38925274
Dynamic Workflow Modeling and Verification
The dynamic nature of incident command systems and their requirement for high flexibility raise a challenge to the research and implementation of workflows. The significance of applying formal approaches to the modeling and analysis of workflows has been well recognized and several such approaches have been proposed. However, these approaches require users to master considerable knowledge of the particular formalisms, which impacts their application on a larger scale. To address these challenges, we developed an intuitive, yet formal approach to workflow modeling, enactment and validation. In this paper, we further develop a set of theorems to support dynamic modeling, modification and on-the-fly verification of the workflows. A prototype has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of the theoretical approach.
28830107
Introducing software architecture specification and analysis in SAM through an example
Abstract Software architecture study has become one of the most active research areas in software engineering in the recent years. Although there have been many published results on specification and analysis method of software architectures, information on sound systematic methodology for modeling and analyzing software architectures is lacking. In this article, we present a formal systematic software architecture specification and analysis methodology called SAM and show how to apply SAM to specify a command control (C2) system and to analyze its real-time constraints.
15835310
An Intuitive Formal Approach to Dynamic Workflow Modeling and Analysis
The increasing dynamics and the continuous changes of business processes raise a challenge to the research and implementation of workflows. The significance of applying formal approaches to the modeling and analysis of workflows has been well recognized and many such approaches have been proposed. However, these approaches require users to master considerable knowledge of the particular formalisms, which impacts the application of these approaches on a larger scale. This paper presents a new formal, yet intuitive approach for the modeling and analysis of workflows, which attempts to overcome the above problem. In addition to the abilities of supporting workflow validation and enactment, this new approach possesses the distinguishing feature of allowing users who are not proficient in formal methods to build up and dynamically modify the workflow models that address their business needs.
15454128
An Approach for Modeling and Analysis of Security System Architectures
Security system architecture governs the composition of components in security systems and interactions between them. It plays a central role in the design of software security systems that ensure secure access to distributed resources in networked environment. In particular, the composition of the systems must consistently assure security policies that it is supposed to enforce. However, there is currently no rigorous and systematic way to predict and assure such critical properties in security system design. A systematic approach is introduced to address the problem. We present a methodology for modeling security system architecture and for verifying whether required security constraints are assured by the composition of the components. We introduce the concept of security constraint patterns, which formally specify the generic form of security policies that all implementations of the system architecture must enforce. The analysis of the architecture is driven by the propagation of the global security constraints onto the components in an incremental process. We show that our methodology is both flexible and scalable. It is argued that such a methodology not only ensures the integrity of critical early design decisions, but also provides a framework to guide correct implementations of the design. We demonstrate the methodology through a case study in which we model and analyze the architecture of the Resource Access Decision (RAD) Facility, an OMG standard for application-level authorization service.
6516220
Resource-Constrained Workflow Modeling
Business processes are often constrained by resource availability. This is particularly true in an emergency response system where large quantity of resources, including emergency responders, ambulances, fire trucks, medications, food, clothing, etc., are required. In our previous work, we introduced WIFA model to meet the needs of incident command systems workflow modeling and analysis. In this paper, we extend WIFA to take resources into account when modeling and enacting workflows. A formal resource-constrained workflow model is defined and the state transitions rules are established to support workflow analysis. An example is given to illustrate the use of the model.
8350188
Constraint Propagation And Progressive Verification For Component-Based Process Model
System assembly is one of the major issues in engineering complex component-based systems. This is especially true when heterogeneous, COTS and GOTS distributed systems, typical in industrial applications, are involved. The goal of system assembly is not only to make constituent components work together, but also to ensure that the components as a whole behave consistently and guarantee certain end-to-end properties. Despite recent advances, there is a lack of understanding about software composability, as well as theory and techniques for checking and verifying component-based systems. A theory of software system constraints about components, their environment and about system as a whole is the necessary foundation toward solid understanding of the composability of component-based systems. In this paper, we present a systematic approach for constraint specification and constraint propagation in concert with design refinement with a novel technique to ensure consistency between system-wide and component constraints in a design composition process of component-based systems. The consistent constraint propagation is used in our approach to drive progressive verification of the design. It allows us to verify overall design composition without interference of internal details of component designs. Verification is done separately at architectural and component levels without having to compose results of component analyses. A component can be safely replaced with alternative design without re-verifying the overall system composition so long as the replacement conforms to the corresponding interface and component constraint(s).
40574141
Finding similar consensus between trees: an algorithm and a distance hierarchy
Abstract The problem of finding this similar consensus (also known as the largest approximately common substructures) of two trees arises in many pattern recognition applications. This paper presents a dynamic programming algorithm to solve the problem based on the distance measure originated from Tanaka and Tanaka. The algorithm runs as fast as the best-known algorithm for comparing two trees using Tanaka's distance measure when the allowed distance between the common substructures is a constant independent of the input trees. In addition, we establish a hierarchy among Tanaka's distance measure and three other edit-based distance measures published in the literature.
17699044
Automated Discovery of Active Motifs in Multiple RNA Secondary Structures
In this paper we present a method for discovering approximately common motifs (also known as active motifs) in multiple RNA secondary structures. The secondary structures can be represented as ordered trees (i.e., the order among siblings matters). Motifs in these trees are connected subgraphs that can differ in both substitutions and deletions/insertions. The proposed method consists of two steps: (1) find candidate motifs in a small sample of the secondary structures; (2) search all of the secondary structures to determine how frequently these motifs occur (within the allowed approximation) in the secondary structures. To reduce the running time, we develop two optimization heuristics based on sampling and pattern matching techniques. Experimental results obtained by running these algorithms on both generated data and RNA secondary structures show the good performance of the algorithms. To demonstrate the utility of our algorithms, we discuss their applications to conducting the phylogenetic study of RNA sequences obtained from GenBank.
3185763
Address generation for nanowire decoders
Nanoscale crossbars built from nanowires can form high density memories and programmable logic devices. To integrate such nanoscale devices with CMOS circuits, nanowire decoders were invented. Due to the stochastic nature of the nanoscale fabrication, the decoder addresses that address the nanowires selectively must be generated after fabrication. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model of the nanowire decoders for the generation of the proper addresses. Assuming a simple testing approach calledon-off measurement, we prove that the maximum number of the proper addresses can be generated in finite time. We design the algorithms to generate the required number of the proper addresses. Experimental results confirm the efficiency of our algorithms.
1269749
Complexity-adaptive search algorithm for block motion estimation
We propose a complexity-adaptive fast block matching algorithm design strategy that allows the user to terminate the algorithm at any target computational complexity. Two complexity-adaptive techniques, frame level complexity allocation and block level complexity allocation, are developed to approach the global complexity-distortion optimization A buffer control strategy is proposed to dynamically adjust the target complexity of one frame. The predictive complexity-distortion benefit list (PCDB list) technique is employed to allocate the target complexity into each block. By these techniques, we modify the full-search block matching, three-step search, new three-step search, and four-step search to the complexity-adaptive algorithms. Experimental results show that the complexity-adaptive algorithms could achieve better performance than traditional fixed algorithms from the viewpoint of complexity-distoftion optimization.
21909317
Generating Concept Hierarchies from Text for Intelligence Analysis
It is important to automatically extract key information from sensitive text documents for intelligence analysis. Text documents are usually unstructured and information extraction from texts usually focuses on named entity extraction that is insufficient to reflect the concepts contained within documents. Other research on texts focuses on classifying the whole text into categories. However, texts might be diverse in subjects and suffer from classification accuracy. In this paper, our goal is to present a feasible approach to extract relevant information from texts and organize into concept hierarchies with the help of Web corpora. The approach is designed considering the need of information intelligence and the adaptation to different application domains.