Plataforma de gestión para aplicaciones IIoT con requisitos de calidad de servicio

El contenido de los capítulos 3, 4, 5 y 6 está sujeto a confidencialidad. 82 p.La Internet Industrial de las Cosas (IIoT) plantea una serie de retos tecnológicos que suponen la motivación de esta tesis. Por una parte es necesario gestionar aplicaciones geográficamente distribuidas y muy heterogéneas en cuanto a plataformas hardware, redes y protocolos de comunicación. Por otra parte, la naturaleza de las aplicaciones es intrínsecamente dinámica, y por tanto requiere de soporte para la reconfiguración dinámica y autónoma de los sistemas. Finalmente, existen una serie de requisitos no funcionales que son claves desde un enfoque industrial y que contemplan aspectos tales como la calidad de servicio, la tolerancia a fallos o la seguridad funcional.En este contexto, desde la perspectiva de la ingeniería del software y con el objetivo de facilitar el desarrollo y soporte de aplicaciones IIoT, se ha concebido una plataforma de gestión de aplicaciones distribuidas basadas en componentes, que soporta la reconfiguración dinámica y autónoma de las mismas en base a criterios de optimización de los recursos y de calidad de servicio. La plataforma soporta una serie de paradigmas de comunicación y modelos de ejecución que abarcan una amplia tipología de aplicaciones. Para su validación, se ha diseñado y desarrollado un demostrador en el campo de los almacenes automatizados

Plataforma de gestión para aplicaciones IIoT con requisitos de calidad de servicio

El contenido de los capítulos 3, 4, 5 y 6 está sujeto a confidencialidad. 82 p.La Internet Industrial de las Cosas (IIoT) plantea una serie de retos tecnológicos que suponen la motivación de esta tesis. Por una parte es necesario gestionar aplicaciones geográficamente distribuidas y muy heterogéneas en cuanto a plataformas hardware, redes y protocolos de comunicación. Por otra parte, la naturaleza de las aplicaciones es intrínsecamente dinámica, y por tanto requiere de soporte para la reconfiguración dinámica y autónoma de los sistemas. Finalmente, existen una serie de requisitos no funcionales que son claves desde un enfoque industrial y que contemplan aspectos tales como la calidad de servicio, la tolerancia a fallos o la seguridad funcional.En este contexto, desde la perspectiva de la ingeniería del software y con el objetivo de facilitar el desarrollo y soporte de aplicaciones IIoT, se ha concebido una plataforma de gestión de aplicaciones distribuidas basadas en componentes, que soporta la reconfiguración dinámica y autónoma de las mismas en base a criterios de optimización de los recursos y de calidad de servicio. La plataforma soporta una serie de paradigmas de comunicación y modelos de ejecución que abarcan una amplia tipología de aplicaciones. Para su validación, se ha diseñado y desarrollado un demostrador en el campo de los almacenes automatizados

Social enterprise and community development : theory into practice in two Cambodian villages

Social enterprise (or business driven by social objectives) is a prominent focus of development policy. In higher income countries it has become a strategy for regional development or regeneration by creating optimal levels of social value out of under-utilised resources. In developing countries, social enterprise is seen to offer hope for sustainable development by reducing dependency on aid, developing markets and improving the basis for economic growth. Social enterprise is widely linked to microfinance, corporate social responsibility and ‘business at the bottom of the pyramid’ and there is particular attention to heroic, socially entrepreneurial individuals. But critical literature shows there is a tension between the top-down ‘development’ driven view of social enterprise and a bottom-upwards grassroots community development approach driven by wellbeing. This thesis explores the second agenda in the context of Cambodia, a post-colonial and post-conflict, aid dependent developing country that has undergone rapid economic transition since the late 1990’s. Support for the top down, development driven view of social enterprise in Cambodia has become a prominent focus of international development institutions while NGO’s are increasingly turning to social enterprise as a substitute for grants as the nature of developmental aid assigned to the country has changed. The thesis asks – How are social enterprises likely to be understood at the grassroots community level in Cambodia? and What discourses of social enterprise are likely to yield sustainable effects at this level of society? This research is multi-disciplinary, drawing from economic geography and substantive economic anthropology as well as the social enterprise management and social entrepreneurship literature. It engages with and critiques some of the most widely held theoretical approaches concerning social value and economic value, social capital, collectivity and solidarity, the attributes of social entrepreneurs and the naturalised ethics of social entrepreneurs. Theoretically, I make the case for seeing social value in pragmatic terms as an embodied process that is situated in context. This allows for an historicised analysis of reciprocity and mutual self-help that is oriented towards contextualised outcomes vis-a-vis wellbeing. The actions of some socially entrepreneurial actors give hope for social economies at the grassroots but they also call ethics into the question. It has to be appreciated that economic solidarity is processed through a host of competing interests and obligations. This thesis was undertaken using an action research project in two adjacent peri-urban villages in Kampong Cham Province, Cambodia. The project was undertaken in collaboration with ten villagers with different skills and a partially shared interest in community development. It began with activities to stimulate new economic subjectivities and to amplify latent subjectivities and moved onto opportunities for social enterprise development that could foster sustainable and democratic development pathways. Significant barriers to grassroots led, cooperatively managed social enterprises were encountered. But in the research process ‘little narratives’ were uncovered, embodied within basic economic activities that underwrite villagers’ survival while also having social, stabilising effects within the villages. The findings court controversy, as far as past traumatic events are found to have an enduring impact on economic subjectivities and grassroots reciprocity which intermeshes with the more recent impact of development strategies including microfinance and ‘free trade zones.’ The research has implications for how projects to promote social enterprise development within village communities might be approached by Third Sector organisations in Cambodia

Um modelo para provisão de garantia dinâmica de tempo real em middleware baseado em componentes

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Elétrica, Florianópolis, 2007.A abordagem baseada em componentes foi desenvolvida em resposta à necessidade de lidar com a complexidade das aplicações e diminuir o ciclo de desenvolvimento do software. A separação em lógica de aplicação e parte não funcional em um componente permite que requisitos temporais sejam configurados, ao invés de inseridos ao longo do código. Como resultado, os componentes se tornam menos dependentes da plataforma subjacente e podem ser reusados em aplicações diferentes. Este trabalho apresenta um modelo para provisão de garantia dinâmica em sistemas de tempo real distribuídos baseados em componentes. O modelo desenvolvido condiciona a aceitação de um cliente à disponibilidade de recursos para satisfazer os requisitos temporais deste cliente e de clientes previamente aceitos. Este modelo permite a adoção de diferentes algoritmos para o teste de aceitação, se adequando ao modelo das tarefas escalonadas ou à capacidade da plataforma. Outra contribuição é um serviço de monitoramento de tempos de resposta de componentes, inicialmente desenvolvidos para prover dados iniciais para o modelo de garantia dinâmica. O serviço de monitoramento permite que o mecanismo de garantia dinâmica se mantenha preciso apesar da flutuação da carga computacional do servidor e permite a aplicação de algoritmos probabilistas para o modelo de garantia dinâmica.Abstract : The component-based approach was developed in response to the need to cope with application complexity and reduce the software development time. The component separation of concerns allows real-time constraints to be configured instead of hard coded. As a result, components become less dependent from the underlying platform and can be reused in different applications. This work presentes a model for real-time dynamic guarantee for component-based distributed systems. According to the model, the acceptance of a client to the system is subject to the availability of resources to satisfy all clients real-time constraints. This model allows the use of different algorithms for the acceptance test, according to the application task model or the platform capacity. Another contribution is the response time monitoring service, developed to provide input data for the dynamic guarantee model. This service provides updates for the dynamic guarantee model and also allows the use of probabilistic approaches for the acceptance test

Sacred Civics

Sacred Civics argues that societal transformation requires that spirituality and sacred values are essential to reimagining patterns of how we live, organize and govern ourselves, determine and distribute wealth, inhabit and design cities, and construct relationships with others and with nature. The book brings together transdisciplinary and global academics, professionals, and activists from a range of backgrounds to question assumptions that are fused deep into the code of how societies operate, and to draw on extraordinary wisdom from ancient Indigenous traditions; to social and political movements like Black Lives Matter, the commons, and wellbeing economies; to technologies for participatory futures where people collaborate to reimagine and change culture. Looking at cities and human settlements as the sites of transformation, the book focuses on values, commons, and wisdom to demonstrate that how we choose to live together, to recognize interdependencies, to build, grow, create, and love—matters. Using multiple methodologies to integrate varied knowledge forms and practices, this truly ground-breaking volume includes contributions from renowned and rising voices. Sacred Civics is a must-read for anyone interested in intersectional discussions on social justice, inclusivity, participatory design, healthy communities, and future cities

Feeding Dar es Salaam: a symbiotic food system perspective

This thesis is a sociological analysis of the agri-food system that feeds most of the over four and a half million residents of the fast-growing city of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. It is based on qualitative research that has generated a picture of the food system that supplies the important foods for the majority of residents of the city. The research took an actor orientated approach and started from urban eaters and then followed the food back through retailers, processors and transporters to the primary producers. Methodological lessons are derived from this process in particular the elaboration of the ‘ride-along’ as a research method. Foods followed include maize, rice, potatoes, green vegetables, eggs and milk. Other foods such as beef and chicken have also been touched on especially in relation to marketing and slaughtering operations. Instead of dismissing what has been found as ‘informal’ or trying to fit it into structuralist paradigms, from orthodox economic or political economy perspectives, I have applied a grounded theory approach in seeking to understand the core ordering principles and rationality of this system that has shown a remarkable resilience over many years. Of particular interest, especially when looking at the functioning of market places and how new actors enter into the food system, is that more important to the food system than competition are various forms of collaboration. This study comes at a time when global food production and distribution is dominated by powerful transnational corporations through an agro-industrial food system that is widely critiqued for its negative environmental and social impacts. Many argue that this industrial food system is unsustainable, yet its expansion can seem inevitable and alternatives are seen by many as incapable of feeding the world’s growing and increasingly urban population. ‘Value chain’ interventions have become popular among ‘development’ practitioners and policy makers seeking to integrate more producers into the global industrial food system rather than challenging that food system. What I have found, and present in this thesis, is a ‘symbiotic food system’ made up of multitudes of small-scale and interdependent actors that produce the food and get it to urban eaters at a city feeding scale. They do this without any vertically - or horizontally -integrated corporate structures nor with government planning and organization of the food system. This food system responds well to the needs of urban eaters, especially those in poverty, and to the interests and circumstances of small scale food producers. It is a food system that outperforms value chain interventions in returns to producers and value to eaters and has social, economic and environmental advantages when compared to the agro-industrial and corporate dominated system. This challenges assumptions that corporate food chains are necessary, or desirable, to feed cities sustainably. The symbiotic food system that feeds Dar es Salaam is not perfect, but it is working and I believe worthy of further research and interventions to create a more enabling environment for such foods systems to flourish in Tanzania and elsewhere.</p

Rangeland Systems: Processes, Management and Challenges

environmental management; environmental law; ecojustice; ecolog

Casting Bread Upon the Waters: American Farming and the International Wheat Market, 1880-1920

In the late 19th and early 20th century, as wheat production and marketing were transformed in scale and in practice, American farmers tried to make sense of how they were positioned within a rapidly growing and changing international market. They tried to formulate a response that would gain them some sense of control over a market that was described by some as vast and powerful as nature itself, and by others as a playground for the wealthy speculators who supposedly controlled it. By situating the farmers within the changing international grain market this thesis explains the challenges that they were up against. American farmers understood their plight through narratives of market failure, common enough during the agricultural depression of the 1890s, as well as in the first decade of the twentieth century: declining prices, distant famines, and attempts to corner the wheat market reinforced the notion that supply and demand were not working "properly" to produce prosperity for all. During the Populist period, farmers organized to demand relief, in the form of government intervention, from what they perceived as a predatory market system that guaranteed profits to speculators but usually left producers with little to show for their labor. They mounted a moral critique of the marketing system, arguing that merchants and middlemen had organized the market in such a way as to control it through unethical and damaging means such as pools and price agreements. These efforts having largely failed, farmers turned increasingly to the cooperative movement to try to exert influence in the marketplace. The crisis of World War I created a different kind of market failure, one that prompted different forms of government intervention in both wheat importing and wheat exporting countries. In both cases these interventions were designed to stabilize prices through centralized oversight, something the farmers had repeatedly asked for and failed to achieve, but found, in the end, did little to secure their way of life. In the aftermath of war, in what was for wheat farmers a permanent crisis requiring permanent government intervention, farmers continued to identify the middlemen as their problem, but after 50 years of controversy, the merchants and exchanges had established a relatively well-oiled and highly technical system of marketing and trading to handle commodities in an international market. Farmers were left with little choice but to think of themselves as businessmen dealing with other businessmen, and this position overtook the older moral discourse as farmers sought to marshal their cooperative strength toward forming their own price-controlling marketing organizations