Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments

Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement

M[pi]log, Macromodeling via parametric identification of logic gates

This paper addresses the development of computational models of digital integrated circuit input and output buffers via the identification of nonlinear parametric models. The obtained models run in standard circuit simulation environments, offer improved accuracy and good numerical efficiency, and do not disclose information on the structure of the modeled devices. The paper reviews the basics of the parametric identification approach and illustrates its most recent extensions to handle temperature and supply voltage variations as well as power supply ports and tristate devices

Enabling High-Level Application Development for the Internet of Things

Application development in the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging because it involves dealing with a wide range of related issues such as lack of separation of concerns, and lack of high-level of abstractions to address both the large scale and heterogeneity. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the application development have to address issues that can be attributed to different life-cycles phases. when developing applications. First, the application logic has to be analyzed and then separated into a set of distributed tasks for an underlying network. Then, the tasks have to be implemented for the specific hardware. Apart from handling these issues, they have to deal with other aspects of life-cycle such as changes in application requirements and deployed devices. Several approaches have been proposed in the closely related fields of wireless sensor network, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and software engineering in general to address the above challenges. However, existing approaches only cover limited subsets of the above mentioned challenges when applied to the IoT. This paper proposes an integrated approach for addressing the above mentioned challenges. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a development methodology that separates IoT application development into different concerns and provides a conceptual framework to develop an application, (2) a development framework that implements the development methodology to support actions of stakeholders. The development framework provides a set of modeling languages to specify each development concern and abstracts the scale and heterogeneity related complexity. It integrates code generation, task-mapping, and linking techniques to provide automation. Code generation supports the application development phase by producing a programming framework that allows stakeholders to focus on the application logic, while our mapping and linking techniques together support the deployment phase by producing device-specific code to result in a distributed system collaboratively hosted by individual devices. Our evaluation based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our approach improves the productivity of stakeholders involved in the application development

Single and Multi-Piece Behavioral Models of IC Output Buffers

This paper discusses the switching properties of the behavioral models of integrated circuit output buffers. Present behavioral models are based on a two-piece structure defined by a linear combination of two submodels for the two logic states. These models are very accurate in the two logic states, but their state switching is sensitive to the driven loads. The analysis carried out in this paper shows that this load sensitivity stems from the linear combination defining the two-piece model. A new single-piece behavioral model is proposed, that solves this problem and has efficiency and complexity levels comparable to those of two-piece model

Parametric Macromodels of Digital I/O Ports

This paper addresses the development of macromodels for input and output ports of a digital device. The proposed macromodels consist of parametric representations that can be obtained from port transient waveforms at the device ports via a well established procedure. The models are implementable as SPICE subcircuits and their accuracy and efficiency are verified by applying the approach to the characterization of transistor-level models of commercial devices

ChimpCheck: Property-Based Randomized Test Generation for Interactive Apps

We consider the problem of generating relevant execution traces to test rich interactive applications. Rich interactive applications, such as apps on mobile platforms, are complex stateful and often distributed systems where sufficiently exercising the app with user-interaction (UI) event sequences to expose defects is both hard and time-consuming. In particular, there is a fundamental tension between brute-force random UI exercising tools, which are fully-automated but offer low relevance, and UI test scripts, which are manual but offer high relevance. In this paper, we consider a middle way---enabling a seamless fusion of scripted and randomized UI testing. This fusion is prototyped in a testing tool called ChimpCheck for programming, generating, and executing property-based randomized test cases for Android apps. Our approach realizes this fusion by offering a high-level, embedded domain-specific language for defining custom generators of simulated user-interaction event sequences. What follows is a combinator library built on industrial strength frameworks for property-based testing (ScalaCheck) and Android testing (Android JUnit and Espresso) to implement property-based randomized testing for Android development. Driven by real, reported issues in open source Android apps, we show, through case studies, how ChimpCheck enables expressing effective testing patterns in a compact manner.Comment: 20 pages, 21 figures, Symposium on New ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward!2017

Behavioral Modeling of IC Ports Including Temperature Effects

The development of temperature-dependent macromodels for digital IC ports is addressed. The proposed modeling approach is based on the theory of discrete-time parametric models and allows one to estimate the model parameters from voltage and current waveforms observed at the ports and to implement the model as a SPICE subcircuit. The proposed technique is validated by applying it to commercial devices described by detailed transistor-level models. The obtained models perform at a good accuracy level and are more efficient than the original transistor-level models