Requirements for a software maintenance support environment

This thesis surveys the field of software maintenance, and addresses the maintenance requirements of the Aerospace Industry, which is developing inige projects, running over many years, and sometimes safety critical in nature (e.g. ARIANE 5, HERMES, COLUMBUS). Some projects are collaborative between distributed European partners. The industry will have to cope in the near and far future with the maintenance of these products and it will be essential to improve the software maintenance process and the environments for maintenance. Cost effective software maintenance needs an efficient, high quality and homogeneous environment or Integrated Project Support Environment (IPSE). Most IPSE work has addressed software development, and lias not fully considered the requirements of software maintenance. The aim of this project is to draw up a set of priorities and requirements for a Maintenance IPSE. An IPSE, however can only support a software maintenance method. The first stage of this project is to deline 'software maintenance best practice' addressing the organisational, managerial and technical aspects, along with an evaluation of software maintenance tools for Aerospace systems. From this and an evaluation of current IPSEs, the requirements for a Software Maintenance Support Environment are presented for maintenance of Aerospace software

Structural Separation Logic

This thesis presents structural separation logic, a novel program reasoning approach for software that manipulates both standard heaps and structured data such as lists and trees. Structural separation logic builds upon existing work in both separation logic and context logic. It considers data abstractly, much as it is exposed by library interfaces, ignoring implementation details. We provide a programming language that works over structural heaps, which are similar to standard heaps but allow data to be stored in an abstract form. We introduce abstract heaps, which extend structural heaps to enable local reasoning about abstract data. Such data can be split up with structural addresses. Structural addresses allow sub-data (e.g. a sub-tree within a tree) to be abstractly allocated, promoting the sub-data to an abstract heap cell. This cell can be analysed in isolation, then re-joined with the original data. We show how the tight footprints this allows can be refined further with promises, which enable abstract heap cells to retain information about the context from which they were allocated. We prove that our approach is sound with respect to a standard Hoare logic. We study two large examples. Firstly, we present an axiomatic semantics for the Docu- ment Object Model in structural separation logic. We demonstrate how structural separa- tion logic allows abstract reasoning about the DOM tree using tighter footprints than were possible in previous work. Secondly, we give a novel presentation of the POSIX file system library. We identify a subset of the large POSIX standard that focuses on the file system, including commands that manipulate both the file heap and the directory structure. Axioms for this system are given using structural separation logic. As file system resources are typically identified by paths, we use promises to give tight footprints to commands, so that that they do not require all the resource needed to explain paths being used. We demonstrate our reasoning using a software installer example.Open Acces

Evaluation of a fuzzy-expert system for fault diagnosis in power systems

A major problem with alarm processing and fault diagnosis in power systems is the reliance on the circuit alarm status. If there is too much information available and the time of arrival of the information is random due to weather conditions etc., the alarm activity is not easily interpreted by system operators. In respect of these problems, this thesis sets out the work that has been carried out to design and evaluate a diagnostic tool which assists power system operators during a heavy period of alarm activity in condition monitoring. The aim of employing this diagnostic tool is to monitor and raise uncertain alarm information for the system operators, which serves a proposed solution for restoring such faults. The diagnostic system uses elements of AI namely expert systems, and fuzzy logic that incorporate abductive reasoning. The objective of employing abductive reasoning is to optimise an interpretation of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) based uncertain messages when the SCADA based messages are not satisfied with simple logic alone. The method consists of object-oriented programming, which demonstrates reusability, polymorphism, and readability. The principle behind employing objectoriented techniques is to provide better insights and solutions compared to conventional artificial intelligence (Al) programming languages. The characteristics of this work involve the development and evaluation of a fuzzy-expert system which tries to optimise the uncertainty in the 16-lines 12-bus sample power system. The performance of employing this diagnostic tool is assessed based on consistent data acquisition, readability, adaptability, and maintainability on a PC. This diagnostic tool enables operators to control and present more appropriate interpretations effectively rather than a mathematical based precise fault identification when the mathematical modelling fails and the period of alarm activity is high. This research contributes to the field of power system control, in particular Scottish Hydro-Electric PLC has shown interest and supplied all the necessary information and data. The AI based power system is presented as a sample application of Scottish Hydro-Electric and KEPCO (Korea Electric Power Corporation)

The 1999 Center for Simulation of Dynamic Response in Materials Annual Technical Report

Introduction: This annual report describes research accomplishments for FY 99 of the Center for Simulation of Dynamic Response of Materials. The Center is constructing a virtual shock physics facility in which the full three dimensional response of a variety of target materials can be computed for a wide range of compressive, ten- sional, and shear loadings, including those produced by detonation of energetic materials. The goals are to facilitate computation of a variety of experiments in which strong shock and detonation waves are made to impinge on targets consisting of various combinations of materials, compute the subsequent dy- namic response of the target materials, and validate these computations against experimental data

Using embedded hardware monitor cores in critical computer systems

The integration of FPGA devices in many different architectures and services makes monitoring and real time detection of errors an important concern in FPGA system design. A monitor is a tool, or a set of tools, that facilitate analytic measurements in observing a given system. The goal of these observations is usually the performance analysis and optimisation, or the surveillance of the system. However, System-on-Chip (SoC) based designs leave few points to attach external tools such as logic analysers. Thus, an embedded error detection core that allows observation of critical system nodes (such as processor cores and buses) should enforce the operation of the FPGA-based system, in order to prevent system failures. The core should not interfere with system performance and must ensure timely detection of errors. This thesis is an investigation onto how a robust hardware-monitoring module can be efficiently integrated in a target PCI board (with FPGA-based application processing features) which is part of a critical computing system. [Continues.

The Representation of Surveillance in Dystopian Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Over the last few decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines have come together to contribute to the field of Surveillance Studies, which explores the relationship between humans and surveillance technology. Traditionally, this field has been dominated by the social sciences with little contribution from the humanities.In the last few years, however, this has begun to change as the importance of the humanities, and literature especially, to the discipline has been acknowledged. The relationship between humans and surveillance has been continually explored in dystopian literature and film since the twentieth century, as surveillance technology has become an important part of human existence. Dystopian fiction frequently engages with the subject of surveillance as this genre is inherently political and concerned with issues such as autonomy, identity and power struggles. This thesis will bring together dystopian fiction, surveillance theory, critical posthumanism, biopower and spatial geography. In the following analysis, it will become apparent how dystopian fiction can provide original ways of conceptualising how the human body and society as a collective can be controlled and manipulated through surveillance methods, which collapse the boundaries between the public and private spheres. Dystopian fiction from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will be analysed in chronological order, alongside surveillance theory, in order to establish how each text builds on images and metaphors from previous novels to create a palimpsest of dystopian references regarding surveillance. The literary texts will also be examined using a spatial framework that investigates the portrayal of surveillance technology in public spaces (the city and the work place) and private spaces (the home and the body). This will establish how the boundaries between the public and the private spheres, as well as the societal body and the individual body, are collapsed, in the novels, through surveillance methods, which result in individuals being increasingly monitored and controlled. Contrary to what many surveillance theorists suggest, this thesis will argue that digital technology did not cause surveillance methods to become more fluid, decentralised and participatory; it did, however, cause an intensification of these surveillance methods which were already in place. The frightening conclusion, in the novels, that surveillance technology results in humans becoming more susceptible to control and manipulation through their participation in surveillance practices causes the reader to examine the role of surveillance technology in their own lives; this examination, paradoxically, suggests hope for a future that does not resemble a dystopian nightmare