Automated Configuration Design and Analysis for Service High-Availability

The need for highly available services is ever increasing in various domains ranging from mission critical systems to transaction based ones such as online banking. The Service Availability Forum (SAForum) has defined a set of services and related Application Programming Interface (API) specifications to address the growing need of commercial-off-the-shelf high availability solutions. Among these services, the Availability Management Framework (AMF) is the service responsible for managing the high availability of the application services. To achieve this task, an AMF implementation requires a specific logical view of the organization of the application’s services and components, known as an AMF configuration. Any AMF configuration must be compliant to the concepts and constraints defined in the AMF specifications. The process of defining AMF configurations is error prone and requires extensive domain knowledge. Another major issue is being able to analyze the designed AMF configuration to quantify the anticipated service availability. This requires a different set of modeling and analysis skills that system integrators might not necessarily possess. In this dissertation we propose the automation of this process. The premise is to define a generation method within which we embed the domain knowledge and the domain constraints, and by that generating AMF configurations that are valid by construction. We also define an approach for the service availability analysis of AMF configurations. Our method is based on generating an analysis stochastic model that captures the middleware behavior and the application configuration. This model is thereafter solved to quantify the service availability

Load Management for Publish/Subscribe Message Oriented Middleware

PhDTo provide time-critical early warnings in a Tsunami Warning System (TWS), the time delay for both the sensor data exchange process (upstream) and the warning message dissemination processes (downstream) should be minimal, maximising the time available for accurately analysing the situation and giving more time for people in the affected region to react to the warnings. Publish/Subscribe Message-oriented Middleware (PSMOM) in combination with a novel use of a federated broker (broker overlay) can be deployed in TWS to support both time-critical and resilient communication. PSMOM can better manage message bursts caused by a sudden increase in sensor data exchange frequency or by additional sensors coming online. PSMOM can better manage the decrease in available system resources (bottlenecks) caused by a disruption in the underlying network infrastructure (limited resource case). Otherwise, these burst and bottlenecks can cause some brokers to become overloaded, which may in turn degrade the overall system performance and delay decision-making. Existing PSMOM load management solutions have two key limitations when applied to TWS. First, existing work does not consider the message delay requirements for the redistribution and offloading phases of load management. Here, some data is only useful or valid for a short time-span (from tens of seconds to tens of minutes); hence, it needs to be exchanged within this maximum allowed end-to-end transmission delay. Time critical subscribers need to be de-prioritised from being offloaded, as the offloading processes take some time to complete, introducing unexpected delays to message exchange. Second, existing solutions assume that there are surplus system resources for offloading, i.e., less loaded brokers can accept loads from overloaded brokers. However, in a TWS, the underlying network infrastructure may be disrupted which in turn reduces the system capacity. It always takes time to recover from the limited resources situation and during that time, brokers may not have enough system resources to accept loads from overloaded brokers, which may result in total failure of the overloaded brokers. A novel load management framework called ePEER is proposed that extends an existing messaging system, Publish/Subscribe Efficient Event Routing (PEER), with the following main contributions. First, for the surplus resource case, the message delay requirements for different subscription services are considered in the load analysis process when offloading the load to different brokers. Second, for the limited resource case, a feedback driven congestion control mechanism can be used when the underlay network infrastructure is damaged, reducing the available bandwidth of PSMOM. This mechanism limits the publication rate of messages with less value, to better maintain the quality of experience (QoE) of subscribers for the more important messages ePEER is validated with emulation-based experiments. The results show that ePEER outperforms the state of the art load management solution used by PEER: through preventing unnecessary delays introduced to time critical services, and through ensuring important messages can be more efficiently exchanged to improve the QoE of subscribers

The 2nd International Electronic Conference on Applied Sciences

This book is focused on the works presented at the 2nd International Electronic Conference on Applied Sciences, organized by Applied Sciences from 15 to 31 October 2021 on the MDPI Sciforum platform. Two decades have passed since the start of the 21st century. The development of sciences and technologies is growing ever faster today than in the previous century. The field of science is expanding, and the structure of science is becoming ever richer. Because of this expansion and fine structure growth, researchers may lose themselves in the deep forest of the ever-increasing frontiers and sub-fields being created. This international conference on the Applied Sciences was started to help scientists conduct their own research into the growth of these frontiers by breaking down barriers and connecting the many sub-fields to cut through this vast forest. These functions will allow researchers to see these frontiers and their surrounding (or quite distant) fields and sub-fields, and give them the opportunity to incubate and develop their knowledge even further with the aid of this multi-dimensional network

Gas, Water and Solid Waste Treatment Technology

This book introduces a variety of treatment technologies, such as physical, chemical, and biological methods for the treatment of gas emissions, wastewater, and solid waste. It provides a useful source of information for engineers and specialists, as well as for undergraduate and postgraduate students, in the areas of environmental science and engineering

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen

Intellectual Property Management in Health and Agricultural Innovation: A Handbook of Best Practices, Vol. 1

Prepared by and for policy-makers, leaders of public sector research establishments, technology transfer professionals, licensing executives, and scientists, this online resource offers up-to-date information and strategies for utilizing the power of both intellectual property and the public domain. Emphasis is placed on advancing innovation in health and agriculture, though many of the principles outlined here are broadly applicable across technology fields. Eschewing ideological debates and general proclamations, the authors always keep their eye on the practical side of IP management. The site is based on a comprehensive Handbook and Executive Guide that provide substantive discussions and analysis of the opportunities awaiting anyone in the field who wants to put intellectual property to work. This multi-volume work contains 153 chapters on a full range of IP topics and over 50 case studies, composed by over 200 authors from North, South, East, and West. If you are a policymaker, a senior administrator, a technology transfer manager, or a scientist, we invite you to use the companion site guide available at http://www.iphandbook.org/index.html The site guide distills the key points of each IP topic covered by the Handbook into simple language and places it in the context of evolving best practices specific to your professional role within the overall picture of IP management

Focus on Family Historians

The articles in this Special Issue of Genealogy titled “Focus of Family Historians: How Ancestor Research Affects Self-Understanding and Well-Being” cover topics including the psychosocial motivations that impel family history research, its therapeutic and healing aspects, and the emotional outcomes of dealing with unexpected findings. Broader issues, such as the ubiquity of ancestral acknowledgement and veneration throughout history and its links with religion are also explored. Papers include scholarly interpretations of case-based material, empirical research, and interpretive literature reviews emanating from a wide range of social science disciplines