to capture the attention of the industry practitioners. Nevertheless, their adoption outside the research community and big companies is still very restricted. We believe that model-driven approaches, like OMG's MDA, with proper tool support, can bring the advantages of product lines to a broader audience. For this to become a reality, model-driven methods should integrate requirements models into the software development process. In this paper, we discuss the semantics of use case relationships and their formalization using activity diagrams to support variability specification. Particularly, we propose an extension to the LtextendGt relationship that supports the adoption of UML 2.0 use case diagrams into model-driven methods. Our proposal results from our work with 4SRS (4 step rule set), a model-driven method in which use cases are the central model for requirements specification and model transformation