Using a Model-driven Approach in Building a Provenance Framework for Tracking Policy-making Processes in Smart Cities

The significance of provenance in various settings has emphasised its potential in the policy-making process for analytics in Smart Cities. At present, there exists no framework that can capture the provenance in a policy-making setting. This research therefore aims at defining a novel framework, namely, the Policy Cycle Provenance (PCP) Framework, to capture the provenance of the policy-making process. However, it is not straightforward to design the provenance framework due to a number of associated policy design challenges. The design challenges revealed the need for an adaptive system for tracking policies therefore a model-driven approach has been considered in designing the PCP framework. Also, suitability of a networking approach is proposed for designing workflows for tracking the policy-making process.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables, Proc of the 21st International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (IDEAS 2017

Designing Reusable Systems that Can Handle Change - Description-Driven Systems : Revisiting Object-Oriented Principles

In the age of the Cloud and so-called Big Data systems must be increasingly flexible, reconfigurable and adaptable to change in addition to being developed rapidly. As a consequence, designing systems to cater for evolution is becoming critical to their success. To be able to cope with change, systems must have the capability of reuse and the ability to adapt as and when necessary to changes in requirements. Allowing systems to be self-describing is one way to facilitate this. To address the issues of reuse in designing evolvable systems, this paper proposes a so-called description-driven approach to systems design. This approach enables new versions of data structures and processes to be created alongside the old, thereby providing a history of changes to the underlying data models and enabling the capture of provenance data. The efficacy of the description-driven approach is exemplified by the CRISTAL project. CRISTAL is based on description-driven design principles; it uses versions of stored descriptions to define various versions of data which can be stored in diverse forms. This paper discusses the need for capturing holistic system description when modelling large-scale distributed systems.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure and 1 table. Accepted by the 9th Int Conf on the Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE'14). Lisbon, Portugal. April 201

A Fault Tolerant, Dynamic and Low Latency BDII Architecture for Grids

The current BDII model relies on information gathering from agents that run on each core node of a Grid. This information is then published into a Grid wide information resource known as Top BDII. The Top level BDIIs are updated typically in cycles of a few minutes each. A new BDDI architecture is proposed and described in this paper based on the hypothesis that only a few attribute values change in each BDDI information cycle and consequently it may not be necessary to update each parameter in a cycle. It has been demonstrated that significant performance gains can be achieved by exchanging only the information about records that changed during a cycle. Our investigations have led us to implement a low latency and fault tolerant BDII system that involves only minimal data transfer and facilitates secure transactions in a Grid environment.Comment: 18 pages; 10 figures; 4 table

Bulk Scheduling with the DIANA Scheduler

Results from the research and development of a Data Intensive and Network Aware (DIANA) scheduling engine, to be used primarily for data intensive sciences such as physics analysis, are described. In Grid analyses, tasks can involve thousands of computing, data handling, and network resources. The central problem in the scheduling of these resources is the coordinated management of computation and data at multiple locations and not just data replication or movement. However, this can prove to be a rather costly operation and efficient sing can be a challenge if compute and data resources are mapped without considering network costs. We have implemented an adaptive algorithm within the so-called DIANA Scheduler which takes into account data location and size, network performance and computation capability in order to enable efficient global scheduling. DIANA is a performance-aware and economy-guided Meta Scheduler. It iteratively allocates each job to the site that is most likely to produce the best performance as well as optimizing the global queue for any remaining jobs. Therefore it is equally suitable whether a single job is being submitted or bulk scheduling is being performed. Results indicate that considerable performance improvements can be gained by adopting the DIANA scheduling approach.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures. To be published in the IEEE Transactions in Nuclear Science, IEEE Press. 200

An Architecture for Integrated Intelligence in Urban Management using Cloud Computing

With the emergence of new methodologies and technologies it has now become possible to manage large amounts of environmental sensing data and apply new integrated computing models to acquire information intelligence. This paper advocates the application of cloud capacity to support the information, communication and decision making needs of a wide variety of stakeholders in the complex business of the management of urban and regional development. The complexity lies in the interactions and impacts embodied in the concept of the urban-ecosystem at various governance levels. This highlights the need for more effective integrated environmental management systems. This paper offers a user-orientated approach based on requirements for an effective management of the urban-ecosystem and the potential contributions that can be supported by the cloud computing community. Furthermore, the commonality of the influence of the drivers of change at the urban level offers the opportunity for the cloud computing community to develop generic solutions that can serve the needs of hundreds of cities from Europe and indeed globally.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure