A Review of the Underlying Concepts of Electronic Voting

Elections and voting are fundamental to any consensus-based society. They are one of the most critical functions of democracy. There are a number of voting systems adopted all over the world with each of them having its peculiar problems. The manual voting system still appears prominent among the developed and developing nations, but with considerations being given to an electronic alternative with a view to showing most of the short comings. Furthermore, with the increased interest and attention on e-government, e-democracy and e-governance, e-voting initiatives have gained more significance. Thus, many countries are piloting with various e-voting models and systems in order to enable voting from anywhere; also, international organisations are developing standards and recommendations in this area. This paper details a review of the underlying concepts of e-voting and discusses some of the salient issues on the subject. Also, a review of common e-voting models, existing elections schemes and explanation of the usual terminologies associated with e-voting were presented. KEYWORDS: voting, election, democracy, e-voting, cryptograph

Modelling of a Sequential Low-level Language Program Using Petri Nets

Petri nets were devised for use in the modelling of a specific class of problems. Typical situations that can be modelled by Petri nets are synchronization, sequentiality, concurrency and conflict. This paper focuses on a low-level language program representation by means of Petri nets. In particular, Petri net formalisms were explored with emphasis on the application of the methodology in the modelling of a sequential low-level language program using a Motorola MC68000 assembly language program as an example. In the Petri net representation of the sequential low-level language program under consideration, tokens denote the values of immediate data as well as availability of the data. Thus, the developed petri net model shows that Petri net formalism can be conveniently used to represent flows of control and not flows of data. Keywords: Petri nets, model, low-level language, microprocessor, instructions

Development of a Timed Coloured Petri Net Model for Time-of-Day Signal Timing Plan Transitions

In many countries, traffic signal control is one of the most cost effective means of improving urban mobility. Nevertheless, the signal control can be grouped into two principal classes, namely traffic-response and fixed-time. Precisely, a traffic response signal controller changes timing plan in real time according to traffic conditions while a fixed-time signal controller deploys multiple signal timing plans to cater for traffic demand changes during a day. To handle different traffic scenarios via fixed-time signal controls, traffic engineers determine such time-of-day intervals manually using one or two days worth of traffic data. That is, owing to significant variation in traffic volumes, the efficient use of fixed-time signal controllers depends primarily on selecting a number of signal timing plans within a day. In this paper, a Timed Coloured Petri Net (TCPN) formalism was explored to model transition between four signal timing plans of a traffic light control system such that a morning peak signal timing plan handles traffic demand between the hours of 6:00 am and 8:30 am, followed by afternoon I and afternoon II signal timing plans which handle traffic demands from 8:30 am to 3:00 pm and from 3:00 pm to 7:00 pm respectively, while the off peak plan handles traffic demands from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm. Other hours of the day are ignored since they are characterized by low traffic demands. Keywords: Signal timing plan, Petri nets, Time-of-day, Model, Traffic, Fixed-time