27,795 research outputs found
Automatic evolution of conceptual building architectures
This thesis describes research in which genetic programming is used to automatically
evolve shape grammars that construct three dimensional models
of possible external building architectures. A completely automated fitness
function is used, which evaluates the three dimensional building models according
to different geometric properties such as surface normals, height,
building footprint, and more. In order to evaluate the buildings on the different
criteria, a multi-objective fitness function is used. The results obtained
from the automated system were successful in satisfying the multiple
objective criteria as well as creating interesting and unique designs that
a human-aided system might not discover. In this study of evolutionary
design, the architectures created are not meant to be fully functional and
structurally sound blueprints for constructing a building, but are meant to
be inspirational ideas for possible architectural designs. The evolved models
are applicable for today's architectural industries as well as in the video
game and movie industries. Many new avenues for future work have also
been discovered and highlighted
Semantic Component Composition
Building complex software systems necessitates the use of component-based
architectures. In theory, of the set of components needed for a design, only
some small portion of them are "custom"; the rest are reused or refactored
existing pieces of software. Unfortunately, this is an idealized situation.
Just because two components should work together does not mean that they will
work together.
The "glue" that holds components together is not just technology. The
contracts that bind complex systems together implicitly define more than their
explicit type. These "conceptual contracts" describe essential aspects of
extra-system semantics: e.g., object models, type systems, data representation,
interface action semantics, legal and contractual obligations, and more.
Designers and developers spend inordinate amounts of time technologically
duct-taping systems to fulfill these conceptual contracts because system-wide
semantics have not been rigorously characterized or codified. This paper
describes a formal characterization of the problem and discusses an initial
implementation of the resulting theoretical system.Comment: 9 pages, submitted to GCSE/SAIG '0
Towards Consistency Management for a Business-Driven Development of SOA
The usage of the Service Oriented Architecture
(SOA) along with the Business Process Management has emerged
as a valuable solution for the complex (business process driven)
system engineering. With a Model Driven Engineering where the
business process models drive the supporting service component
architectures, less effort is gone into the Business/IT alignment
during the initial development activities, and the IT developers
can rapidly proceed with the SOA implementation. However, the
difference between the design principles of the emerging domainspecific
languages imposes serious challenges in the following
re-design phases. Moreover, enabling evolutions on the business
process models while keeping them synchronized with the underlying
software architecture models is of high relevance to the key
elements of any Business Driven Development (BDD). Given a
business process update, this paper introduces an incremental
model transformation approach that propagates this update
to the related service component configurations. It, therefore,
supports the change propagation among heterogenous domainspecific
languages, e.g., the BPMN and the SCA. As a major
contribution, our approach makes model transformation more
tractable to reconfigure system architecture without disrupting its
structural consistency. We propose a synchronizer that provides
the BPMN-to-SCA model synchronization with the help of the
conditional graph rewriting
Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences
To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices
Bounded Rationality and Heuristics in Humans and in Artificial Cognitive Systems
In this paper I will present an analysis of the impact that the notion of âbounded rationalityâ,
introduced by Herbert Simon in his book âAdministrative Behaviorâ, produced in the
field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In particular, by focusing on the field of Automated
Decision Making (ADM), I will show how the introduction of the cognitive dimension into
the study of choice of a rational (natural) agent, indirectly determined - in the AI field - the
development of a line of research aiming at the realisation of artificial systems whose decisions
are based on the adoption of powerful shortcut strategies (known as heuristics) based
on âsatisficingâ - i.e. non optimal - solutions to problem solving. I will show how the
âheuristic approachâ to problem solving allowed, in AI, to face problems of combinatorial
complexity in real-life situations and still represents an important strategy for the design
and implementation of intelligent systems
The Semantic Grid: A future e-Science infrastructure
e-Science offers a promising vision of how computer and communication technology can support and enhance the scientific process. It does this by enabling scientists to generate, analyse, share and discuss their insights, experiments and results in an effective manner. The underlying computer infrastructure that provides these facilities is commonly referred to as the Grid. At this time, there are a number of grid applications being developed and there is a whole raft of computer technologies that provide fragments of the necessary functionality. However there is currently a major gap between these endeavours and the vision of e-Science in which there is a high degree of easy-to-use and seamless automation and in which there are flexible collaborations and computations on a global scale. To bridge this practiceâaspiration divide, this paper presents a research agenda whose aim is to move from the current state of the art in e-Science infrastructure, to the future infrastructure that is needed to support the full richness of the e-Science vision. Here the future e-Science research infrastructure is termed the Semantic Grid (Semantic Grid to Grid is meant to connote a similar relationship to the one that exists between the Semantic Web and the Web). In particular, we present a conceptual architecture for the Semantic Grid. This architecture adopts a service-oriented perspective in which distinct stakeholders in the scientific process, represented as software agents, provide services to one another, under various service level agreements, in various forms of marketplace. We then focus predominantly on the issues concerned with the way that knowledge is acquired and used in such environments since we believe this is the key differentiator between current grid endeavours and those envisioned for the Semantic Grid
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