290,026 research outputs found
Configuration Management for Industrial Automation
Core Issue: Developing and maintaining industrial automation systems requires a lot of coordination of programming code. To support this task a configuration management system can be used but many companies of today find it hard to select a system that suites them best. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to examine various configuration management systems and evaluate them according to the needs that Tetra Pak Processing Systems 14 Business Unit Dairy, Beverage and Prepared Food (BU DBF) has. The Platform & Standards department, where the thesis has been written, has started to work with templates that are shared between different projects. This leads to more versions which make it harder to organize and structure the work. Methodology: Qualitative information has been gathered through interviews and quantitative information has been gathered through a survey. Using configuration management requires the user to understand the theory behind it and the area has been studied thoroughly. Various tests on different tools were performed according to test specifications. Conclusions: For BU DBF the largest problem was to find a configuration management tool that supported binary files, which are used for PLC and HMI, from several manufacturers. Both freeware applications and commercial tools were tested. The tool that best fulfilled the test specifications was VersionWorks from GepaSoft/Rockwell Automation. Implementing configuration management within BU DBF is something that definitely should be done and based on the results of this thesis
An Overview on Application of Machine Learning Techniques in Optical Networks
Today's telecommunication networks have become sources of enormous amounts of
widely heterogeneous data. This information can be retrieved from network
traffic traces, network alarms, signal quality indicators, users' behavioral
data, etc. Advanced mathematical tools are required to extract meaningful
information from these data and take decisions pertaining to the proper
functioning of the networks from the network-generated data. Among these
mathematical tools, Machine Learning (ML) is regarded as one of the most
promising methodological approaches to perform network-data analysis and enable
automated network self-configuration and fault management. The adoption of ML
techniques in the field of optical communication networks is motivated by the
unprecedented growth of network complexity faced by optical networks in the
last few years. Such complexity increase is due to the introduction of a huge
number of adjustable and interdependent system parameters (e.g., routing
configurations, modulation format, symbol rate, coding schemes, etc.) that are
enabled by the usage of coherent transmission/reception technologies, advanced
digital signal processing and compensation of nonlinear effects in optical
fiber propagation. In this paper we provide an overview of the application of
ML to optical communications and networking. We classify and survey relevant
literature dealing with the topic, and we also provide an introductory tutorial
on ML for researchers and practitioners interested in this field. Although a
good number of research papers have recently appeared, the application of ML to
optical networks is still in its infancy: to stimulate further work in this
area, we conclude the paper proposing new possible research directions
Cloud Testing: A Survey on Tools and Open Challenges
Cloud Computing is growing exponentially across organizations and it has a vast impact on the way traditional computation and software testing is conducted. The web based applications these days have different configuration setting, and different deployment requirements. The main focus of Cloud Computing is todeliverreliable, secured, fault-tolerant and elastic infrastructures for hosting Internet-based web applications. Computing the scheduling policies and allocation policy for resources which affect the cloud infrastructure (i.e. hardware, software services) for various web application under fluctuating load and system size is highly challenging problem to deal with. Testing cloud based web applicationsdemands for novel testing methods and tools. This paper is a survey on the growing need of cloud testing, the tools used and the open challenges in the area of cloud testing
An Industry-Based Study on the Efficiency Benefits of Utilising Public Cloud Infrastructure and Infrastructure as Code Tools in the IT Environment Creation Process
The traditional approaches to IT infrastructure management typically involve the procuring, housing and running of company-owned and maintained physical servers. In recent years, alternative solutions to IT infrastructure management based on public cloud technologies have emerged. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), also known as public cloud infrastructure, allows for the on-demand provisioning of IT infrastructure resources via the Internet. Cloud Service Providers (CSP) such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer integration of their cloud-based infrastructure with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. These tools allow for the entire configuration of public cloud based infrastructure to be scripted out and defined as code. This thesis hypothesises that the correct utilization of IaaS and IaC can offer an organisation a more efficient type of IT infrastructure creation system than that of the organisations traditional method. To investigate this claim, an industry-based case study and survey questionnaire were carried out as part of this body of work. The case study involved the replacement of a manually managed IT infrastructure with that of the public cloud, the creation of which was automated via a framework consisting of IaC and related automation tools. The survey questionnaire was created with the intent to corroborate or refute the results obtained in the case study in the context of a wider audience of organisations. The results show that the correct utilization of IaaS and IaC technologies can provide greater efficiency in the management of IT networks than the traditional approac
Observing the clouds : a survey and taxonomy of cloud monitoring
This research was supported by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) grant. Date of Acceptance: 10/12/2014Monitoring is an important aspect of designing and maintaining large-scale systems. Cloud computing presents a unique set of challenges to monitoring including: on-demand infrastructure, unprecedented scalability, rapid elasticity and performance uncertainty. There are a wide range of monitoring tools originating from cluster and high-performance computing, grid computing and enterprise computing, as well as a series of newer bespoke tools, which have been designed exclusively for cloud monitoring. These tools express a number of common elements and designs, which address the demands of cloud monitoring to various degrees. This paper performs an exhaustive survey of contemporary monitoring tools from which we derive a taxonomy, which examines how effectively existing tools and designs meet the challenges of cloud monitoring. We conclude by examining the socio-technical aspects of monitoring, and investigate the engineering challenges and practices behind implementing monitoring strategies for cloud computing.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
Reducing the Barrier to Entry of Complex Robotic Software: a MoveIt! Case Study
Developing robot agnostic software frameworks involves synthesizing the
disparate fields of robotic theory and software engineering while
simultaneously accounting for a large variability in hardware designs and
control paradigms. As the capabilities of robotic software frameworks increase,
the setup difficulty and learning curve for new users also increase. If the
entry barriers for configuring and using the software on robots is too high,
even the most powerful of frameworks are useless. A growing need exists in
robotic software engineering to aid users in getting started with, and
customizing, the software framework as necessary for particular robotic
applications. In this paper a case study is presented for the best practices
found for lowering the barrier of entry in the MoveIt! framework, an
open-source tool for mobile manipulation in ROS, that allows users to 1)
quickly get basic motion planning functionality with minimal initial setup, 2)
automate its configuration and optimization, and 3) easily customize its
components. A graphical interface that assists the user in configuring MoveIt!
is the cornerstone of our approach, coupled with the use of an existing
standardized robot model for input, automatically generated robot-specific
configuration files, and a plugin-based architecture for extensibility. These
best practices are summarized into a set of barrier to entry design principles
applicable to other robotic software. The approaches for lowering the entry
barrier are evaluated by usage statistics, a user survey, and compared against
our design objectives for their effectiveness to users
The Making of Cloud Applications An Empirical Study on Software Development for the Cloud
Cloud computing is gaining more and more traction as a deployment and
provisioning model for software. While a large body of research already covers
how to optimally operate a cloud system, we still lack insights into how
professional software engineers actually use clouds, and how the cloud impacts
development practices. This paper reports on the first systematic study on how
software developers build applications in the cloud. We conducted a
mixed-method study, consisting of qualitative interviews of 25 professional
developers and a quantitative survey with 294 responses. Our results show that
adopting the cloud has a profound impact throughout the software development
process, as well as on how developers utilize tools and data in their daily
work. Among other things, we found that (1) developers need better means to
anticipate runtime problems and rigorously define metrics for improved fault
localization and (2) the cloud offers an abundance of operational data,
however, developers still often rely on their experience and intuition rather
than utilizing metrics. From our findings, we extracted a set of guidelines for
cloud development and identified challenges for researchers and tool vendors
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