33,118 research outputs found
A framework for the simulation of structural software evolution
This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 ACM.As functionality is added to an aging piece of software, its original design and structure will tend to erode. This can lead to high coupling, low cohesion and other undesirable effects associated with spaghetti architectures. The underlying forces that cause such degradation have been the subject of much research. However, progress in this field is slow, as its complexity makes it difficult to isolate the causal flows leading to these effects. This is further complicated by the difficulty of generating enough empirical data, in sufficient quantity, and attributing such data to specific points in the causal chain. This article describes a framework for simulating the structural evolution of software. A complete simulation model is built by incrementally adding modules to the framework, each of which contributes an individual evolutionary effect. These effects are then combined to form a multifaceted simulation that evolves a fictitious code base in a manner approximating real-world behavior. We describe the underlying principles and structures of our framework from a theoretical and user perspective; a validation of a simple set of evolutionary parameters is then provided and three empirical software studies generated from open-source software (OSS) are used to support claims and generated results. The research illustrates how simulation can be used to investigate a complex and under-researched area of the development cycle. It also shows the value of incorporating certain human traits into a simulationâfactors that, in real-world system development, can significantly influence evolutionary structures
Agents for educational games and simulations
This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications
Modelling and Simulation of Asynchronous Real-Time Systems using Timed Rebeca
In this paper we propose an extension of the Rebeca language that can be used
to model distributed and asynchronous systems with timing constraints. We
provide the formal semantics of the language using Structural Operational
Semantics, and show its expressiveness by means of examples. We developed a
tool for automated translation from timed Rebeca to the Erlang language, which
provides a first implementation of timed Rebeca. We can use the tool to set the
parameters of timed Rebeca models, which represent the environment and
component variables, and use McErlang to run multiple simulations for different
settings. Timed Rebeca restricts the modeller to a pure asynchronous
actor-based paradigm, where the structure of the model represents the service
oriented architecture, while the computational model matches the network
infrastructure. Simulation is shown to be an effective analysis support,
specially where model checking faces almost immediate state explosion in an
asynchronous setting.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2011, arXiv:1107.584
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
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