Quality assessment of coupled civil engineering applications

The software scenery in civil engineering is characterized by a large number of more or less specialized software applications for different tasks. To solve the tasks efficiently, each software application has its own appropriate and optimized data structure. The variety of software tools used to support the design process leads to an exchange of data and information between the involved engineers and their software applications. An exchange of data and information can be achieved by schema mapping and has been an active subject of research during the last decade. However, due to the incompatible data schemas, loss of data and information may occur and therefore needs to be quantified. Current evaluation processes mainly operate on the data and work a posteriori. The changes of data and information resulting from inadequate data mappings between data schemas of software applications to be coupled are identified either by visual inspection or via file comparison and are classified according to certain criteria. Then, the changes have to be qualitatively evaluated by the user. In this paper, a generic a priori approach to assess coupling quality is introduced. Software coupling in computer science refers to the ability to enable software applications to work together, and thus to achieve a common objective. This can be achieved by a data exchange and means the transfer of needed data between the coupled software. The quality of the coupling depends on the quantity and the accuracy of data to be transferred. The formalism to assess coupling quality is described mathematically including set theory and graph theory. This approach operates on the involved schemas, is not limited to a common data exchange format, and takes into account various mapping patterns. Moreover, the coupling quality is evaluated in the formalization process, which results in a global quality value. This quality value can then be used directly by the user to assess the data exchange. A synthetic scenario from civil engineering is used to illustrate the formalization process. Finally, the applicability of the proposed approach to assess coupling quality is shown within a real world case study.