Workflow resource pattern modelling and visualization

Workflow patterns have been recognized as the theoretical basis to modeling recurring problems in workflow systems. A form of workflow patterns, known as the resource patterns, characterise the behaviour of resources in workflow systems. Despite the fact that many resource patterns have been discovered, people still preclude them from many workflow system implementations. One of reasons could be obscurityin the behaviour of and interaction between resources and a workflow management system. Thus, we provide a modelling and visualization approach for the resource patterns, enabling a resource behaviour modeller to intuitively see the specific resource patterns involved in the lifecycle of a workitem. We believe this research can be extended to benefit not only workflow modelling, but also other applications, such as model validation, human resource behaviour modelling, and workflow model visualization

PROJECT ÉVORA 3D: RESEARCH, METHODOLOGY, RECONSTRUCTION AND VISUALIZATION

The Évora 3D project was born from the collaboration between the Municipality and the University of Évora, through the two research centres of CIDEHUS1 and CHAIA2, with the objective of completing a virtual reconstruction of the city in a longtime frame. In the national and international context, the use of new technologies has led to the diversification of this type of proposal, both at the urban level and in the reconstruction of concrete spaces. The application of this same model to Évora, contemplating several chronological layers, seems to impose itself in a city that, in the medieval and modern periods, was one of the most important of the kingdom, as Court city, and that today is classified as World Heritage Site

Autonomic Cloud Computing: Open Challenges and Architectural Elements

As Clouds are complex, large-scale, and heterogeneous distributed systems, management of their resources is a challenging task. They need automated and integrated intelligent strategies for provisioning of resources to offer services that are secure, reliable, and cost-efficient. Hence, effective management of services becomes fundamental in software platforms that constitute the fabric of computing Clouds. In this direction, this paper identifies open issues in autonomic resource provisioning and presents innovative management techniques for supporting SaaS applications hosted on Clouds. We present a conceptual architecture and early results evidencing the benefits of autonomic management of Clouds.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conference keynote pape

Procedural digital twin generation for co-creating in VR focusing on vegetation

An early-stage development of a Digital Twin (DT) in Virtual Reality (VR) is presented, aiming for civic engagement in a new urban development located in an area that is a forest today. The area is presently used for recreation. For the developer, it is important both to communicate how the new development will affect the forest and allow for feedback from the citizen. High quality DT models are time-consuming to generate, especially for VR. Current model generation methods require the model developer to manually design the virtual environment. Furthermore, they are not scalable when multiple scenarios are required as a project progresses. This study aimed to create an automated, procedural workflow to generate DT models and visualize large-scale data in VR with a focus on existing green structures as a basis for participatory approaches. Two versions of the VR prototype were developed in close cooperation with the urban developer and evaluated in two user tests. A procedural workflow was developed for generating DT models and integrated into the VR application. For the green structures, efforts focused on the vegetation, such as realistic representation and placement of different types of trees and bushes. Only navigation functions were enabled in the first user test with practitioners (9 participants). Interactive functions were enabled in the second user test with pupils (age 15, 9 participants). In both tests, the researchers observed the participants and carried out short reflective interviews. The user test evaluation focussed on the perception of the vegetation, general perception of the VR environment, interaction, and navigation. The results show that the workflow is effective, and the users appreciate green structure representations in VR environments in both user tests. Based on the workflow, similar scenes can be created for any location in Sweden. Future development needs to concentrate on the refinement of buildings and information content. A challenge will be balancing the level of detail for communication with residents

Documenting Bronze Age Akrotiri on Thera using laser scanning, image-based modelling and geophysical prospection

The excavated architecture of the exceptional prehistoric site of Akrotiri on the Greek island of Thera/Santorini is endangered by gradual decay, damage due to accidents, and seismic shocks, being located on an active volcano in an earthquake-prone area. Therefore, in 2013 and 2014 a digital documentation project has been conducted with support of the National Geographic Society in order to generate a detailed digital model of Akrotiri’s architecture using terrestrial laser scanning and image-based modeling. Additionally, non-invasive geophysical prospection has been tested in order to investigate its potential to explore and map yet buried archaeological remains. This article describes the project and the generated results

MOLNs: A cloud platform for interactive, reproducible and scalable spatial stochastic computational experiments in systems biology using PyURDME

Computational experiments using spatial stochastic simulations have led to important new biological insights, but they require specialized tools, a complex software stack, as well as large and scalable compute and data analysis resources due to the large computational cost associated with Monte Carlo computational workflows. The complexity of setting up and managing a large-scale distributed computation environment to support productive and reproducible modeling can be prohibitive for practitioners in systems biology. This results in a barrier to the adoption of spatial stochastic simulation tools, effectively limiting the type of biological questions addressed by quantitative modeling. In this paper, we present PyURDME, a new, user-friendly spatial modeling and simulation package, and MOLNs, a cloud computing appliance for distributed simulation of stochastic reaction-diffusion models. MOLNs is based on IPython and provides an interactive programming platform for development of sharable and reproducible distributed parallel computational experiments