Run-time Adaptation of Mobile Applications using Genetic Algorithms

Mobile applications run in environments where the context is continuously changing. Therefore, it is necessary to provide support for the run-time adaptation of these applications. This support is usually achieved by middleware platforms that offer a context-aware dynamic reconfiguration service. However, the main shortcoming of existing approaches is that both the list of possible configurations and the plans to adapt the application to a new configuration are usually specified at design-time. In this paper we present an approach that allows the automatic generation at run-time of application configurations and of reconfiguration plans. Moreover, the generated configurations are optimal regarding the provided functionality and, more importantly, without exceeding the available resources (e.g. battery). This is performed by: (1) having the information about the application variability available at runtime using feature models, and (2) using an genetic algorithm that allows generating an optimal configuration at runtime. We have specified a case study and evaluated our approach, and the results show that it is efficient enough as to be used on mobile devices without introducing an excessive overhead.Campus de Excelencia Andalucía Tech y Proyectos de investigación TIN2008-01942, P09-TIC-5231 y INTER-TRUST FP7-317731

Certifications of Critical Systems – The CECRIS Experience

In recent years, a considerable amount of effort has been devoted, both in industry and academia, to the development, validation and verification of critical systems, i.e. those systems whose malfunctions or failures reach a critical level both in terms of risks to human life as well as having a large economic impact.Certifications of Critical Systems – The CECRIS Experience documents the main insights on Cost Effective Verification and Validation processes that were gained during work in the European Research Project CECRIS (acronym for Certification of Critical Systems). The objective of the research was to tackle the challenges of certification by focusing on those aspects that turn out to be more difficult/important for current and future critical systems industry: the effective use of methodologies, processes and tools.The CECRIS project took a step forward in the growing field of development, verification and validation and certification of critical systems. It focused on the more difficult/important aspects of critical system development, verification and validation and certification process. Starting from both the scientific and industrial state of the art methodologies for system development and the impact of their usage on the verification and validation and certification of critical systems, the project aimed at developing strategies and techniques supported by automatic or semi-automatic tools and methods for these activities, setting guidelines to support engineers during the planning of the verification and validation phases

Certifications of Critical Systems – The CECRIS Experience

In recent years, a considerable amount of effort has been devoted, both in industry and academia, to the development, validation and verification of critical systems, i.e. those systems whose malfunctions or failures reach a critical level both in terms of risks to human life as well as having a large economic impact.Certifications of Critical Systems – The CECRIS Experience documents the main insights on Cost Effective Verification and Validation processes that were gained during work in the European Research Project CECRIS (acronym for Certification of Critical Systems). The objective of the research was to tackle the challenges of certification by focusing on those aspects that turn out to be more difficult/important for current and future critical systems industry: the effective use of methodologies, processes and tools.The CECRIS project took a step forward in the growing field of development, verification and validation and certification of critical systems. It focused on the more difficult/important aspects of critical system development, verification and validation and certification process. Starting from both the scientific and industrial state of the art methodologies for system development and the impact of their usage on the verification and validation and certification of critical systems, the project aimed at developing strategies and techniques supported by automatic or semi-automatic tools and methods for these activities, setting guidelines to support engineers during the planning of the verification and validation phases

An Empirical Comparison of Reuse in Embedded and Nonembedded Systems

High-quality software, delivered on time and budget, constitutes a critical part of most products and services in modern society. Our government has invested billions of dollars to develop software assets, often to redevelop the same capability many times. Recognizing the waste involved in redeveloping these assets, in 1992 the Department of Defense issued the Software Reuse Initiative. The vision of the Software Reuse Initiative was To drive the DoD software community from its current re-invent the software cycle to a process-driven, domain-specific, architecture-centric, library-based way of constructing software.\u27\u27 Twenty years after issuing this initiative, there is evidence of this vision beginning to be realized in nonembedded systems. However, virtually every large embedded system undertaken has incurred large cost and schedule overruns. Investigations into the root cause of these overruns implicates reuse. Why are we seeing improvements in the outcomes of these large scale nonembedded systems and worse outcomes in embedded systems? This question is the foundation for this research. The experiences of the Aerospace industry have led to a number of questions about reuse and how the industry is employing reuse in embedded systems. For example, does reuse in embedded systems yield the same outcomes as in nonembedded systems? Are the outcomes positive? If the outcomes are different, it may indicate that embedded systems should not use data from nonembedded systems for estimation. Are embedded systems using the same development approaches as nonembedded systems? Does the development approach make a difference? If embedded systems develop software differently from nonembedded systems, it may mean that the same processes do not apply to both types of systems. What about the reuse of different artifacts? Perhaps there are certain artifacts that, when reused, contribute more or are more difficult to use in embedded systems. Finally, what are the success factors and obstacles to reuse? Are they the same in embedded systems as in nonembedded systems? The research in this dissertation is comprised of a series of empirical studies using professionals in the aerospace and defense industry as its subjects. The main focus has been to investigate the reuse practices of embedded systems professionals and nonembedded systems professionals and compare the methods and artifacts used against the outcomes. The research has followed a combined qualitative and quantitative design approach. The qualitative data were collected by surveying software and systems engineers, interviewing senior developers, and reading numerous documents and other studies. Quantitative data were derived from converting survey and interview respondents\u27 answers into coding that could be counted and measured. From the search of existing empirical literature, we learned that reuse in embedded systems are in fact significantly different from nonembedded systems, particularly in effort in model based development approach and quality where the development approach was not specified. The questionnaire showed differences in the development approach used in embedded projects from nonembedded projects, in particular, embedded systems were significantly more likely to use a heritage/legacy development approach. There was also a difference in the artifacts used, with embedded systems more likely to reuse hardware, test products, and test clusters. Nearly all the projects reported using code, but the questionnaire showed that the reuse of code brought mixed results. One of the differences expressed by the respondents to the questionnaire was the difficulty in reuse of code for embedded systems when the platform changed. The semistructured interviews were performed to tell us why the phenomena in the review of literature and the questionnaire were observed. We asked respected industry professionals, such as senior fellows, fellows and distinguished members of technical staff, about their experiences with reuse. We learned that many embedded systems used heritage/legacy development approaches because their systems had been around for many years, before models and modeling tools became available. We learned that reuse of code is beneficial primarily when the code does not require modification, but, especially in embedded systems, once it has to be changed, reuse of code yields few benefits. Finally, while platform independence is a goal for many in nonembedded systems, it is certainly not a goal for the embedded systems professionals and in many cases it is a detriment. However, both embedded and nonembedded systems professionals endorsed the idea of platform standardization. Finally, we conclude that while reuse in embedded systems and nonembedded systems is different today, they are converging. As heritage embedded systems are phased out, models become more robust and platforms are standardized, reuse in embedded systems will become more like nonembedded systems

Data-driven fault detection for component based robotic systems

Golombek R. Data-driven fault detection for component based robotic systems. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2014.Advancements in the field of robotics enable the creation of systems with cognitive abilities which are capable of close interaction with humans in real world scenarios. These systems may take over jobs previously executed by humans like house cleaning and cooking or they can be supportive and act as a helper for elderly people. One consequence of this progress is the increased need for dependable and fault tolerant behavior of today’s robotic systems because they share the same spaces with humans and operate in close proximity to them. Unreliable and faulty behavior may frustrate users or even endanger them resulting in poor acceptance of robotic systems. The contribution of this thesis is a fault detection approach called AuCom. Fault detection is a basis element for fault tolerant system behavior which is the ability of a system to autonomously cope with occurring faults while it is engaged in interaction. The approach is designed to tackle the specific needs of cognitive robotic systems which feature a component based hardware and software structure and are characterized by frequent changes due to research and development efforts as well as uncertain and variant behavior resulting from the interaction in real world environments. The solution presented in this thesis belongs to the class of data-driven fault detection approaches. This class of approaches assumes that fault relevant information can be directly derived from data gathered in the robotic system. The data exploited in this work for fault detection is the communication between the system’s components. This communication is represented with features which are common to all elements of the communication (i.e., they are generic). Furthermore, the approach assumes that the current element of the communication can be estimated from the history of the system’s communication and that a deviation from the expected estimate indicates a fault. This assumption is encoded in the model in terms of a novel representation of the communication as a time-series of temporal dynamic features. A concrete integration of the approach into a real system is exemplified on our robotic platform BIRON. In addition, exemplary integration solutions for robotic frameworks currently prominent in literature are discussed in this thesis. The actual capability of the approach to report faults is evaluated for several artificial systems in simulation and on BIRON in an off-line and on-line manner. The performance is compared to a histogram-based baseline approach

Human-friendly robotic manipulators: safety and performance issues in controller design

Recent advances in robotics have spurred its adoption into new application areas such as medical, rescue, transportation, logistics, personal care and entertainment. In the personal care domain, robots are expected to operate in human-present environments and provide non-critical assistance. Successful and flourishing deployment of such robots present different opportunities as well as challenges. Under a national research project, Bobbie, this dissertation analyzes challenges associated with these robots and proposes solutions for identified problems. The thesis begins by highlighting the important safety concern and presenting a comprehensive overview of safety issues in a typical domestic robot system. By using functional safety concept, the overall safety of the complex robotic system was analyzed through subsystem level safety issues. Safety regions in the world model of the perception subsystem, dependable understanding of the unstructured environment via fusion of sensory subsystems, lightweight and compliant design of mechanical components, passivity based control system and quantitative metrics used to assert safety are some important points discussed in the safety review. The main research focus of this work is on controller design of robotic manipulators against two conflicting requirements: motion performance and safety. Human-friendly manipulators used on domestic robots exhibit a lightweight design and demand a stable operation with a compliant behavior injected via a passivity based impedance controller. Effective motion based manipulation using such a controller requires a highly stiff behavior while important safety requirements are achieved with compliant behaviors. On the basis of this intuitive observation, this research identifies suitable metrics to identify the appropriate impedance for a given performance and safety requirement. This thesis also introduces a domestic robot design that adopts a modular design approach to minimize complexity, cost and development time. On the basis of functional modularity concept where each module has a unique functional contribution in the system, the robot “Bobbie-UT‿ is built as an interconnection of interchangeable mobile platform, torso, robotic arm and humanoid head components. Implementation of necessary functional and safety requirements, design of interfaces and development of suitable software architecture are also discussed with the design

Evaluating the impact of adopting a component-based approach within the automotive domain

Component-based technology applied to the control system of production machinery is one of the new research developments in the automotive sector. Although it is important to evaluate the technical aspects of this new paradigm, an appreciation of the impact from the business and human aspects is equally important to the stakeholders in the industry. However, the current evaluation approaches do not offer a method to capture and analyse the component-based technology that is simple to use and produces results that are readily understood by the stakeholders involved in the process. This study is based upon a research project at Loughborough University to look into the effect of the implementation of a component-based control system for production machinery in the automotive sector (referred to as the component-based approach) and is focused on the business and the human aspects of the approach. [Continues.