16,328 research outputs found
CONFIGEN: A tool for managing configuration options
This paper introduces CONFIGEN, a tool that helps modularizing software.
CONFIGEN allows the developer to select a set of elementary components for his
software through an interactive interface. Configuration files for use by
C/assembly code and Makefiles are then automatically generated, and we
successfully used it as a helper tool for complex system software refactoring.
CONFIGEN is based on propositional logic, and its implementation faces hard
theoretical problems.Comment: In Proceedings LoCoCo 2010, arXiv:1007.083
Is my configuration any good: checking usability in an interactive sensor-based activity monitor
We investigate formal analysis of two aspects of usability in a deployed interactive, configurable and context-aware system: an event-driven, sensor-based homecare activity monitor system. The system was not designed from formal requirements or specification: we model the system as it is in the context of an agile development process. Our aim was to determine if formal modelling and analysis can contribute to improving usability, and if so, which style of modelling is most suitable. The purpose of the analysis is to inform configurers about how to interact with the system, so the system is more usable for participants, and to guide future developments. We consider redundancies in configuration rules defined by carers and participants and the interaction modality of the output messages.Two approaches to modelling are considered: a deep embedding in which devices, sensors and rules are represented explicitly by data structures in the modelling language and non-determinism is employed to model all possible device and sensor states, and a shallow embedding in which the rules and device and sensor states are represented directly in propositional logic. The former requires a conventional machine and a model-checker for analysis, whereas the latter is implemented using a SAT solver directly on the activity monitor hardware. We draw conclusions about the role of formal models and reasoning in deployed systems and the need for clear semantics and ontologies for interaction modalities
CoPhy: A Scalable, Portable, and Interactive Index Advisor for Large Workloads
Index tuning, i.e., selecting the indexes appropriate for a workload, is a
crucial problem in database system tuning. In this paper, we solve index tuning
for large problem instances that are common in practice, e.g., thousands of
queries in the workload, thousands of candidate indexes and several hard and
soft constraints. Our work is the first to reveal that the index tuning problem
has a well structured space of solutions, and this space can be explored
efficiently with well known techniques from linear optimization. Experimental
results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art commercial
and research techniques by a significant margin (up to an order of magnitude).Comment: VLDB201
How to Complete an Interactive Configuration Process?
When configuring customizable software, it is useful to provide interactive
tool-support that ensures that the configuration does not breach given
constraints.
But, when is a configuration complete and how can the tool help the user to
complete it?
We formalize this problem and relate it to concepts from non-monotonic
reasoning well researched in Artificial Intelligence. The results are
interesting for both practitioners and theoreticians. Practitioners will find a
technique facilitating an interactive configuration process and experiments
supporting feasibility of the approach. Theoreticians will find links between
well-known formal concepts and a concrete practical application.Comment: to appear in SOFSEM 201
An interactive multi-block grid generation system
A grid generation procedure combining interactive and batch grid generation programs was put together to generate multi-block grids for complex aircraft configurations. The interactive section provides the tools for 3D geometry manipulation, surface grid extraction, boundary domain construction for 3D volume grid generation, and block-block relationships and boundary conditions for flow solvers. The procedure improves the flexibility and quality of grid generation to meet the design/analysis requirements
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
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