This course introduces students familiar with programing concepts to tools and techniques for developing software systems in the computational engineering context. The course teaches the fundamental strategies of modelling, abstraction, decomposition and reuse as methods for constructing software systems used in Engineering simulation. Verification and validation techniques, with an emphasis on testing, are taught as a means to ensure that students are able to undertake meaningful simulations using computational tools, and deliver reliable software for this purpose. The course will be taught using one or more programming languages and environments which are widely applicable to engineering simulation.

In particular, the course will cover: interactive and stored program use of computers, modelling in the simulation context; program organisation; accuracy and performance issues in numerical algorithms; structured numeric data types and abstract data types; procedural and object-oriented programming approaches; visual programming approaches for simulation; the software life-cycle; and verification and validation. Case studies will be taken from various Engineering simulation scenario.

Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to:

• model small to moderate sized problems in engineering simulation for the purpose of computational implementation.
• be able to analyze case studies in engineering simulation, and recognize how to apply the techniques and methods used to other situations.
• complete the implementation of a program, given a description of its required behavior.
• be able to structure the design of a larger task into appropriate sub-tasks, using procedural and object-oriented methods where appropriate.
• analyze alternatives among simple algorithms -- based on numerical properties and algorithm complexity -- and select the most appropriate for a simple task.
• be able to reason about the correctness of a simple program, given a logical description of its required behavior.
• analyze alternatives among simple data-structures, and select the most appropriate structure for a simple task.
• apply their knowledge of testing principles to select appropriate test data for an individual software module, and implement a test harness to perform its testing.
• be capable of applying visual programming techniques to simple examples in engineering simulation.
• identify economic implications of the software life cycle to the process of software construction in this context.

Two Assignments (30%); Lab Tests (20%); Final Exam (50%)

Thirty one-hour lectures and nine two-hour tutorial/laboratory sessions

Refer to assumed knowledge

A degree in the sciences or engineering would be an advantage. The equivalent in programming background to the undergraduate courses COMP1100 or COMP1730.