A Software Engineering Tool Model towards Textile Industry

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This article discusses a novel methodology of software engineering which accomplishes in the field of Textiles. Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE), in the field of Software Engineering is the scientific application of a set of tools and methods to a software system which results in error-free, better quality and manageable software products. CASE also refers to methods for the development of information systems together with automated tools that can be used in the software development process. In this paper various CASE tools are discussed for the effective deployment in textile industry.


The Textile industry is in need of drastic reduction of the cost of production, capital investment, time complexity, manpower and to gain, withstand in the market even in the Recession. To overcome the Scenario the Textile industry must invest in technology and IT solution so that the entrepreneurs can face the competitive market in each and every stage of the industry. Nowadays, every industry has shown their growth tremendously and the software engineering also showed it growth and used in every field. The term Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) refers to the software used for the automated development of computer code. The CASE functions include analysis, design, and programming. CASE tools automate methods for designing, documentation, and producing structured computer code in the desired programming language.


Indian Textile Industries


India is the second largest country in population and it is a sub-continent too. It shares the Indian budget around 42%. Textile Industry in India is the second largest industry after agriculture. Textile industry was one of the earliest industries to come into existence in India and it accounts for more than 45% of the total exports. Indian textile industry is the second largest in the world; next to China. India has rich resources of raw materials for textile industry. It is one of the largest producers of cotton in the world and also has abundant resources of fibres like polyester, silk, viscose etc. India is highly competitive in spinning sector and has presence in almost all processes of the value chain. Indian garment industry is very diverse in size, manufacturing facility, type of apparel produced, quantity and quality of output, cost, requirement for fabric etc. It comprises suppliers of ready-made garments for both, domestic and export markets. Indian textile industry is highly fragmented in industry structure, and is led by small scale companies which do not have the fiscal resources to enhance technology or invest in the high-end engineering of processes. Hence, there is a loss in productivity also. So, there is a need for the textile industries to deploy in the field of software engineering, so that in long term, there may be increase in productivity.


Software Engineering Methodology towards Textile Industry


The CASE tools used for designing software engineering methodology towards textile industries are Configuration Management tools, Data Modeling tools, Model Transformation tools, Refactoring tools, Source Code generation tools and Unified Modeling Language (UML).


Configuration Management Tools


Configuration management focuses on establishing and maintaining consistency of products performance and its functional and physical attributes corresponding with their requirements, design and operational information throughout its life. There are two types of configuration management namely software configuration management and hardware configuration management. Software configuration management identifies four procedures such as configuration identification, configuration control, and configuration status accounting and configuration audits.


Configuration identification is the process of identifying the attributes that define every aspect of a configuration item. A configuration item is a product that has an end-user purpose. Here the end user is the software which is going to be developed for the textile industry.


Configuration change control is a set of processes and approval stages required to change a configuration item's attributes and to re-baseline them.


Configuration status accounting is the ability to record and report on the configuration baselines associated with each configuration item at any moment of time.



Configuration audits are broken into functional and physical configuration audits. They occur either at delivery or at the moment of effecting the change.


Hardware configuration management is the process of creating and maintaining an up to recent record of all the components of the infrastructure. The scope of configuration management is to include all configuration items used in the provision of Iive and operational services.


Data Modeling Tools


Data modeling is a method used to define and analyze data requirements needed to support the textile processes of an organization. The data requirements are recorded as a conceptual data model with associated data definitions. Data modeling is used to manage data as a resource, for the integration of information systems, for designing databases/data warehouses. There are two types of data modeling such as strategic data modeling and data modeling using system analysis. The data modeling preferable for Textile industry is strategic data modeling.


Data models support data and computer systems by providing the definition and format of data. In the context of Textile Process Integration, data modeling will result in database generation. It complements textile process modeling, which results in application programs to support the textile processes. The actual database design is the process of producing a detailed data model of a database. This logical data model contains all the needed logical and physical design choices and physical storage parameters needed to generate a design in a Data Definition Language, which can then be created using the textile model integration. the term database design could also be used to apply to the overall process of designing, not just the base data structures, but also the forms and queries used as part of the overall database application within the Database Management System or DBMS. There are several notations for data modeling. The actual model is frequently called "Entity relationship model". An entity-relationship model (ERM) is an abstract conceptual representation of structured data. Entity-relationship modeling is a relational schema database modeling method, used in software engineering to produce a type of conceptual data model. Also many other representations are available but E-R diagram is the most follow able model in the filed of software process management.


Program Transformation

A program transformation is any operation that takes a program and generates another program. It is often important that the derived program be semantically equivalent to the original, relative to a particular formal semantics. A generalization of semantic equivalence is the notion of program refinement: one program is a refinement of another if it terminates on all the initial states for which the original program terminates, and for each such state it is guaranteed to terminate in a possible final state for the original program. Program transformations may be specified as automated procedures that modify compiler data structures. For a program transformation system to be used in a wide variety of circumstances, it must be able to handle a wide variety of languages. This requires the program transformation system to have a robust parsing technology.


Code Refactoring

Code refactoring is the process of changing a computer programs source code without modifying its external functional behavior in order to improve some of the nonfunctional attributes of the software. Advantages include improved code readability and reduced complexity to improve the maintainability of the source code, as well as a more expressive internal architecture or object model to improve extensibility.

There are two general categories of benefits to the activity of refactoring.


Maintainability: It is easier to fix bugs because the source code is easy to read and the intent of its author is easy to understand. This might be achieved by reducing large monolithic routines into a set of individually concise, well-named, single-purpose methods. It might be achieved by moving a method to a more appropriate class, or by removing misleading comments.


Extensibility: It is easier to extend the capabiIities of the application if it uses recognizable design patterns, and it provides some flexibility where none before may have existed.


Hardware refactoring: The term hardware refactoring is used for refactoring of code in Hardware Description Languages (HDL). It is one of the parts of VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) program.

Source Code Generation

Source code generation is the act of generating source code based on an ontological model such as a template and is accomplished with a programming tool such as a template processor or an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). These tools allow the generation of source code through any of various means. A macro processor, such as the C preprocessor, which replaces patterns in source code according to relatively simple rules, is a simple form of source code generator.


Unified Modeling Language

 

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is used to specify, visualize, modify, construct and document the artifacts of an object-oriented software intensive system under development. UML offers a standard way to visualize a system's architectural blueprints. UML combines best techniques from data modeling (entity relationship diagrams), textile modeling (work flows), object modeling, and component modeling. It can be used with all processes, throughout the software development life cycle, and across different implementation technologies.

Conclusion

Software engineering tool model has been deployed in all sorts of industries. Due to rise of competition for the market of products, the producers have to think an adaptive, sophisticated software engineering tool model for promoting the textiles for sale not only inside the country but also to the outside world.