636 research outputs found
Monitoring extensions for component-based distributed software
This paper defines a generic class of monitoring extensions to component-based distributed enterprise software. Introducing a monitoring extension to a legacy application system can be very costly. In this paper, we identify the minimum support for application monitoring within the generic components of a distributed system, necessary for rapid development of new monitoring extensions. Furthermore, this paper offers an approach for design and implementation of monitoring extensions at reduced cost. A framework of basic facilities supporting the monitoring extensions is presented. These facilities handle different aspects critical to the monitoring process, such as ordering of the generated monitoring events, decoupling of the application components from the components of the monitoring extensions, delivery of the monitoring events to multiple consumers, etc.\ud
The work presented in this paper is being validated in the prototype of a large distributed system, where a specific monitoring extension is built as a tool for debugging and testing the application behaviour.\u
Requirements engineering for computer integrated environments in construction
A Computer Integrated Environment (CIE) is the type of innovative integrated information system that helps to reduce fragmentation and enables the stakeholders to collaborate together in business. Researchers have observed that the concept of CIE has been the subject of research for many years but the uptake of this technology has been very limited because of the development of the technology and its effective implementation. Although CIE is very much valued by both industrialists and academics, the answers to the question of how to develop and how to implement it are still not clear.
The industrialists and researchers conveyed that networking, collaboration, information sharing and communication will become popular and critical issues in the future, which can be managed through CIE systems. In order for successful development of the technology, successful delivery, and effective implementation of user and industry-oriented CIE systems, requirements engineering seems a key parameter. Therefore, through experiences and lessons learnt in various case studies of CIE systems developments, this book explains the development of a requirements engineering framework specific to the CIE system.
The requirements engineering process that has been developed in the research is targeted at computer integrated environments with a particular interest in the construction industry as the implementation field. The key features of the requirements engineering framework are the following: (1) ready-to-use, (2) simple, (3) domain specific, (4) adaptable and (5) systematic, (6) integrated with the legacy systems. The method has three key constructs: i) techniques for requirements development, which includes the requirement elicitation, requirements analysis/modelling and requirements validation, ii) requirements documentation and iii) facilitating the requirements management. It focuses on system development methodologies for the human driven ICT solutions that provide communication, collaboration, information sharing and exchange through computer integrated environments for professionals situated in discrete locations but working in a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary environment. The overview for each chapter of the book is as follows;
Chapter 1 provides an overview by setting the scene and presents the issues involved in requirements engineering and CIE (Computer Integrated Environments). Furthermore, it makes an introduction to the necessity for requirements engineering for CIE system development, experiences and lessons learnt cumulatively from CIE systems developments that the authors have been involved in, and the process of the development of an ideal requirements engineering framework for CIE systems development, based on the experiences and lessons learnt from the multi-case studies.
Chapter 2 aims at building up contextual knowledge to acquire a deeper understanding of the topic area. This includes a detailed definition of the requirements engineering discipline and the importance and principles of requirements engineering and its process. In addition, state of the art techniques and approaches, including contextual design approach, the use case modelling, and the agile requirements engineering processes, are explained to provide contextual knowledge and understanding about requirements engineering to the readers.
After building contextual knowledge and understanding about requirements engineering in chapter 2, chapter 3 attempts to identify a scope and contextual knowledge and understanding about computer integrated environments and Building Information Modelling (BIM). In doing so, previous experiences of the authors about systems developments for computer integrated environments are explained in detail as the CIE/BIM case studies.
In the light of contextual knowledge gained about requirements engineering in chapter 2, in order to realize the critical necessity of requirements engineering to combine technology, process and people issues in the right balance, chapter 4 will critically evaluate the requirements engineering activities of CIE systems developments that are explained in chapter 3. Furthermore, to support the necessity of requirements engineering for human centred CIE systems development, the findings from semi-structured interviews are shown in a concept map that is also explained in this chapter.
In chapter 5, requirements engineering is investigated from different angles to pick up the key issues from discrete research studies and practice such as traceability through process and product modelling, goal-oriented requirements engineering, the essential and incidental complexities in requirements models, the measurability of quality requirements, the fundamentals of requirements engineering, identifying and involving the stakeholders, reconciling software requirements and system architectures and barriers to the industrial uptake of requirements engineering. In addition, a comprehensive research study measuring the success of requirements engineering processes through a set of evaluation criteria is introduced. Finally, the key issues and the criteria are comparatively analyzed and evaluated in order to match each other and confirm the validity of the criteria for the evaluation and assessment of the requirements engineering implementation in the CIE case study projects in chapter 7 and the key issues will be used in chapter 9 to support the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) for acceptance and wider implications of the requirements engineering framework to be proposed in chapter 8.
Chapter 6 explains and particularly focuses on how the requirements engineering activities in the case study projects were handled by highlighting strengths and weaknesses. This will also include the experiences and lessons learnt from these system development practices. The findings from these developments will also be utilized to support the justification of the necessity of a requirements engineering framework for the CIE systems developments. In particular, the following are addressed.
• common and shared understanding in requirements engineering efforts,
• continuous improvement,
• outputs of requirement engineering
• reflections and the critical analysis of the requirements engineering approaches in these practices.
The premise of chapter 7 is to evaluate and assess the requirements engineering approaches in the CIE case study developments from multiple viewpoints in order to find out the strengths and the weaknesses in these requirements engineering processes. This evaluation will be mainly based on the set of criteria developed by the researchers and developers in the requirements engineering community in order to measure the success rate of the requirements engineering techniques after their implementation in the various system development projects. This set of criteria has already been introduced in chapter 5. This critical assessment includes conducting a questionnaire based survey and descriptive statistical analysis.
In chapter 8, the requirements engineering techniques tested in the CIE case study developments are composed and compiled into a requirements engineering process in the light of the strengths and the weaknesses identified in the previous chapter through benchmarking with a Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to ensure that it has the required level of maturity for implementation in the CIE systems developments. As a result of this chapter, a framework for a generic requirements engineering process for CIE systems development will be proposed.
In chapter 9, the authors will discuss the acceptance and the wider implications of the proposed framework of requirements engineering process using the CMM from chapter 8 and the key issues from chapter 5.
Chapter 10 is the concluding chapter and it summarizes the findings and brings the book to a close with recommendations for the implementation of the Proposed RE framework and also prescribes a guideline as a way forward for better implementation of requirements engineering for successful developments of the CIE systems in the future
Telecommunication Services Engineering- Definitions, Architectures and Tools
This paper introduces telecommunication services engineering through a definition of services, of network architectures that run services, and of methods, techniques and tools used to develop services. We emphasize the Intelligent Network (IN), the Telecommunication Management Network (TMN) and TINA architecture
Detector Construction Management and Quality Control: Establishing and Using a CRISTAL System
The CRISTAL (Cooperating Repositories and an Information System for Tracking
Assembly Lifecycles) project is delivering a software system to facilitate the
management of the engineering data collected at each stage of production of
CMS. CRISTAL captures all the physical characteristics of CMS components as
each sub-detector is tested and assembled. These data are retained for later
use in areas such as detector slow control, calibration and maintenance.
CRISTAL must, therefore, support different views onto its data dependent on the
role of the user. These data viewpoints are investigated in this paper. In the
recent past two CMS Notes have been written about CRISTAL. The first note, CMS
1996/003, detailed the requirements for CRISTAL, its relationship to other CMS
software, its objectives and reviewed the technology on which it would be
based. CMS 1997/104 explained some important design concepts on which CRISTAL
is and showed how CRISTAL integrated the domains of product data man- agement
and workflow management. This note explains, through the use of diagrams, how
CRISTAL can be established for detector production and used as the information
source for analyses, such as calibration and slow controls, carried out by
physicists. The reader should consult the earlier CMS Notes and conference
papers for technical detail on CRISTAL - this note concentrates on issues
surrounding the practical use of the CRISTAL software.Comment: 16 pages, 14 figure
Engineering Automation for Reliable Software Interim Progress Report (10/01/2000 - 09/30/2001)
Prepared for: U.S. Army Research Office
P.O. Box 12211
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2211The objective of our effort is to develop a scientific basis for producing reliable
software that is also flexible and cost effective for the DoD distributed software domain.
This objective addresses the long term goals of increasing the quality of service provided
by complex systems while reducing development risks, costs, and time. Our work focuses on
"wrap and glue" technology based on a domain specific distributed prototype model. The key
to making the proposed approach reliable, flexible, and cost-effective is the automatic
generation of glue and wrappers based on a designer's specification. The "wrap and glue"
approach allows system designers to concentrate on the difficult interoperability problems
and defines solutions in terms of deeper and more difficult interoperability issues, while
freeing designers from implementation details. Specific research areas for the proposed
effort include technology enabling rapid prototyping, inference for design checking,
automatic program generation, distributed real-time scheduling, wrapper and glue
technology, and reliability assessment and improvement. The proposed technology will be
integrated with past research results to enable a quantum leap forward in the state of the
art for rapid prototyping.U. S. Army Research Office P.O. Box 12211 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-22110473-MA-SPApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited
Intelligent monitoring and fault diagnosis for ATLAS TDAQ: a complex event processing solution
Effective monitoring and analysis tools are fundamental in modern IT
infrastructures to get insights on the overall system behavior and to deal
promptly and effectively with failures. In recent years, Complex Event
Processing (CEP) technologies have emerged as effective solutions for
information processing from the most disparate fields: from wireless sensor
networks to financial analysis. This thesis proposes an innovative approach to
monitor and operate complex and distributed computing systems, in particular
referring to the ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition (TDAQ) system currently
in use at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The
result of this research, the AAL project, is currently used to provide ATLAS
data acquisition operators with automated error detection and intelligent
system analysis.
The thesis begins by describing the TDAQ system and the controlling
architecture, with a focus on the monitoring infrastructure and the expert
system used for error detection and automated recovery. It then discusses
the limitations of the current approach and how it can be improved to
maximize the ATLAS TDAQ operational efficiency.
Event processing methodologies are then laid out, with a focus on CEP
techniques for stream processing and pattern recognition. The open-source
Esper engine, the CEP solution adopted by the project is subsequently
analyzed and discussed.
Next, the AAL project is introduced as the automated and intelligent
monitoring solution developed as the result of this research. AAL
requirements and governing factors are listed, with a focus on how stream
processing functionalities can enhance the TDAQ monitoring experience. The
AAL processing model is then introduced and the architectural choices are
justified. Finally, real applications on TDAQ error detection are presented. The main conclusion from this work is that CEP techniques can be
successfully applied to detect error conditions and system misbehavior.
Moreover, the AAL project demonstrates a real application of CEP concepts
for intelligent monitoring in the demanding TDAQ scenario. The adoption of
AAL by several TDAQ communities shows that automation and intelligent
system analysis were not properly addressed in the previous infrastructure.
The results of this thesis will benefit researchers evaluating intelligent
monitoring techniques on large-scale distributed computing system
JAVA Wrappers for Automated Interoperability
Databases in Networked Information Systems International Workshop DNIS 2000This paper concentrates on the issues related to implementation of interoperability between distributed subsystems, particularly in the context of reengineering and integration of several centralized legacy systems. Currently, most interoperability techniques require the data or services to be tightly coupled to a particular server. Furthermore, as most programmers are trained in designing stand- alone application, developing distributed system proves to be time-consuming and difficult. Here, we addressed those concerns by creating an interface wrapper model that allows developers to treat distributed objects as local objects. A tool that automatically generates the features of Java interface wrapper from a specification language called the Prototyping System Description Language has been developed based on the model.U.S. Army Research OfficeARO 40473.30-MA-S
Development of an integrated product information management system
This thesis reports on a research project undertaken over a four year period investigating
and developing a software framework and application for integrating and managing
building product information for construction engineering. The research involved
extensive literature research, observation of the industry practices and interviews with
construction industry practitioners and systems implementers to determine how best to
represent and present product information to support the construction process.
Applicable product models for information representation were reviewed and evaluated
to determine present suitability. The IFC product model was found to be the most
applicable. Investigations of technologies supporting the product model led to the
development of a software tool, the IFC Assembly Viewer, which aided further
investigations into the suitability of the product model (in its current state) for the
exchange and sharing of product information. A software framework, or reusable
software design and application, called PROduct Information Management System
(PROMIS), was developed based on a non-standard product model but with flexibility
to work with the IFC product model when sufficiently mature. The software comprises
three subsystems namely: ProductWeb, ModelManager.NET and Product/Project
Service (or P2Service). The key features of this system were shared project databases,
parametric product specification, integration of product information sources, and
application interaction and integration through interface components. PROMIS was
applied to and tested with a modular construction business for the management of
product information and for integration of product and project information through the
design and construction (production) process
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