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Object-Oriented Software Representation of Polymer Materials Information in Engineering Design
The software application POISE, Polymer Objects in a Smalltalk™ Environment, integrates knowledge representation, user interfaces, and data management; a system of tools for the materials domain expert involved in design. Engineering design solutions initially build from generalisations. POISE represents multiple levels of generalisations from classifications of polymer information.
The class-instance paradigm classifies software objects. An object’s behaviour is an exclusive function of its class. Polymer’s behaviours are a function of multiple orthogonal factors, like chemistry and processing, therefore multiple orthogonal classes must represent polymers. Taxonomy only represents one of these factors. The Enhancer mechanism resolves this conflict between classification and representation.
Polymer classification is not well established, with new materials evolving. The software compensates by evolving the classification schema. Guided with a specialised interface tool, the domain expert updates the schema by adding new polymer families and re-classifying existing classes. Through analysing the generalisations in the classification, the domain expert can develop an appropriate classification. This analysis relies on the engineering properties differentiating the principal material qualities. Standard properties do not distinguish specific structural differences in polymer materials, necessitating new
properties.
Material properties distinguish materials in the domain whereas the classes describe the properties of polymer objects. Domain experts add new properties to the polymer classes to distinguish polymer objects. Properties are independent objects that partially describe the class template; Partial Template Objects.
Persistence of personal design information and management of shared data requires dichotomous database management. Shared data requires multi-user access, and consequently transaction management. Transaction management in object-oriented systems often holds resources for a long duration. Transaction declaration hinders transparent access to storage, and corrupts the representation. For single-user design information, transactions are implicit with access. Database proxies provide transparent per-object transaction management to persistent design information. The WorkBase is an object-storage utility that utilises Enhancers as proxies
Software engineering and middleware: a roadmap (Invited talk)
The construction of a large class of distributed systems can be simplified by leveraging middleware, which is layered between network operating systems and application components. Middleware resolves heterogeneity and facilitates communication and coordination of distributed components. Existing middleware products enable software engineers to build systems that are distributed across a local-area network. State-of-the-art middleware research aims to push this boundary towards Internet-scale distribution, adaptive and reconfigurable middleware and middleware for dependable and wireless systems. The challenge for software engineering research is to devise notations, techniques, methods and tools for distributed system construction that systematically build and exploit the capabilities that middleware deliver
Information Technology as Coordination Infrastructure
Business information technology is traditionally viewed as information provision technology. In this view, organizations use their IT to implement databases that provide people with information when they want it. This view is persistent even though information provision is never an end in itself but always has the further purpose to support the coordination of activities of people. The role if IT as coordination technology became more prominent in the 1980s with the advent of network technology, that allowed activities across different businesses to be coordinated. This trend has accellerated since the growth of Internet usage, and today IT is used to support an increasingly varied range of processes performed by a variety of partners that do not all have a hierarchical relation to each other. This makes it difficult to analyze requirements for IT support and specify IT solutions: Business processes may not be well-defined, and interests of different businesses may clash. This report argues that to deal with this in requirements engineering and IT solution specification, business information technology should not be viewed as IT support for business processes but as IT support for the coordination of activities in one or more businesses. We will identify three basic coordination mechanisms, namely coordination by price, by management, and by shared norms, and for each of these mechanisms, we will identify requirements for IT support. The advent of flexible and standardized networking technology has facilitated the creation of novel coordination mechanisms within these three general paradigms, and we will give an inventory of generalized coordination mechanisms made possible by current IT. Finally, we will draw conclusions for requirements engineering methods for IT support for each of the coordination mechanisms identified by the framework
Strongly Secure and Efficient Data Shuffle On Hardware Enclaves
Mitigating memory-access attacks on the Intel SGX architecture is an
important and open research problem. A natural notion of the mitigation is
cache-miss obliviousness which requires the cache-misses emitted during an
enclave execution are oblivious to sensitive data. This work realizes the
cache-miss obliviousness for the computation of data shuffling. The proposed
approach is to software-engineer the oblivious algorithm of Melbourne shuffle
on the Intel SGX/TSX architecture, where the Transaction Synchronization
eXtension (TSX) is (ab)used to detect the occurrence of cache misses. In the
system building, we propose software techniques to prefetch memory data prior
to the TSX transaction to defend the physical bus-tapping attacks. Our
evaluation based on real implementation shows that our system achieves superior
performance and lower transaction abort rate than the related work in the
existing literature.Comment: Systex'1
Managing healthcare workflows in a multi-agent system environment
Whilst Multi-Agent System (MAS) architectures appear to offer a more flexible model for designers and developers of complex, collaborative information systems, implementing real-world business processes that can be delegated to autonomous agents is still a relatively difficult task. Although a range of agent tools and toolkits exist, there still
remains the need to move the creation of models nearer to code generation, in order that the development path be more rigorous and repeatable. In particular, it is essential that complex organisational
process workflows are captured and expressed in a way that MAS can successfully interpret. Using a complex social care system as an exemplar, we describe a technique whereby a business process is
captured, expressed, verified and specified in a suitable format for a healthcare MAS.</p
Developing an inter-enterprise alignment maturity model: research challenges and solutions
Business-IT alignment is pervasive today, as organizations strive to achieve competitive advantage. Like in other areas, e.g., software development, maintenance and IT services, there are maturity models to assess such alignment. Those models, however, do not specifically address the aspects needed for achieving alignment between business and IT in inter-enterprise settings. In this paper, we present the challenges we face in the development of an inter-enterprise alignment maturity model, as well as the current solutions to counter these problems
Ensuring the visibility and traceability of items through logistics chain of automotive industry based on AutoEPCNet Usage
Traceability in logistics is the capability of the participants to trace the products throughout the supply chain by means of either the product and/or container identifiers in a forward and/or backward direction. In today's competitive economic environment, traceability is a key concept related to all products and all types of supply chains. The goal of this paper is to describe development of application that enables to create and share information about the physical movement and status of products as they travel throughout the supply chain. The main purpose of this paper is to describe the development of RFID based track and trace system for ensuring the visibility and traceability of items in logistics chain especially in automotive industry. The proposed solution is based on EPCglobal Network Architecture
Advanced Architectures for Transactional Workflows or Advanced Transactions in Workflow Architectures
In this short paper, we outline the workflow management systems research in the Information Systems division at the University of Twente. We discuss the two main themes in this research: architecture design and advanced transaction management. Attention is paid to the coverage of these themes in the context of the completed Mercurius and WIDE projects and in the new CrossFlow project. In the latter project, contracts are introduced as a new theme to support electronic commerce aspects in workflow management
Opaque Service Virtualisation: A Practical Tool for Emulating Endpoint Systems
Large enterprise software systems make many complex interactions with other
services in their environment. Developing and testing for production-like
conditions is therefore a very challenging task. Current approaches include
emulation of dependent services using either explicit modelling or
record-and-replay approaches. Models require deep knowledge of the target
services while record-and-replay is limited in accuracy. Both face
developmental and scaling issues. We present a new technique that improves the
accuracy of record-and-replay approaches, without requiring prior knowledge of
the service protocols. The approach uses Multiple Sequence Alignment to derive
message prototypes from recorded system interactions and a scheme to match
incoming request messages against prototypes to generate response messages. We
use a modified Needleman-Wunsch algorithm for distance calculation during
message matching. Our approach has shown greater than 99% accuracy for four
evaluated enterprise system messaging protocols. The approach has been
successfully integrated into the CA Service Virtualization commercial product
to complement its existing techniques.Comment: In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software
Engineering Companion (pp. 202-211). arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1510.0142
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