8941164
Supporting agent-based distributed software development through modeling and simulation
In today's software engineering environment, it is becoming increasingly commonplace for team members and stakeholders to be distributed in multiple locations and time zones. Under these circumstances, the coordination of software development activities becomes increasingly more complex. One solution uses mobile agent-based tools to support collaborative software engineering tasks, such as requirements management. Despite the fact that development and validation of such tools would be facilitated by the use of modeling and simulation, very little work relating formal methods to agent-based system development has been performed. This paper therefore presents a hierarchical colored Petri Net (CPN) model as a formal framework for agent-based distributed software development, and demonstrates its usefulness by applying the framework to the development of a requirements management system.
10317156
A research on Collaboration Net
We present research on computer-supported cooperative work by introducing an approach to the multimedia based net-centric conference environment-Collaboration Net. Some basic definitions of the distributed Web-based meeting are provided, and the properties of this kind of collaboration are given. We explain problems associated with the well-known yet old-fashioned parliamentary procedure, Robert's Rules of Order, which must be formally modeled and adapted to the modern net-centric virtual conference where time synchronism is hard to enforce. A prototype of our Web-browser based approach to developing the Collaboration Net is also briefly presented. Finally, research challenges in this area are highlighted.
36174550
Service-oriented design with aspects (SODA)
In this paper, we introduce a service-oriented design method by integrating the concept of aspects, which is called service-oriented design with aspects (SODA) in order to utilize services and aspects as fundamental and abstract elements in the design phase of software lifecycle. The service model is represented in the structural and behavior views using UML with its extension mechanism and Petri net respectively. Aspects are used to capture service-specific concerns required for delivering high-quality and user-friendly services. By weaving services and aspects, we can generate various versions of a service system as well as their Petri net based service semantics that also facilitates the verification of service design results. We exemplify a service design result of SODA by applying it to a supply-chain management application.
18643244
An Empirical Performance Study on PSIM
It is well known that errors caught in the early stages of system development life cycle greatly helped reduce the expense for later error fixing and mitigate risks and complications. Performance analysis is one of the methods to ensure satisfactory system performance that can avoid redesign and patch in the later stage of system development when performance problems emerge. Much work has been done to address such concerns collectively known as the 'performance engineering' problem. However, a comprehensive method is still needed to provide an end-to-end support for performance evaluation on software architecture design. Automated tools to support the method must be developed, and its validation must be carefully planned and conducted. In response to this need, we propose our approach, PSIM (performance simulation and modeling). PSIM is a performance simulation and modeling tool that integrated performance properties into software architecture specifications expressed in several major UML diagrams. PSIM models can be transformed into Colored GSPN (colored generalized stochastic Petri nets) via an automated tool. As a result, the Colored GSPN models can be simulated to perform model-based performance evaluation. In this paper PSIM is first briefly reviewed and illustrated through modeling a web-based electronic conferencing system, called M-Net, to derive performance metrics. We then conduct runtime performance testing to the implementation of M-Net and compare the simulation results against the runtime testing data. PSIM is shown to be effective in predicting system performance and in identifying system performance bottlenecks through this experimentation.
11560314
Distributed systems design using function-class decomposition with aspects
Object-oriented methods are known for their capabilities to encapsulate and manage core concerns of complex software systems. However, they are inadequate in discerning and separating a variety of other cross-cutting concerns. In particular, for distributed systems, a number of important concerns such as synchronization, logging, and security, should be sufficiently treated in the design phase of the software lifecycle in order to ensure high system quality. Often these concerns tend to be overlooked at the design level and consequently scattered across multiple system modules during implementation. Consequently it becomes difficult to connect the set of requirements with the system structure, thus system traceability is reduced. This paper proposes an extension to the function-class decomposition (FCD) method, that is a hybrid method of structured analysis and OO approach, by integrating the concepts of "aspect". "Aspect" is an abstraction mechanism that emerged in recent years from the aspect-oriented programming (AOP) community. This extended method supports separation of functional and non-functional concerns by maintaining two primary views (function-class view and aspect view) at the design stage, and demonstrates the iterative process by applying it to the development of an example system called M-Net that is an Internet-based real-time distributed conferencing system.
32612296
Automating performance-related impact analysis through event based traceability
Current impact analysis techniques tend to focus on assessing the impact of change upon the system's functionality, whilst a consideration of performance related requirements is often deferred until after implementation. This tendency can lead to costly and time-consuming mistakes that frustrate customers and require frantic last-minute efforts to fix. This paper proposes a method for supporting performance-related impact analysis in a heterogeneous software engineering environment. An event-based approach is taken to establish dynamic traceability links, capable of propagating data values and commands between requirements and performance models. Quantitative values in performance related requirements are adjusted to reflect proposed changes, and impacted models are re-executed to measure the impact of the change. The resulting outputs are then automatically compared to relevant performance requirements and a system-wide report showing the impact of the proposed change upon performance is generated.
2457108
An object-oriented real-time distributed simulation of cellular phone switching system
The cellular phone network is a distributed system which is composed of three kinds of subsystems, a mobile phone unit, a base site station and a MSC (mobile switching center). A class of cellular phone switching systems, was chosen as the system to be studied. SUN workstations and the UNIX operating system with X windows have been employed as the core of the development environment. The object-oriented (OO) paradigm and C++ were chosen to develop the simulation. UICCELL was developed as an object-oriented system for cellular phone switching real-time multitasking simulation. UICCELL has been fully implemented and is currently running on an Ethernet LAN. A central monitor is created on the screen to manipulate and monitor the simulator. The graphical user interface displays the configuration of UICCELL and the status of processors, channels, etc. The current implementation contains 60 classes and about 20,000 lines of C++ code.<<ETX>>
30575380
Modeling a real-time multitasking system in a timed PQ net
A system is described that integrates timed Petri nets and queueing networks to model complex, real-time systems. It includes a graphical modeling tool, called TPQN, a textual specification language, called TPQL, and a simulator, called TPQS. TPQN's capabilities are illustrated by a performance analysis of a real-time, multitasking scheduler that had been previously implemented on top of SunOS on a Sun-3 workstation. A simulation package has been developed for TPQN that allows the behavior of various complicated systems under a designated queueing network topology to be studied before the system is implemented.<<ETX>>
1331907
An efficient representation of complex materials for real-time rendering
In this paper, we propose an appearance representation for general complex materials which can be applied in real-time rendering framework. By combining a single parametric shading function (such as the Phong model) and the proposed spatial-varying residual function (SRF), this representation can recover the appearance of complex materials with little loss of visual fidelity. The difference between the real data and the parametric shading is directly fitted by a specific function for easy reconstruction. It is simple, flexible and easy to be implemented on programmable graphics hardware. Experiments show that the mean square error (MSE) between the reconstructed appearance and real photographs is less than 5%.
14995712
Applying Pattern Mining to Web Information Extraction
Information extraction (IE) from semi-structured Web documents is a critical issue for information integration systems on the Internet. Previous work in wrapper induction aim to solve this problem by applying machine learning to automatically generate extractors. For example, WIEN, Stalker, Softmealy, etc. However, this approach still requires human intervention to provide training examples. In this paper, we propose a novel idea to IE, by repeated pattern mining and multiple pattern alignment. The discovery of repeated patterns are realized through a data structure call PAT tree. In addition, incomplete patterns are further revised by pattern alignment to comprehend all pattern instances. This new track to IE involves no human effort and content-dependent heuristics. Experimental results show that the constructed extraction rules can achieves 97 percent extraction over fourteen popular search engines.
9710130
A specification language for real-time distributed systems
The authors introduce a design specification method, extended modified Petri nets (EMPN), and its description language (EMPNDL). The specification is based on a stochastic Petri-net model and is suitable for modeling real-time distributed systems. The syntax of the language is formally described in BNF grammar while the semantics is based on that for stochastic Petric nets. In addition to the modeling capability of EMPN and EMPNDL, methods for verification and validation of such systems are also discussed. EMPN and EMPNDL have been extensively used to the specification of a prototype switching system, UICPBX. Based on the presented formulation, verification and validation of UICPBX can be automated to a great extent.<<ETX>>