Designing and Developing a Modular Single-Page Web Application for Providing Situation Awareness
Manninen, Jimi (2020)
2020
Automaatiotekniikan DI-tutkinto-ohjelma - Degree Programme in Automation Engineering, MSc (Tech)
Tekniikan ja luonnontieteiden tiedekunta - Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2020-05-20
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202004294668
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202004294668
Tiivistelmä
To make deliberate decisions that affect the safety, operability or similar concerns of critical systems over a geographic area where resources such as people, equipment or other entities are scattered across the area, the one responsible for the task needs to have a well-formed understanding of the situation. This understanding is also called situation awareness. Common operational picture is one solution to support decision-making with systems where geographic distances are great.
Insta DefSec Ltd has a long history of making applications that offer common operational picture to support dynamic decision-making. To cost efficiently serve multiple use cases where common operation picture is needed, the company had interest to develop an application with an easily customizable user interface that could be expanded to meet the needs of different user groups.
In this thesis, a solution proposal for a modifiable and expandable web application is designed and described from the perspective of its client’s implementation. The main objective is to find out what design methods can be used to develop a modular web application that can be used in several different domains to provide situational awareness. In addition, the goal is to describe how new components can be developed for the application to be used in parallel with the common operational picture component.
The software design is based on research of suitable software design patterns as well as technologies that are applicable for implementing modularity. Principles for providing situation awareness and supporting dynamic decision-making are derived from the literature on situation awareness. The development of the application was done using an incremental and iterative method, so that the results, as well as possible problems, could be evaluated in smaller pieces.
The designed and developed application met the main requirements by being customizable, scalable, easily accessed even on light devices and configurable to present information from a variety of sources. Based on the results, it could be concluded that the design models and used technologies were suitable for the development of the said application.
However, the application did not yet reach the point to be deployed under production-like conditions, which made it difficult to assess its actual usability. Therefore, it would be recommendable to validate the potential of the application in a preliminary production trial in order to obtain more detailed information and feedback on possible development areas. In addition, more design work could be put into developing a modular structure for state management on the client-side. It should also be noted that potential design problems might only occur after the application has been in production use for a longer period of time.
Insta DefSec Ltd has a long history of making applications that offer common operational picture to support dynamic decision-making. To cost efficiently serve multiple use cases where common operation picture is needed, the company had interest to develop an application with an easily customizable user interface that could be expanded to meet the needs of different user groups.
In this thesis, a solution proposal for a modifiable and expandable web application is designed and described from the perspective of its client’s implementation. The main objective is to find out what design methods can be used to develop a modular web application that can be used in several different domains to provide situational awareness. In addition, the goal is to describe how new components can be developed for the application to be used in parallel with the common operational picture component.
The software design is based on research of suitable software design patterns as well as technologies that are applicable for implementing modularity. Principles for providing situation awareness and supporting dynamic decision-making are derived from the literature on situation awareness. The development of the application was done using an incremental and iterative method, so that the results, as well as possible problems, could be evaluated in smaller pieces.
The designed and developed application met the main requirements by being customizable, scalable, easily accessed even on light devices and configurable to present information from a variety of sources. Based on the results, it could be concluded that the design models and used technologies were suitable for the development of the said application.
However, the application did not yet reach the point to be deployed under production-like conditions, which made it difficult to assess its actual usability. Therefore, it would be recommendable to validate the potential of the application in a preliminary production trial in order to obtain more detailed information and feedback on possible development areas. In addition, more design work could be put into developing a modular structure for state management on the client-side. It should also be noted that potential design problems might only occur after the application has been in production use for a longer period of time.