95,496 research outputs found
A Mathcadâbased educational experience to address the design of nonisothermal plug flow reactors
Mathcad is a simple-to-use and intuitive mathematical software that helps students to minimize the mathematical difficulties involved in solving engineering problems. The design of nonisothermal plug flow reactors (PFR) is a fundamental issue within the field of chemical reaction engineering; however, its teachingâlearning process is hindered by students' mathematical difficulties in solving ordinary differential equations. In this paper, the software Mathcad was conveniently integrated into an educational experience through the resolution of two real case studies. In the first one, a simple liquid-phase reaction is considered in a PFR working at different operating conditions, whereas the second case evaluates a PFR taking place multiple reactions (parallel reactions) with a heat exchanger attached. The assessment of this experience, which was held into two 5-h Mathcad workshops, revealed that Mathcad made the design of non-isothermal PFR more appealing, facilitated the understanding of the design process, and brought another dimension to the way the students perform complex calculations
Degrees of tenant isolation for cloud-hosted software services : a cross-case analysis
A challenge, when implementing multi-tenancy
in a cloud-hosted software service, is how to ensure that the
performance and resource consumption of one tenant does
not adversely affect other tenants. Software designers and
architects must achieve an optimal degree of tenant isolation
for their chosen application requirements. The objective
of this research is to reveal the trade-offs, commonalities,
and differences to be considered when implementing
the required degree of tenant isolation. This research uses
a cross-case analysis of selected open source cloud-hosted
software engineering tools to empirically evaluate varying
degrees of isolation between tenants. Our research reveals
five commonalities across the case studies: disk space reduction,
use of locking, low cloud resource consumption,
customization and use of plug-in architecture, and choice of
multi-tenancy pattern. Two of these common factors compromise
tenant isolation. The degree of isolation is reduced
when there is no strategy to reduce disk space and customization
and plug-in architecture is not adopted. In contrast,
the degree of isolation improves when careful consideration
is given to how to handle a high workload, locking of
data and processes is used to prevent clashes between multiple
tenants and selection of appropriate multi-tenancy pattern. The research also revealed five case study differences:
size of generated data, cloud resource consumption, sensitivity
to workload changes, the effect of the software process,
client latency and bandwidth, and type of software process.
The degree of isolation is impaired, in our results, by
the large size of generated data, high resource consumption
by certain software processes, high or fluctuating workload,
low client latency, and bandwidth when transferring multiple
files between repositories. Additionally, this research
provides a novel explanatory framework for (i) mapping tenant
isolation to different software development processes,
cloud resources and layers of the cloud stack; and (ii) explaining
the different trade-offs to consider affecting tenant
isolation (i.e. resource sharing, the number of users/requests,
customizability, the size of generated data, the scope of control
of the cloud application stack and business constraints)
when implementing multi-tenant cloud-hosted software services.
This research suggests that software architects have
to pay attention to the trade-offs, commonalities, and differences
we identify to achieve their degree of tenant isolation
requirements
In vivo evaluation of large-scale IR-based traceability recovery
Modern large-scale software development is a complex undertaking and coordinating various processes is crucial to achieve efficiency. The alignment between requirements and test activities is one important aspect. Production and maintenance of software result in an ever-increasing amount of information. To be able to work efficiently under such circumstances, navigation in all available data needs support. Maintaining traceability links between software artifacts is one approach to structure the information space and support this challenge. Many researchers have proposed traceability recovery by applying information retrieval (IR) methods, utilizing the fact that artifacts often have textual content in natural language. Case studies have shown promising results, but no large-scale in vivo evaluations have been made. Currently, there is a trend among our industrial partners to move to a specific new software engineering tool. Their aim is to collect different pieces of information in one system. Our ambition is to develop an IR-based traceability recovery plug-in to this tool. From this position, right in the middle of a real industrial setting, many interesting observations could be made. This would allow a unique evaluation of the usefulness of the IR-based approach
Impacts of plug-in hybrid vehicles and combined heat and power technologies on electric and gas distribution network losses
Distribution network operators (DNOs) require strategies that can offset the tradeoffs new embedded technologies have on their assets. This paper employs modelling to show that through control device manipulation, gas and electric (G&E) network operators can influence savings in energy losses under the presence of plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) and combined heat and power technologies (CHPs). An integrated gas and electric optimal power flow (OPF) tool is introduced to undertake various case studies. The OPF tool evaluates the technical impacts experienced in the networks when DNOs apply a "plug and forget" operation strategy and then compares the results against a "loss minimisation" strategy. Results show the benefits in applying different strategies are more considerable in electric networks than in gas networks. The study corroborates that an integrated G&E analysis offers a fresh perspective for stakeholders in evaluating energy service networks performance under different operation strategies
A framework for the simulation of structural software evolution
This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 ACM.As functionality is added to an aging piece of software, its original design and structure will tend to erode. This can lead to high coupling, low cohesion and other undesirable effects associated with spaghetti architectures. The underlying forces that cause such degradation have been the subject of much research. However, progress in this field is slow, as its complexity makes it difficult to isolate the causal flows leading to these effects. This is further complicated by the difficulty of generating enough empirical data, in sufficient quantity, and attributing such data to specific points in the causal chain. This article describes a framework for simulating the structural evolution of software. A complete simulation model is built by incrementally adding modules to the framework, each of which contributes an individual evolutionary effect. These effects are then combined to form a multifaceted simulation that evolves a fictitious code base in a manner approximating real-world behavior. We describe the underlying principles and structures of our framework from a theoretical and user perspective; a validation of a simple set of evolutionary parameters is then provided and three empirical software studies generated from open-source software (OSS) are used to support claims and generated results. The research illustrates how simulation can be used to investigate a complex and under-researched area of the development cycle. It also shows the value of incorporating certain human traits into a simulationâfactors that, in real-world system development, can significantly influence evolutionary structures
OntoMaven: Maven-based Ontology Development and Management of Distributed Ontology Repositories
In collaborative agile ontology development projects support for modular
reuse of ontologies from large existing remote repositories, ontology project
life cycle management, and transitive dependency management are important
needs. The Apache Maven approach has proven its success in distributed
collaborative Software Engineering by its widespread adoption. The contribution
of this paper is a new design artifact called OntoMaven. OntoMaven adopts the
Maven-based development methodology and adapts its concepts to knowledge
engineering for Maven-based ontology development and management of ontology
artifacts in distributed ontology repositories.Comment: Pre-print submission to 9th International Workshop on Semantic Web
Enabled Software Engineering (SWESE2013). Berlin, Germany, December 2-5, 201
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The P3 platform: an approach and software system for developing diagrammatic model-based methods in design research
Many issues in design and design management have been explored by building models which capture the relationships between different aspects of the problem at hand. These models require computer support to construct and analyse. However, appropriate modelling tools can be time-consuming to develop in a research environment. Reflecting upon five design research projects, this paper proposes that such projects can be facilitated by recognising the iterative and tightly-coupled nature of research and tool development, and by attempting to minimise the effort of solution prototyping within this process. Our approach is enabled by a software platform which can be rapidly configured to implement many conceivable modelling approaches. This configurability is complemented by an emerging library of modelling and analysis approaches tailored to explore design process systems. The platform-based approach enables any mix of modelling concepts to be easily created. We propose it could thus help researchers to explore a wide range of questions without being constrained to existing conventions for modelling â or for model integration
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