Expressing advanced user preferences in component installation

State of the art component-based software collections - such as FOSS distributions - are made of up to dozens of thousands components, with complex inter-dependencies and conflicts. Given a particular installation of such a system, each request to alter the set of installed components has potentially (too) many satisfying answers. We present an architecture that allows to express advanced user preferences about package selection in FOSS distributions. The architecture is composed by a distribution-independent format for describing available and installed packages called CUDF (Common Upgradeability Description Format), and a foundational language called MooML to specify optimization criteria. We present the syntax and semantics of CUDF and MooML, and discuss the partial evaluation mechanism of MooML which allows to gain efficiency in package dependency solvers

Design and Implementation of a Distributed Middleware for Parallel Execution of Legacy Enterprise Applications

A typical enterprise uses a local area network of computers to perform its business. During the off-working hours, the computational capacities of these networked computers are underused or unused. In order to utilize this computational capacity an application has to be recoded to exploit concurrency inherent in a computation which is clearly not possible for legacy applications without any source code. This thesis presents the design an implementation of a distributed middleware which can automatically execute a legacy application on multiple networked computers by parallelizing it. This middleware runs multiple copies of the binary executable code in parallel on different hosts in the network. It wraps up the binary executable code of the legacy application in order to capture the kernel level data access system calls and perform them distributively over multiple computers in a safe and conflict free manner. The middleware also incorporates a dynamic scheduling technique to execute the target application in minimum time by scavenging the available CPU cycles of the hosts in the network. This dynamic scheduling also supports the CPU availability of the hosts to change over time and properly reschedule the replicas performing the computation to minimize the execution time. A prototype implementation of this middleware has been developed as a proof of concept of the design. This implementation has been evaluated with a few typical case studies and the test results confirm that the middleware works as expected

Analysis of Green Computing Strategy in University: Analytic Network Process (ANP) Approach

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis do not provide an analytical means to determine the importance of the identified factors of green computing strategy and implementation. Although the SWOT analysis successfully explores the factors, individual factors are usually described very generally. For this reason, SWOT analysis possesses deficiencies in the measurement and evaluation of green computing steps. Even though the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique eliminates these deficiencies, it does not allow for measuring the possible dependencies among the individual factors. The AHP method assumes that the green computing factors presented in the hierarchical structure are independent; however, this assumption may be inappropriate in light of certain situation. Therefore, it is important to utilize a form of SWOT analysis that calculates and takes into account the possible dependency among the factors. This paper demonstrates a process for quantitative SWOT analysis of green computing implementation that can be performed even when there is dependence among strategic factors. The proposed algorithm uses the analytic network process (ANP), which allows measurement of the dependency among the green computing implementation factors, as well as AHP, which is based on the independence between the factors. There are four alternatives: campus awareness program, computer procurement, increase in heat removal requirement, and increase in equipment power density for improving the implementation of green computing in campus. Dependency among the SWOT factors is observed to effect the strategic and sub-factor weights, as well as to change the strategy priorities. Based on ANC method, the best alternative for this implementation is computer procurement

Controlling Concurrent Change - A Multiview Approach Toward Updatable Vehicle Automation Systems

The development of SAE Level 3+ vehicles [{SAE}, 2014] poses new challenges not only for the functional development, but also for design and development processes. Such systems consist of a growing number of interconnected functional, as well as hardware and software components, making safety design increasingly difficult. In order to cope with emergent behavior at the vehicle level, thorough systems engineering becomes a key requirement, which enables traceability between different design viewpoints. Ensuring traceability is a key factor towards an efficient validation and verification of such systems. Formal models can in turn assist in keeping track of how the different viewpoints relate to each other and how the interplay of components affects the overall system behavior. Based on experience from the project Controlling Concurrent Change, this paper presents an approach towards model-based integration and verification of a cause effect chain for a component-based vehicle automation system. It reasons on a cross-layer model of the resulting system, which covers necessary aspects of a design in individual architectural views, e.g. safety and timing. In the synthesis stage of integration, our approach is capable of inserting enforcement mechanisms into the design to ensure adherence to the model. We present a use case description for an environment perception system, starting with a functional architecture, which is the basis for componentization of the cause effect chain. By tying the vehicle architecture to the cross-layer integration model, we are able to map the reasoning done during verification to vehicle behavior

Goodbye to Projects? ¿ A livelihoods-grounded audit of the Agricultural Sector Programme Support (ASPS) in Tanzania

Approaches to projects and development have undergone considerable change in the last decade with significant policy shifts on governance, gender, poverty eradication, and environmental issues. Most recently this has led to the adoption and promotion of the sustainable livelihood (SL) approach. The adoption of the SL approach presents challenges to development interventions including: the future of projects and programmes, and sector wide approaches (SWAPs) and direct budgetary support.This paper `A livelihoods-grounded audit of Agricultural Sector Programme Support (ASPS) ¿ Tanzania¿ is the seventh in the series of project working papers.Department for International Developmen

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Reasoning About the Reliability of Multi-version, Diverse Real-Time Systems

This paper is concerned with the development of reliable real-time systems for use in high integrity applications. It advocates the use of diverse replicated channels, but does not require the dependencies between the channels to be evaluated. Rather it develops and extends the approach of Little wood and Rush by (for general systems) by investigating a two channel system in which one channel, A, is produced to a high level of reliability (i.e. has a very low failure rate), while the other, B, employs various forms of static analysis to sustain an argument that it is perfect (i.e. it will never miss a deadline). The first channel is fully functional, the second contains a more restricted computational model and contains only the critical computations. Potential dependencies between the channels (and their verification) are evaluated in terms of aleatory and epistemic uncertainty. At the aleatory level the events ''A fails" and ''B is imperfect" are independent. Moreover, unlike the general case, independence at the epistemic level is also proposed for common forms of implementation and analysis for real-time systems and their temporal requirements (deadlines). As a result, a systematic approach is advocated that can be applied in a real engineering context to produce highly reliable real-time systems, and to support numerical claims about the level of reliability achieved