A simulator for the control network of smart grid architectures

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A component-based product line architecture for workflow management systems

This paper presents a component-based product line for workflow management systems. The process followed to design the product line was based on the Catalysis method. Extensions were made to represent variability across the process. The domain of workflow management systems has been shown to be appropriate to the application of the product line approach as there are a standard architecture and models established by a regulatory board, the Workflow Management Coalition. In addition, there is a demand for similar workflow management systems but with some different features. The product line architecture was evaluated with Rapide simulation tools. The evaluation was based on selected scenarios, thus, avoiding implementation issues. The strategy that has been used to populate the architecture and experiment with the product line is shown. In particular, the design of the workflow execution manager component is described

Higher-Order Process Modeling: Product-Lining, Variability Modeling and Beyond

We present a graphical and dynamic framework for binding and execution of business) process models. It is tailored to integrate 1) ad hoc processes modeled graphically, 2) third party services discovered in the (Inter)net, and 3) (dynamically) synthesized process chains that solve situation-specific tasks, with the synthesis taking place not only at design time, but also at runtime. Key to our approach is the introduction of type-safe stacked second-order execution contexts that allow for higher-order process modeling. Tamed by our underlying strict service-oriented notion of abstraction, this approach is tailored also to be used by application experts with little technical knowledge: users can select, modify, construct and then pass (component) processes during process execution as if they were data. We illustrate the impact and essence of our framework along a concrete, realistic (business) process modeling scenario: the development of Springer's browser-based Online Conference Service (OCS). The most advanced feature of our new framework allows one to combine online synthesis with the integration of the synthesized process into the running application. This ability leads to a particularly flexible way of implementing self-adaption, and to a particularly concise and powerful way of achieving variability not only at design time, but also at runtime.Comment: In Proceedings Festschrift for Dave Schmidt, arXiv:1309.455

Smartphone picture organization: a hierarchical approach

We live in a society where the large majority of the population has a camera-equipped smartphone. In addition, hard drives and cloud storage are getting cheaper and cheaper, leading to a tremendous growth in stored personal photos. Unlike photo collections captured by a digital camera, which typically are pre-processed by the user who organizes them into event-related folders, smartphone pictures are automatically stored in the cloud. As a consequence, photo collections captured by a smartphone are highly unstructured and because smartphones are ubiquitous, they present a larger variability compared to pictures captured by a digital camera. To solve the need of organizing large smartphone photo collections automatically, we propose here a new methodology for hierarchical photo organization into topics and topic-related categories. Our approach successfully estimates latent topics in the pictures by applying probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, and automatically assigns a name to each topic by relying on a lexical database. Topic-related categories are then estimated by using a set of topic-specific Convolutional Neuronal Networks. To validate our approach, we ensemble and make public a large dataset of more than 8,000 smartphone pictures from 40 persons. Experimental results demonstrate major user satisfaction with respect to state of the art solutions in terms of organization.Peer ReviewedPreprin

PACMAS: A Personalized, Adaptive, and Cooperative MultiAgent System Architecture

In this paper, a generic architecture, designed to support the implementation of applications aimed at managing information among different and heterogeneous sources, is presented. Information is filtered and organized according to personal interests explicitly stated by the user. User pro- files are improved and refined throughout time by suitable adaptation techniques. The overall architecture has been called PACMAS, being a support for implementing Personalized, Adaptive, and Cooperative MultiAgent Systems. PACMAS agents are autonomous and flexible, and can be made personal, adaptive and cooperative, depending on the given application. The peculiarities of the architecture are highlighted by illustrating three relevant case studies focused on giving a support to undergraduate and graduate students, on predicting protein secondary structure, and on classifying newspaper articles, respectively