Process Based Unification for Multi-Model Software Process Improvement

A number of differences among quality approaches exist and there can be various situations in which the usage of multiple approaches is required, e.g. to strengthen a particular process with multiple quality approaches or to reach certification of the compliance to a number of standards. First of all it has to be decided which approaches have potential for the organization. In many cases one approach does not contain enough information for process implementation. Consequently, the organization may need to use several approaches and the decision has to be made how the chosen approaches can be used simultaneously. This area is called Multi-model Software Process Improvement (MSPI). The simultaneous usage of multiple quality approaches is called the multi-model problem. In this dissertation we propose a solution for the multi-model problem which we call the Process Based Unification (PBU) framework. The PBU framework consists of the PBU concept, a PBU process and the PBU result. We call PBU concept the mapping of quality approaches to a unified process. The PBU concept is operationalized by a PBU process. The PBU result includes the resulting unified process and the mapping of quality approaches to the unified process.Comment: PhD Thesi

FESTivE: an information system method to improve product designers and environmental experts information exchanges

Effective collaboration between product designers and environmental experts is an important driver for the ecodesign practice in industry. This paper investigates the principal functions required for such an e ective collaboration and aims at facilitating them. Product designers should be able to integrate the environmental parameters into their activities, and to exchange information dynamically with the environmental expert whenever needed during the design process. Therefore, the IT system should be in itself dynamic and exible to the integration of new concepts (knowledge, software). Recent developments in Model Driven Engineering (MDE) are showing some interesting results to gain exibility and dynamism in the IT system. Combining software interoperability using model federation based on MDE with the speci city of ecodesign practice in industry this paper proposes the FESTivE method for Federate EcodeSign Tool modEls. Experimented in two different industrial contexts the practical feasibility of FESTivE has been validated with practitioners. Results on the e ects of using FESTivE in industry shows that product designers and environmental experts are more equipped to anticipate and to respond to each other's needs at each stage of the design process of product or service

Methods for Rapidly Processing Angular Masks of Next-Generation Galaxy Surveys

As galaxy surveys become larger and more complex, keeping track of the completeness, magnitude limit, and other survey parameters as a function of direction on the sky becomes an increasingly challenging computational task. For example, typical angular masks of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey contain about N=300,000 distinct spherical polygons. Managing masks with such large numbers of polygons becomes intractably slow, particularly for tasks that run in time O(N^2) with a naive algorithm, such as finding which polygons overlap each other. Here we present a "divide-and-conquer" solution to this challenge: we first split the angular mask into predefined regions called "pixels," such that each polygon is in only one pixel, and then perform further computations, such as checking for overlap, on the polygons within each pixel separately. This reduces O(N^2) tasks to O(N), and also reduces the important task of determining in which polygon(s) a point on the sky lies from O(N) to O(1), resulting in significant computational speedup. Additionally, we present a method to efficiently convert any angular mask to and from the popular HEALPix format. This method can be generically applied to convert to and from any desired spherical pixelization. We have implemented these techniques in a new version of the mangle software package, which is freely available at http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mangle/, along with complete documentation and example applications. These new methods should prove quite useful to the astronomical community, and since mangle is a generic tool for managing angular masks on a sphere, it has the potential to benefit terrestrial mapmaking applications as well.Comment: New version 2.1 of the mangle software now available at http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mangle/ - includes galaxy survey masks and galaxy lists for the latest SDSS data release and the 2dFGRS final data release as well as extensive documentation and examples. 14 pages, 9 figures, matches version accepted by MNRA

Automating control system design via a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm

This chapter presents a performance-prioritized computer aided control system design (CACSD) methodology using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. The evolutionary CACSD approach unifies different control laws in both the time and frequency domains based upon performance satisfactions, without the need of aggregating different design criteria into a compromise function. It is shown that control engineers' expertise as well as settings on goal or priority for different preference on each performance requirement can be easily included and modified on-line according to the evolving trade-offs, which makes the controller design interactive, transparent and simple for real-time implementation. Advantages of the evolutionary CACSD methodology are illustrated upon a non-minimal phase plant control system, which offer a set of low-order Pareto optimal controllers satisfying all the conflicting performance requirements in the face of system constraints

Structured Review of the Evidence for Effects of Code Duplication on Software Quality

This report presents the detailed steps and results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to investigate the evidence for the claim that code duplication has a negative effect on code changeability. This report contains only the details of the review for which there is not enough place to include them in the companion paper published at a conference (Hordijk, Ponisio et al. 2009 - Harmfulness of Code Duplication - A Structured Review of the Evidence)

Recycling Lingware in a Multilingual MT System

We describe two methods relevant to multi-lingual machine translation systems, which can be used to port linguistic data (grammars, lexicons and transfer rules) between systems used for processing related languages. The methods are fully implemented within the Spoken Language Translator system, and were used to create versions of the system for two new language pairs using only a month of expert effort.Comment: 6 pages, needs aclap.sty. To appear in "From Research to Commercial Applications" workshop at ACL-97, see also http://www.cam.sri.co

Profumo di SUSY: Suggestive Correlations in the ATLAS and CMS High Jet Multiplicity Data

We present persistently amassing evidence that the CMS and ATLAS Collaborations may indeed be already registering supersymmetry events at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Our analysis is performed in the context of a highly phenomenologically favorable model named No-Scale F-SU(5), which represents the unification of the F-lipped SU(5) Grand Unified Theory (GUT), two pairs of hypothetical TeV-scale vector-like supersymmetric multiplets derived out of F-Theory, and the dynamically established boundary conditions of No-Scale supergravity. We document highly suggestive correlations between the first inverse femtobarn of observations by CMS and ATLAS, where seductive excesses in multijet events, particularly those with nine or more jets, are unambiguously accounted for by a precision Monte-Carlo simulation of the F-SU(5) model space. This intimate correspondence is optimized by a unified gaugino mass in the neighborhood of M_{1/2}=518 GeV. We supplement this analysis by extrapolating for the expected data profile to be realized with five inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity, as expected to be observed at the LHC by the conclusion of 2011. Significantly, we find that this luminosity may be sufficient to constitute a SUSY discovery for the favored benchmark spectrum. Indeed, the winds wafting our way from Geneva may already be heavy with the delicate perfume of Supersymmetry.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, 6 table

PROSET — A Language for Prototyping with Sets

We discuss the prototyping language PROSET(Prototyping with Sets) as a language for experimental and evolutionary prototyping, focusing its attention on algorithm design. Some of PROSET’s features include generative communication, flexible exception handling and the integration of persistence. A discussion of some issues pertaining to the compiler and the programming environment conclude the pape