2,411 research outputs found
An evolutionary model for simple ecosystems
In this review some simple models of asexual populations evolving on smooth
landscapes are studied. The basic model is based on a cellular automaton, which
is analyzed here in the spatial mean-field limit. Firstly, the evolution on a
fixed fitness landscape is considered. The correspondence between the time
evolution of the population and equilibrium properties of a statistical
mechanics system is investigated, finding the limits for which this mapping
holds. The mutational meltdown, Eigen's error threshold and Muller's ratchet
phenomena are studied in the framework of a simplified model. Finally, the
shape of a quasi-species and the condition of coexistence of multiple species
in a static fitness landscape are analyzed. In the second part, these results
are applied to the study of the coexistence of quasi-species in the presence of
competition, obtaining the conditions for a robust speciation effect in asexual
populations.Comment: 36 pages, including 16 figures, to appear in Annual Review of
Computational Physics, D. Stauffer (ed.), World Scientific, Singapor
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An architecture for certification-aware service discovery
Service-orientation is an emerging paradigm for building complex systems based on loosely coupled components, deployed and consumed over the network. Despite the original intent of the paradigm, its current instantiations are limited to a single trust domain (e.g., a single organization). Also, some of the key promises of service-orientation - such as the dynamic orchestration of externally provided software services, using runtime service discovery and deployment - are still unachieved. One of the main reasons for this is the trust gap that normally arises when software services, offered by previously unknown providers, are to be selected at run-time, without any human intervention. To close this gap, the concept of machine-readable security certificates (called asserts) has been recently introduced, which paves the way to automated processing about security properties of services. Similarly to current security certification schemes, the assessment of the security properties of a service is delegated to an independent third party (certification authority), who issues a corresponding assert, bound to the service. In this paper, we propose an architecture, which exploits the assert concept to realise a certification-aware service discovery framework. The architecture supports the discovery of single services based on certified security properties (in additional to the usual functional properties), as well as the dynamic synthesis of service compositions, that satisfy the given security properties. The architecture is extensible, thus allowing for a range of domain specific matchmaking components, to cover dimensions related to, e.g., performance, cost and other non-functional characteristics
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