To boldly go:an occam-π mission to engineer emergence

Future systems will be too complex to design and implement explicitly. Instead, we will have to learn to engineer complex behaviours indirectly: through the discovery and application of local rules of behaviour, applied to simple process components, from which desired behaviours predictably emerge through dynamic interactions between massive numbers of instances. This paper describes a process-oriented architecture for fine-grained concurrent systems that enables experiments with such indirect engineering. Examples are presented showing the differing complex behaviours that can arise from minor (non-linear) adjustments to low-level parameters, the difficulties in suppressing the emergence of unwanted (bad) behaviour, the unexpected relationships between apparently unrelated physical phenomena (shown up by their separate emergence from the same primordial process swamp) and the ability to explore and engineer completely new physics (such as force fields) by their emergence from low-level process interactions whose mechanisms can only be imagined, but not built, at the current time

Dynamic bandwidth allocation in multi-class IP networks using utility functions.

PhDAbstact not availableFujitsu Telecommunications Europe Lt

Engage D2.7 Annual combined thematic workshops progress report

This deliverable reports on the organisation and results obtained from the third and fourth editions of the Engage thematic challenge (TC) workshops held in 2021. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the third editions of the TC2 and TC3 workshops, initially scheduled to be held in 2020, were delayed to the beginning of 2021. The TC1 and TC4 workshops reached their third edition in 2021, while TC2 and TC3 closed with the fourth edition. The main lessons learned relate to data availability, collaboration opportunities, machine learning and artificial intelligence methodologies and approaches, and incentives for future ATM implementations

Compile-Time Optimisation of Store Usage in Lazy Functional Programs

Functional languages offer a number of advantages over their imperative counterparts. However, a substantial amount of the time spent on processing functional programs is due to the large amount of storage management which must be performed. Two apparent reasons for this are that the programmer is prevented from including explicit storage management operations in programs which have a purely functional semantics, and that more readable programs are often far from optimal in their use of storage. Correspondingly, two alternative approaches to the optimisation of store usage at compile-time are presented in this thesis. The first approach is called compile-time garbage collection. This approach involves determining at compile-time which cells are no longer required for the evaluation of a program, and making these cells available for further use. This overcomes the problem of a programmer not being able to indicate explicitly that a store cell can be made available for further use. Three different methods for performing compile-time garbage collection are presented in this thesis; compile-time garbage marking, explicit deallocation and destructive allocation. Of these three methods, it is found that destructive allocation is the only method which is of practical use. The second approach to the optimisation of store usage is called compile-time garbage avoidance. This approach involves transforming programs into semantically equivalent programs which produce less garbage at compile-time. This attempts to overcome the problem of more readable programs being far from optimal in their use of storage. In this thesis, it is shown how to guarantee that the process of compile-time garbage avoidance will terminate. Both of the described approaches to the optimisation of store usage make use of the information obtained by usage counting analysis. This involves counting the number of times each value in a program is used. In this thesis, a reference semantics is defined against which the correctness of usage counting analyses can be proved. A usage counting analysis is then defined and proved to be correct with respect to this reference semantics. The information obtained by this analysis is used to annotate programs for compile-time garbage collection, and to guide the transformation when compile-time garbage avoidance is performed. It is found that compile-time garbage avoidance produces greater increases in efficiency than compile-time garbage collection, but much of the garbage which can be collected by compile-time garbage collection cannot be avoided at compile-time. The two approaches are therefore complementary, and the expressions resulting from compile-time garbage avoidance transformations can be annotated for compile-time garbage collection to further optimise the use of storage

Designing an institutional network for improving farm animal welfare in the EU

Improvements in the welfare of farmed animals in the EU have been achieved by legislation, increased welfare capacity in the food chain, greater public awareness, welfare measurement tools and dissemination of best practice. However, pressure for improvement grows. The EC recognises that delivering improved welfare would best be achieved by increasing welfare capacity, including establishing a Network of Welfare Reference Centres to provide support for welfare research, knowledge transfer and policy design. Designing a structure for this Network presents a challenge, as it would have multiple functions, interact with diverse stakeholders and operate in a complex environment. Here, we describe the use of a novel strategic planning approach to design an optimal structure for this Network. Our evaluation found that no existing structure was ideal, but that by taking functional units from several existing models, an optimal model could be identified

A Survey on the Contributions of Software-Defined Networking to Traffic Engineering

Since the appearance of OpenFlow back in 2008, software-defined networking (SDN) has gained momentum. Although there are some discrepancies between the standards developing organizations working with SDN about what SDN is and how it is defined, they all outline traffic engineering (TE) as a key application. One of the most common objectives of TE is the congestion minimization, where techniques such as traffic splitting among multiple paths or advanced reservation systems are used. In such a scenario, this manuscript surveys the role of a comprehensive list of SDN protocols in TE solutions, in order to assess how these protocols can benefit TE. The SDN protocols have been categorized using the SDN architecture proposed by the open networking foundation, which differentiates among data-controller plane interfaces, application-controller plane interfaces, and management interfaces, in order to state how the interface type in which they operate influences TE. In addition, the impact of the SDN protocols on TE has been evaluated by comparing them with the path computation element (PCE)-based architecture. The PCE-based architecture has been selected to measure the impact of SDN on TE because it is the most novel TE architecture until the date, and because it already defines a set of metrics to measure the performance of TE solutions. We conclude that using the three types of interfaces simultaneously will result in more powerful and enhanced TE solutions, since they benefit TE in complementary ways.European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GN4) under Grant 691567 Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Secure Deployment of Services Over SDN and NFV-based Networks Project S&NSEC under Grant TEC2013-47960-C4-3-