31,462 research outputs found
Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management
Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has
increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be
able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute
and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of
services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available
with the current technology. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs
requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences
and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several
advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge
representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business
requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and
enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The
article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy
for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate
flexibility and scalability of the approach.Comment: Paschke, A. and Bichler, M.: Knowledge Representation Concepts for
Automated SLA Management, Int. Journal of Decision Support Systems (DSS),
submitted 19th March 200
SAT Modulo Monotonic Theories
We define the concept of a monotonic theory and show how to build efficient
SMT (SAT Modulo Theory) solvers, including effective theory propagation and
clause learning, for such theories. We present examples showing that monotonic
theories arise from many common problems, e.g., graph properties such as
reachability, shortest paths, connected components, minimum spanning tree, and
max-flow/min-cut, and then demonstrate our framework by building SMT solvers
for each of these theories. We apply these solvers to procedural content
generation problems, demonstrating major speed-ups over state-of-the-art
approaches based on SAT or Answer Set Programming, and easily solving several
instances that were previously impractical to solve
A Survey of Languages for Specifying Dynamics: A Knowledge Engineering Perspective
A number of formal specification languages for knowledge-based systems has been developed. Characteristics for knowledge-based systems are a complex knowledge base and an inference engine which uses this knowledge to solve a given problem. Specification languages for knowledge-based systems have to cover both aspects. They have to provide the means to specify a complex and large amount of knowledge and they have to provide the means to specify the dynamic reasoning behavior of a knowledge-based system. We focus on the second aspect. For this purpose, we survey existing approaches for specifying dynamic behavior in related areas of research. In fact, we have taken approaches for the specification of information systems (Language for Conceptual Modeling and TROLL), approaches for the specification of database updates and logic programming (Transaction Logic and Dynamic Database Logic) and the generic specification framework of abstract state machine
Towards a Rule Interchange Language for the Web
This articles discusses rule languages that are needed for a a
full deployment of the SemanticWeb. First, it motivates the need for such
languages. Then, it presents ten theses addressing (1) the rule and/or
logic languages needed on the Web, (2) data and data processing, (3)
semantics, and (4) engineering and rendering issues. Finally, it discusses
two options that might be chosen in designing a Rule Interchange Format
for the Web
A Survey of Symbolic Execution Techniques
Many security and software testing applications require checking whether
certain properties of a program hold for any possible usage scenario. For
instance, a tool for identifying software vulnerabilities may need to rule out
the existence of any backdoor to bypass a program's authentication. One
approach would be to test the program using different, possibly random inputs.
As the backdoor may only be hit for very specific program workloads, automated
exploration of the space of possible inputs is of the essence. Symbolic
execution provides an elegant solution to the problem, by systematically
exploring many possible execution paths at the same time without necessarily
requiring concrete inputs. Rather than taking on fully specified input values,
the technique abstractly represents them as symbols, resorting to constraint
solvers to construct actual instances that would cause property violations.
Symbolic execution has been incubated in dozens of tools developed over the
last four decades, leading to major practical breakthroughs in a number of
prominent software reliability applications. The goal of this survey is to
provide an overview of the main ideas, challenges, and solutions developed in
the area, distilling them for a broad audience.
The present survey has been accepted for publication at ACM Computing
Surveys. If you are considering citing this survey, we would appreciate if you
could use the following BibTeX entry: http://goo.gl/Hf5FvcComment: This is the authors pre-print copy. If you are considering citing
this survey, we would appreciate if you could use the following BibTeX entry:
http://goo.gl/Hf5Fv
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