A Contract-Based Requirement Engineering Framework for the Design of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

This work-in-progress paper presents our current effort toward the development of compositional modeling formalisms and scalable algorithms for high-assurance design of industrial cyber-physical systems, with emphasis on smart manufacturing systems. A require-ment engineering methodology is implemented within CHASE, a software framework supporting contract-based representations of systems and components to facilitate analysis and design space exploration. We provide an overview of CHASE and discuss its application to the design of a robotic arm. This paper is accompanied by a poster describing the architecture of CHASE and a demonstration of its application to the case study

La transmisión de la cultura africana a los niños

African ancient traditions suffered a major historical change as a result of colonization. Several decades after decolonization and access to independence, what is the situation and place of the African culture in Africa and outside Africa? Does African culture perpetuate effectively today? What are the obstacles to the transmission of African culture to our children? What are the beliefs or elements that have influenced the transmission of our culture after the period of independence? Roughly, what is left of our culture in the twenty-first century? We are going to focus on Côte d´Ivoire case study, basing our analysis on an analytical reading of contemporary society since 1960, year of the independence of our country.Las tradiciones ancestrales africanas sufrieron un gran cambio histórico a raíz de la colonización. Varias décadas después de la descolonización y el acceso a la independencia, ¿cuál es la fisonomía y el lugar de la cultura africana en África y fuera de África? ¿Se sigue perpetuando la cultura africana de manera eficaz hoy en día? ¿Cuáles son los obstáculos a la transmisión de la cultura africana a nuestros hijos? ¿Cuáles son las creencias o los elementos que han influido en la transmisión de nuestra cultura después del periodo de las independencias? A grosso modo, ¿qué queda de nuestra cultura en el siglo XXI? Vamos a interesarnos por el caso de Costa de Marfil, basando nuestro análisis en una lectura analítica de la sociedad contemporánea desde 1960, año de la independencia de nuestro país

IP-XACT for Smart Systems Design: Extensions for the Integration of Functional and Extra-Functional Models

Smart systems are miniaturized devices integrating computation, communication, sensing and actuation. As such, their design can not focus solely on functional behavior, but it must rather take into account different extra-functional concerns, such as power consumption or reliability. Any smart system can thus be modeled through a number of views, each focusing on a specific concern. Such views may exchange information, and they must thus be simulated simultaneously to reproduce mutual influence of the corresponding concerns. This paper shows how the IP-XACT standard, with some necessary extensions, can effectively support this simultaneous simulation. The extended IP-XACT descriptions allow to model extra-functional properties with a homogeneous format, defined by analysing requirements and characteristic of three main concerns, i.e., power, temperature and reliability. The IP-XACT descriptions are then used to automatically generate a skeleton of the simulation infrastructure in SystemC. The skeleton can be easily populated with models available in the literature, thus reaching simultaneous simulation of multiple concerns

Sensore e dispositivo per il monitoraggio di fluidi

L’oggetto del brevetto è una soluzione hardware in grado di acquisire contemporaneamente e in una sola misura il dato di pressione e portata di un fluido. Il misuratore possiede una scheda elettronica incorporata che lo rende compatibile con un software in grado di raccogliere i dati in tempo reale, integrabile in una rete di monitoraggio. I bassi consumi e la versatilità lo rendono una soluzione alternativa sul mercato degli smart-meter

Reusing RTL assertion checkers for verification of SystemC TLM models

The recent trend towards system-level design gives rise to new challenges for reusing existing RTL intellectual properties (IPs) and their verification environment in TLM. While techniques and tools to abstract RTL IPs into TLM models have begun to appear, the problem of reusing, at TLM, a verification environment originally developed for an RTL IP is still under-explored, particularly when ABV is adopted. Some frameworks have been proposed to deal with ABV at TLM, but they assume a top-down design and verification flow, where assertions are defined ex-novo at TLM level. In contrast, the reuse of existing assertions in an RTL-to-TLM bottom-up design flow has not been analyzed yet, except by using transactors to create a mixed simulation between the TLM design and the RTL checkers corresponding to the assertions. However, the use of transactors may lead to longer verification time due to the need of developing and verifying the transactors themselves. Moreover, the simulation time is negatively affected by the presence of transactors, which slow down the simulation at the speed of the slowest parts (i.e., RTL checkers). This article proposes an alternative methodology that does not require transactors for reusing assertions, originally defined for a given RTL IP, in order to verify the corresponding TLM model. Experimental results have been conducted on benchmarks with different characteristics and complexity to show the applicability and the efficacy of the proposed methodology

On the Reuse of RTL assertions in Systemc TLM Verification

Reuse of existing and already verified intellectual property (IP) models is a key strategy to cope with the com- plexity of designing modern system-on-chips (SoC)s under ever stringent time-to-market requirements. In particular, the recent trend towards system-level design and transaction level modeling (TLM) gives rise to new challenges for reusing existing RTL IPs and their verification environment in TLM-based design flows. While techniques and tools to abstract RTL IPs into TLM models have begun to appear, the problem of reusing, at TLM, a verification environment originally developed for an RTL IP is still underexplored, particularly when assertion-based verification (ABV) is adopted. Some techniques and frameworks have been proposed to deal with ABV at TLM, but they assume a top-down design and verification flow, where assertions are defined ex-novo at TLM level. In contrast, the reuse of existing assertions in an RTL-to-TLM bottom-up design flow has not been analyzed yet. This paper proposes a methodology to reuse assertions originally defined for a given RTL IP, to verify the corresponding TLM model. Experimental results have been conducted on benchmarks of different characteristics and complexity to show the applicability and the efficacy of the proposed methodology

The “Wireless Sensor Networks for City-Wide Ambient Intelligence (WISE-WAI)” Project

This paper gives a detailed technical overview of some of the activities carried out in the context of the “Wireless Sensor networks for city-Wide Ambient Intelligence (WISE-WAI)” project, funded by the Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo Foundation, Italy. The main aim of the project is to demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale wireless sensor network deployments, whereby tiny objects integrating one or more environmental sensors (humidity, temperature, light intensity), a microcontroller and a wireless transceiver are deployed over a large area, which in this case involves the buildings of the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Padova. We will describe how the network is organized to provide full-scale automated functions, and which services and applications it is configured to provide. These applications include long-term environmental monitoring, alarm event detection and propagation, single-sensor interrogation, localization and tracking of objects, assisted navigation, as well as fast data dissemination services to be used, e.g., to rapidly re-program all sensors over-the-air. The organization of such a large testbed requires notable efforts in terms of communication protocols and strategies, whose design must pursue scalability, energy efficiency (while sensors are connected through USB cables for logging and debugging purposes, most of them will be battery-operated), as well as the capability to support applications with diverse requirements. These efforts, the description of a subset of the results obtained so far, and of the final objectives to be met are the scope of the present paper

The Grizzly, April 14, 1989

Middle States: What To Look For At U.C. • Sorority Songfest Continues • Letters: Lack of MACLAS Coverage Disturbing; I.D. Hassles; We Smell a Rat! • Middle States Closing Offers Suggestions • Canterbury Corner too Costly • Lacrosse Braces for Traditional Rivalry • Outmanned, But Still Best • Tennis Turns Tables • Ursinus Sweeps • Men\u27s Lax Gets Physical • Cinders Burnin\u27 Down the House • Guess Who\u27s Coming to Dinner? • Branker Wins Jazz Fellowship • MACLAS Meeting Absolute Success • Sternal: Functional Art at U.C. • Cyclists Rolling to Victories • Pilgrim Continues U.C. Evaluation • Admissions Reception • Grant to Give Biology a Boost • The Music Scenehttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1235/thumbnail.jp

A high-resolution map of human evolutionary constraint using 29 mammals.

The comparison of related genomes has emerged as a powerful lens for genome interpretation. Here we report the sequencing and comparative analysis of 29 eutherian genomes. We confirm that at least 5.5% of the human genome has undergone purifying selection, and locate constrained elements covering ∼4.2% of the genome. We use evolutionary signatures and comparisons with experimental data sets to suggest candidate functions for ∼60% of constrained bases. These elements reveal a small number of new coding exons, candidate stop codon readthrough events and over 10,000 regions of overlapping synonymous constraint within protein-coding exons. We find 220 candidate RNA structural families, and nearly a million elements overlapping potential promoter, enhancer and insulator regions. We report specific amino acid residues that have undergone positive selection, 280,000 non-coding elements exapted from mobile elements and more than 1,000 primate- and human-accelerated elements. Overlap with disease-associated variants indicates that our findings will be relevant for studies of human biology, health and disease