The fractal urban coherence in biourbanism: the factual elements of urban fabric

This article is available online and will be inserted in also printed format in the Journal in October 2013.During the last few decades, modern urban fabric lost some very important elements, only because urban design and planning turned out to be stylistic aerial views or new landscapes of iconic technological landmarks. Biourbanism attempts to re-establish lost values and balance, not only in urban fabric, but also in reinforcing human-oriented design principles in either micro or macro scale. Biourbanism operates as a catalyst of theories and practices in both architecture and urban design to guarantee high standards in services, which are currently fundamental to the survival of communities worldwide. Human life in cities emerges during connectivity via geometrical continuity of grids and fractals, via path connectivity among highly active nodes, via exchange/movement of people and, finally via exchange of information (networks). In most human activities taking place in central areas of cities, people often feel excluded from design processes in the built environment. This paper aims at exploring the reasons for which, fractal cities, which have being conceived as symmetries and patterns, can have scientifically proven and beneficial impact on human fitness of body and mind; research has found that, brain traumas caused by visual agnosia become evident when patterns disappear from either 2D or 3D emergences in architectural and urban design.ADT Fund

On environments as systemic exoskeletons: Crosscutting optimizers and antifragility enablers

Classic approaches to General Systems Theory often adopt an individual perspective and a limited number of systemic classes. As a result, those classes include a wide number and variety of systems that result equivalent to each other. This paper introduces a different approach: First, systems belonging to a same class are further differentiated according to five major general characteristics. This introduces a "horizontal dimension" to system classification. A second component of our approach considers systems as nested compositional hierarchies of other sub-systems. The resulting "vertical dimension" further specializes the systemic classes and makes it easier to assess similarities and differences regarding properties such as resilience, performance, and quality-of-experience. Our approach is exemplified by considering a telemonitoring system designed in the framework of Flemish project "Little Sister". We show how our approach makes it possible to design intelligent environments able to closely follow a system's horizontal and vertical organization and to artificially augment its features by serving as crosscutting optimizers and as enablers of antifragile behaviors.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal of Reliable Intelligent Environments. Extends conference papers [10,12,15]. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40860-015-0006-

Aspects of Assembly and Cascaded Aspects of Assembly: Logical and Temporal Properties

Highly dynamic computing environments, like ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments, require frequent adaptation of applications. This has to be done in a timely fashion, and the adaptation process must be as fast as possible and mastered. Moreover the adaptation process has to ensure a consistent result when finished whereas adaptations to be implemented cannot be anticipated at design time. In this paper we present our mechanism for self-adaptation based on the aspect oriented programming paradigm called Aspect of Assembly (AAs). Using AAs: (1) the adaptations process is fast and its duration is mastered; (2) adaptations' entities are independent of each other thanks to the weaver logical merging mechanism; and (3) the high variability of the software infrastructure can be managed using a mono or multi-cycle weaving approach.Comment: 14 pages, published in International Journal of Computer Science, Volume 8, issue 4, Jul 2011, ISSN 1694-081

Properties for Component Model: The definition Perspective

The presence of a large number of component models to date should be able to offer software developers a wide variety of component models -- which they can easily choose from -- for their software development projects. However, the opposite situation is currently observed, where the presence of many component models has caused difficulties in making the selection. Lack of properties or characteristics that can be used as a basis to perform objective comparison between the existing models is believed to have caused the difficulties. In this paper, a list of component model properties is derived by thoroughly examining the available component model definitions. Results from a comparative analysis performed on six component models using the properties show that the properties enable a more objective comparison between the existing component models to be performed

Constructing Domain-Specific Component Frameworks through Architecture Refinement

Acceptance rate: 38%International audienceRecently, a plethora of domain-specific component frameworks (DSCF) emerges. Although the current trend emphasizes generative programming methods as cornerstones of software development, they are commonly applied in a costly, ad-hoc fashion. However, we believe that DSCFs share the same subset of concepts and patterns. In this paper we propose two contributions to DSCF development. First, we propose DomainComponents --- a high-level abstraction to capture semantics of domain concepts provided by containers, and we identify patterns facilitating their implementation. Second, we develop a generic framework that automatically generates implementation of DomainComponents semantics, thus addressing domain-specific services with one unified approach. To evaluate benefits of our approach we have conducted several case studies that span different domain-specific challenges

SCA Platform Specifications - Version 2.0

The SCOrWare project aims at building an open source implementation of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) specifications. This implementation is composed of 1) a runtime platform for deploying, executing, and managing SCAbased applications, 2) a set of development tools for modeling, designing, and implementing SCA-based applications, and 3) a set of demonstrators. This document contains the specifications of the SCOrWare runtime platform. Section 1.1 lists the parts of SCA specifications supported by the SCOrWare platform. Section 1.2 gives an overview of the SCOrWare platform, and a summary of next chapters of this document. Section 1.3 lists the main update from the version 1 to the version 2 of this documen

Behavioural Models for Distributed Fractal Components

This paper presents a formal behavioural specification framework together with its applications in different contexts for specifying and verifying the correct behaviour of distributed Fractal components. Our framework allows us to build behavioural models for applications ranging from sequential Fractal components, to distributed objects, and finally distributed components. Our models are able to characterise both functional and non-functional behaviours, and the interaction between the two concerns. Finally, this work has resulted in the development of tools allowing the non-expert programmer to specify the behaviour of his components, and automatically, or semi-automatically verify properties of his application