Tools for FOTs
Conducting an FOT or NDS in a scientific manner as proposed in the FESTA methodology requires a coordination effort during the different stages. Generic tools (such as document and project management tools, databases, or evaluation tools) as well as dedicated tools specific to a FOT are necessary to cope with the demands of planning an FOT, operationalizing abstract use-cases, collecting and holding the test data and finally evaluating the hypotheses.
In previous projects these tools were developed each time an FOT or NDS was conducted by the FOT/NDS partners taking into account the specific needs and requirements of their FOT/NDS. This leads to a considerable amount of work, which partly could have been avoided, if existing tools would have been used and additionally if these tools would have been developed in a more general way considering a broader field of application and not only the projects these have been developed for. A reason besides the missing general tools for non-reuse of FOT/NDS tools is that project partners are often not aware of what is already available and accessible.
Therefore this section is aiming for an inventory of FOT and NDS tools, which can be used by all parties interested in conducting an FOT/NDS. The inventory aims to list all tools and specify these tools as far as the tool specification are accessible and public. Additionally experience gathered with these tools in existing projects will be considered in the inventory, in order to allow the reader for the choice of the best suited tool for his type of FOT. It is not the intention of the WP to rate and evaluate the tools but to indicate e.g. whether a specific data acquisition system (DAS) could be useful for an FOT with extensive data collection including also video or is better suited for FOT where only CAN data is collected. By doing so, future FOTs/NDS should be able to re-use existing tools and just adapt these according to their specific needs instead of developing new tools starting from scratch.
Tools of various kinds are used throughout the complete project process as described in the FESTA handbook. Ideally the tools should form a chain by being interoperable. In this section we will focus on sophisticated special tools needed and often built for FOTs. Following the FESTA V, these tools are categorized in
Tools for Preparing: Operationalization of high-level FOT goals to specific study design and measures
Tools for Using: FOT operation and data acquisition
Tools for Analysing: Data handling and evaluation
Figure 1.1: FESTA V - tools are seperated by three categories "Preparing", "Using" and "Analysing".
The collected data will be constantly updated by the FOTNET consortium partners, but can also be updated by the user of this wiki.
If you or your company would like to contribute to the tools list, please feel free to add to this wiki or contact us directly.
For a complete list of tools sorted by their primary usage please see Category:Tools for FOTs
For any question contact:
zlocki@ika.rwth-aachen.de
