The future of Beijing urban courtyards

The Beijing Siheyuan is typical and representative of traditional Chinese residential construction. It is not only an architectural form but also a reflection of the traditional modes of living in Beijing. However, with the changes in family structure and people’s living needs, the spatial pattern of traditional courtyards has been unable to meet the life and economic needs of modern society. The scarce public space, poor living environment, and the low-quality of residents’ life led Siheyuan to lose its original status. Despite these challenges, whether for the protection of the overall style of Beijing’s old city or the renewal of modern urban functions, the Siheyuan is crucial. Based on the theory of this unique typology, this thesis summarizes Beijing Siheyuan’s current challenges and development opportunities by combing through the historical development process of Siheyuan in the Baita Temple area of Beijing for alternative forms of transformation. Through the study of domestic Siheyuan transformation cases, and the latest protection strategies in the area, as well as direct surveys with residents on the current situation of Beijing\u27s Baita Temple area, a balanced view of Beijing\u27s important courtyard cluster area, is obtained. On this basis, this thesis summarized the building modules of Beijing Siheyuan, and through organic integration, put forward effective suggestions for the protection and renewal of the Beijing Baita Temple area. The spatial sequence of courtyards is reconsidered considering two priorities: the public and private needs of the courtyard space and the interaction with the community environment. The motifs of the public space and residential unit are extracted from the traditional courtyard structure, and the traditional two-layer courtyard is taken as an example to expand and upgrade public space, reorganize and interpret the residential units. Combining the logic of the traditional Chinese construction system, the original architectural sequence that is no longer suitable for modern lifestyles has been optimized and transformed. The design is based on the user\u27s point of view, revolving around the concept of “Simultaneity”, giving residents a sense of belonging. Meanwhile, without affecting the traditional appearance and form of the courtyard, this design bases on the people-oriented purpose, injects the functional logic into modern life, making the residents have a more authentic life experience

Integration Features in the Development of Software Product Line Architecture

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on August 17, 2015Thesis advisor: Yongjie ZhengVitaIncludes bibliographic references (pages 33-36)Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2015Software product line architecture (PLA) is one of the most promising applications of software architecture. This paper presents a pragmatic PLA development approach with tool support. It addresses two existing issues of PLA development, the difficulty of relating product line features to PLA, and the overhead of manually creating and maintaining variation points in PLA. The approach is implemented and integrated in ArchStudio, an Eclipse-based architecture development toolset. The developed tool supports (1) side-by-side integrated development of features, PLA, and their relationships, (2) automatic variability modeling in PLA, and (3) derivation of architecture instances from the PLA model. To evaluate the scalability and effectiveness of the approach, I have used the work done by Adam Carter and Jeffrey Lanning [30] as a case study using the developed tool to create a feature-integrated architecture for the Apache Solr software system - a Java-based enterprise search server used in the Cerner Corporation.Introduction -- Background and related work -- Tools developed -- Implementation -- Results and evaluation -- Conclusion, availability, and future wor

Model-Driven Productivity Evaluation for Self-Adaptive Context-Oriented Software Development

Anticipating context changes using a model-based approach requires a formal procedure for analysing and mod- elling their context-dependent functionality, and a stable descrip- tion of the architecture which supports dynamic decision-making and architecture evolution. This article demonstrates the capabil- ities of the context-oriented component-based application-model- driven architecture (COCA-MDA) to support the development of self-adaptive applications; we describe a state-of-the-art case study and evaluate the development effort involved in adopting the COCA-MDA in constructing the application. An intensive analysis of the application requirements simplified the process of modelling the application’s behavioural model; therefore, instead of modelling several variation models, the developers modelled an extra-functionality model. COCA-MDA reduces the development effort because it maintains a clear separation of concerns and em- ploys a decomposition mechanism to produce a context-oriented component model which decouples the applications’ core func- tionality from the context-dependent functionality. Estimating the MDA approach’s productivity can help the software developers to select the best MDA-based methodology from the available solutions proposed in the literature. Thus, counting the source line of code is not adequate for evaluating the development effort of the MDA-based methodology. Quantifying the maintenance adjustment factor of the new, adapted, and reused code is a better estimate of the development effort of the MDA approaches

Issues of Architectural Description Languages for Handling Dynamic Reconfiguration

Dynamic reconfiguration is the action of modifying a software system at runtime. Several works have been using architectural specification as the basis for dynamic reconfiguration. Indeed ADLs (architecture description languages) let architects describe the elements that could be reconfigured as well as the set of constraints to which the system must conform during reconfiguration. In this work, we investigate the ADL literature in order to illustrate how reconfiguration is supported in four well-known ADLs: pi-ADL, ACME, C2SADL and Dynamic Wright. From this review, we conclude that none of these ADLs: (i) addresses the issue of consistently reconfiguring both instances and types; (ii) takes into account the behaviour of architectural elements during reconfiguration; and (iii) provides support for assessing reconfiguration, e.g., verifying the transition against properties.Comment: 6\`eme Conf\'erence francophone sur les architectures logicielles (CAL'2012), Montpellier : France (2012

Measuring the Impact of Code Dependencies on Software Architecture Recovery Techniques

Many techniques have been proposed to automatically recover software architectures from software implementations. A thorough comparison among the recovery techniques is needed to understand their effectiveness and applicability. This study improves on previous studies in two ways. First, we study the impact of leveraging more accurate symbol dependencies on the accuracy of architecture recovery techniques. In addition, we evaluate other factors of the input dependencies such as the level of granularity, the impact of virtual call resolution, global variable usage and whether using direct dependencies provides better results than using transitive dependencies. Previous studies have not extensively studied how the quality of the input might affect the quality of the output for architecture recovery techniques. Second, we study a system (Chromium) that is substantially larger (10 million lines of code) than those included in previous studies. Obtaining the ground-truth architecture of Chromium involved two years of collaboration with its developers. As part of this work we developed a new submodule-based technique to recover preliminary versions of ground-truth architectures. The other systems that we study have been examined previously. In some cases, we have updated the ground-truth architectures to newer versions, and in other cases we have corrected newly discovered inconsistencies. Our evaluation of nine variants of six state-of-the-art architecture recovery techniques on 8 types of dependencies shows that symbol dependencies generally produce architectures with higher accuracies than include dependencies. We also observed that using a higher level of granularity (i.e., module level) and direct dependencies helps generating better architectures. Despite this improvement, the overall accuracy is low for all recovery techniques. The results suggest that (1) in addition to architecture recovery techniques, the type of dependencies used as their inputs is another factor to consider for high recovery accuracy, and (2) more accurate recovery techniques are needed. Our results show that some of the studied architecture recovery techniques (ACDC, Bunch-SAHC, WCA and ARC) scale to the 10M lines-of-code range (the size of Chromium), whereas others do not

Productivity Evaluation of Self-Adaptive Software Model Driven Architecture

Anticipating context changes using a model-based approach requires a formal procedure for analysing and modelling context-dependent functionality and stable description of the architecture which supports dynamic decision-making and architecture evolution. This article demonstrates the capabilities of the context-oriented component-based application-model-driven architecture (COCA-MDA) to support the development of self- adaptive applications; the authors describe a state-of-the-art case study and evaluate the development effort involved in adopting the COCA-MDA in constructing the application. An intensive analysis of the applica- tion requirements simplified the process of modelling the application’s behavioural model; therefore, instead of modelling several variation models, the developers modelled an extra-functionality model. COCA-MDA reduces the development effort because it maintains a clear separation of concerns and employs a decom- position mechanism to produce a context-oriented component model which decouples the applications’ core functionality from the context-dependent functionality. Estimating the MDA approach’s productivity can help the software developers select the best MDA-based methodology from the available solutions. Thus, counting the source line of code is not adequate for evaluating the development effort of the MDA-based methodology. Quantifying the maintenance adjustment factor of the new, adapted, and reused code is a better estimate of the development effort of the MDA approaches

Innovación y tradición: intervenciones contemporáneas en China

L'accelerat desenvolupament econòmic a la Xina en els darrers anys ha tingut àmplies i diverses repercussions. Aquest creixement ha deixat una empremta significativa a la demografia, la construcció, la qualitat de vida i altres àmbits. La Xina ha experimentat un procés d'urbanització destacat globalment. No obstant això, el desenvolupament arquitectònic no sempre ha estat a l'altura del ràpid auge constructiu que ha tingut lloc. La necessitat de construir espais ha portat a la demolició de ciutats senceres i estructures històriques, donant pas a la construcció de nous paisatges urbans que, de vegades, no tenen una identitat distintiva. Aquest projecte té com a enfocament principal l'estudi i l'anàlisi de les intervencions arquitectòniques contemporànies a la Xina, específicament al camp de la rehabilitació. S'examina com aquestes intervencions han contribuït a la millora tant a nivell espacial com a l'entorn urbà. El propòsit és adquirir una comprensió del diàleg que sorgeix entre les estructures existents i les noves interpretacions que empren tècniques contemporànies, dutes a terme per arquitectes de la nova generació de la Xina.El acelerado desarrollo económico en China en los últimos años ha tenido amplias y diversas repercusiones. Este crecimiento ha dejado una huella significativa en la demografía, la construcción, la calidad de vida y otros ámbitos. China ha experimentado un proceso de urbanización destacado a nivel global. Sin embargo, el desarrollo arquitectónico no siempre ha estado a la altura del rápido auge constructivo que ha tenido lugar. La necesidad de construir espacios ha llevado a la demolición de ciudades enteras y estructuras históricas, dando paso a la construcción de nuevos paisajes urbanos que, en ocasiones, carecen de una identidad distintiva. Este proyecto tiene como enfoque principal el estudio y análisis de las intervenciones arquitectónicas contemporáneas en China, específicamente en el campo de la rehabilitación. Se examina cómo estas intervenciones han contribuido a la mejora tanto a nivel espacial como en el entorno urbano. El propósito es adquirir una comprensión del diálogo que surge entre las estructuras existentes y las nuevas interpretaciones que emplean técnicas contemporáneas, llevadas a cabo por arquitectos de la nueva generación de China.The rapid economic development in China in recent years has had extensive and diverse repercussions. This growth has left a significant mark on demographics, construction, quality of life, and other areas. China has experienced a remarkable urbanization process at a global level. However, architectural development has not always kept up with the rapid construction boom that has taken place. The need to build spaces has led to the demolition of entire cities and historical structures, giving way to the construction of new urban landscapes that, at times, lack a distinctive identity. This project primarily focuses on the study and analysis of contemporary architectural interventions in China, specifically in the field of rehabilitation. It examines how these interventions have contributed to improvements both at the spatial level and in the urban environment. The purpose is to gain an understanding of the dialogue that emerges between existing structures and new interpretations employing contemporary techniques, carried out by China’s new generation architects

Self-adaptive application for indoor wayfinding for individuals with cognitive impairments

This article focuses on describing a Model Driven Archi- tecture (COCA-MDA) approach that facilitates the develop- ment of self-adaptive application for indoor wayfinding for individuals with cognitive impairments. COCA-MDA pro- vides the following benefits: 1) It enables the architecture to anticipate several behavioural variations based on the context and the specific needs of the individuals with cog- nitive impairments. 2) It enables the application to proac- tively anticipate or reactively address unforeseen changes through support by a dynamic-decision making and policy framework. The policy framework is based on a stable de- scription of software models and proprieties. 3) It can de- compose the application into several architectural units to allow developers to decide which part of the architecture should be notified when a specific context condition occurs

Implementing Product Line Architecture with Code Generation and Separation

Title from PDF of title page, viewed May 26, 2017Thesis advisor: Yongjie ZhengVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 45-49)Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2016Software product line engineering (SPLE) emphasizes high level of reuse and mass customization of the core assets shared by a family of software products. Product line architecture (PLA) is a promising application of architecture-centric development in SPLE. However, unfaithful implementation of the PLA and manual implementation of its variation points remain two difficult challenges that need to be addressed in this area. While many PLA implementation approaches exist, they either focus on certain types of variability or require manual implementation of variation points. In this thesis, I present a novel code generation and separation approach that can faithfully implement the PLA with a goal of reducing the inconsistency between the PLA and its implementation. Moreover, the approach can automatically implement the variation points modeled in the PLA and convert them to code entities using different techniques based on the variation point’s type. I have implemented the approach in ArchFeature, an Eclipse-based PLA development environment, and evaluated it in a case study with a chat application. The purpose of the evaluation was to validate the approach and to assess its feasibility, performance, and affordability.Introduction -- Background and related work -- Approach -- Implementation -- Evaluation -- Conclusion and future wor