10149363
A comparative analysis of architecture frameworks
Architecture frameworks are methods used in architecture modeling. They provide a structured and systematic approach to designing systems. To date there has been little analysis on their roles in system and software engineering and if they are satisfactory. This study provides a model of understanding through analyzing the goals, inputs and outcomes of six architecture frameworks. It characterizes two classes of architecture frameworks and identifies some of their deficiencies. To overcome these deficiencies, we propose to use costs, benefits and risks for architecture analysis. We also propose a method to delineate architecture activities from detailed design activities.
3251598
TRAM: a tool for requirements and architecture management
Management of system requirements and system architectures is part of any software engineering project. But it is usually very tedious and error prone. In particular, managing the traceability between system requirements and system architectures is critical but difficult. The article introduces a tool, TRAM, for managing system requirements, system architectures and more importantly the traceability between them. Its primary design objective is "being practical" and ready for practitioners to use without much overhead. The issues discussed in the paper include an information model that underlies the capture of requirements, architectures and their traceability, a set of document templates implementing the information model, and the support tool.
1745958
Industrial Perspective on the Usefulness of Design Rationale for Software Maintenance: A Survey
Software maintenance is widely known as a problematic area that may consume up to 80% of a software project's resources. It has been claimed that providing an effective mechanism to access design rationale (DR) has great potential to improve software maintenance processes. However, we postulate that the first step towards exploring the potential of DR for improving software maintenance should be to gain a better understanding of what DR means to practitioners, how valuable they consider DR to be and how they use DR. To determine the perceived usefulness of DR, we surveyed a large number of software designers. This exploratory study has discovered that practitioners recognize the importance of DR to understand existing designs and frequently use it to reason about proposed modifications. The results of this study establish that DR is perceived by practitioners to be useful and the efforts required to capture DR for the purpose of maintenance are worthwhile. The findings allow us to identify areas of further research on DR support that have the potential to improve the maintenance process
629310
Semantic and Usage Packaging for Software Components
Current models for software components have made component-based software engineering practical. However, these models are limited in the sense that their support for the specification of software components primarily deals with syntactic issues. To facilitate interoperability and proper use of software components, more comprehensive specification of these components is required. In this paper, we present an approach to software component packaging aimed at comprehensive component specification, especially its support for semantic and usage specification.
14721307
Specifying Interaction Constraints of Software Components for Better Understandability and Interoperability
A vital issue in the correct use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components is the proper understanding of their functionality, quality attributes and ways of operation. Traditionally, COTS component vendors provide some of this information in accompanying documentation. However, the documentation is often informal and likely contains ambiguous and inconsistent statements. Even equipped with interface descriptions clearly defining the basic aspects of component use, such as operation signatures and operating platforms, this documentation does not provide a mathematically sound means for addressing the behavioural interoperability issues in component-based system design. In this paper, we propose a formal but user-friendly component specification approach which augments commercial IDLs with the capability of capturing component interoperability requirements. This approach uses unambiguous temporal operators to define sequencing and concurrency constraints between component operation invocations. Accordingly, it enables precise specifications of how a component provides its services and the correct way in which its services should be used.
17910560
Providing configuration management support in software engineering environments
Software configuration management (CM) is a key element of any software development project. A software engineering environment should not only provide support for software products and software processes in general, but also pay attention to high-level software engineering concepts like CM. In this paper, we present an overview of our approach to software engineering environments and demonstrate how CM can be achieved in such environments with minimal effort by codifying a CM model. Issues addressed include the structures and consistency of CM components and their relationships, the definition and activation of CM operations, and the definition of presentation views that facilitate CM activities.
163835
Popularity Adaptive Search in Hybrid P2P Systems
In a hybrid peer-to-peer (P2P) system, flooding and DHT are both employed for content locating. The decision to use flooding or DHT largely depends on the population of desired data. Previous works either use local information only, or do not consider dynamic factors of P2P systems. In this paper, we propose a popularity adaptive search method for hybrid (PASH) P2P systems. By dynamically detecting the content popularity, PASH properly selects search methods and efficiently saves query traffic cost and response time. We comprehensively evaluate PASH through synthetic and trace-driven simulations. The results show that PASH outperforms existing approaches and it also scales well.
14694684
A mutual anonymous peer-to-peer protocol design
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has become a popular application model because of its easy resource sharing pattern and powerful query search scheme. However, decentralized P2P architecture is scarcely seen to deploy the anonymity on its peers. In this paper, we propose a mutual anonymity protocol, called Secret-sharing-based Mutual Anonymity Protocol (SSMP), for decentralized P2P systems. SSMP employs Shamirs' secret sharing scheme to allow peers to issue queries and responders to deliver requested files anonymously. Compared with previous designs, SSMP achieves mutual anonymity in P2P systems with a high degree of anonymity and a low cryptography processing overhead. We evaluate SSMP by comprehensive simulations.
18395453
Content-Based Model Template Adaptation and Real-Time System for Behavior Interpretation in Sports Video
In this paper, we present a real-time sports analysis system, which not only recognizes the semantic events, but also concludes the behavior, like player's tactics. To this end, we propose an advanced multiple-player tracking algorithm, which addresses two improvements on practical problems: (1) updating of the player template so that it remains a good model over time, and (2) adaptive scaling of the template size depending on the player motion. In this algorithm, we obtain the initial locations of players in the first frame. The tracking is performed by considering both the kinematic constraints of the player and the color distribution of appearance, thereby achieving promising results. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed system by evaluating it for double tennis matches where the player count and the resulting occlusions are challenging.
10084934
CLOSET: An Efficient Algorithm for Mining Frequent Closed Itemsets
Association mining may often derive an undesirably large set of frequent itemsets and association rules. Recent studies have proposed an interesting alternative: mining frequent closed itemsets and their corresponding rules, which has the same power as association mining but substantially reduces the number of rules to be presented. In this paper, we propose an e cient algorithm, CLOSET, for mining closed itemsets, with the development of three techniques: (1) applying a compressed, frequent pattern tree FP-tree structure for mining closed itemsets without candidate generation, (2) developing a single pre x path compression technique to identify frequent closed itemsets quickly, and (3) exploring a partition-based projection mechanism for scalable mining in large databases. Our performance study shows that CLOSET is e cient and scalable over large databases, and is faster than the previously proposed methods.
43532686
AIM: Approximate Intelligent Matching for Time Series Data
Time-series data mining presents many challenges due to the intrinsic large scale and high dimensionality of the data sets. Subsequence similarity matching has been an active research area driven by the need to analyse large data sets in the financial, biomedical and scientific databases. In this paper, we investigate an intelligent subsequence similarity matching of time series queries based on efficient graph traversal. We introduce a new problem, the approximate partial matching of a query sequence in a time series database. Our system can address such queries with high specificity and minimal time and space overhead. The performance bottleneck of the current methods were analysed and we show our method can improve the performance of the time series queries significantly. It is general and flexible enough to find the best approximate match query without specifying a tolerance Ɛ parameter.