Traditionally, designers obtain the information required for a navigation test by performing classic usability tests, such as watching and listening carefully to, users as they explore the navigation model. However, t...
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Traditionally, designers obtain the information required for a navigation test by performing classic usability tests, such as watching and listening carefully to, users as they explore the navigation model. However, those techniques have crucial drawbacks in terms of the quality and accuracy of the information obtained. In order to avoid these problems, the authors developed ANTS, an Automatic Navigability Testing System based on data-gathering agents.
User or program mobility in distributed computing systems is becoming increasingly significant, since users may sometimes change their working locations. This paper proposes a Logical Machine (LM) system that can effe...
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User or program mobility in distributed computing systems is becoming increasingly significant, since users may sometimes change their working locations. This paper proposes a Logical Machine (LM) system that can effectively support software environment migration and resource mapping. The LM partitions the conventional operating systems into two parts: the Logical Machine Operating System (LMOS) and the Logical Machine Monitor (LMM). They are responsible for user service and system resource management, respectively. The LMM provides a machine independent appearance, called the Logical Machine Interface (LMI), for the upper operating system layers to provide the resources they need. In our experimental system, the LMM contains some disk objects that can be bound dynamically. By varying the binds, the users get different disk characteristics. A mobile disk object with the mechanism of block migration on demand is implemented. It can be incorporated with a logical machine migration facility to achieve job migration, i.e., the user can migrate the operating system and disk blocks to the place he or she desires. The mobile disk also simplifies the mechanism of parallel processing when each server reads and processes its data portion locally. With this approach, the system resources can be mapped more flexibly, while transparency to the operating system is retained. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
In this paper, we describe the design and development of a simulation-agent interface for real-time distributed control system benchmarking. This work is motivated by the need to test the feasibility of extending agen...
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In this paper, we describe the design and development of a simulation-agent interface for real-time distributed control system benchmarking. This work is motivated by the need to test the feasibility of extending agent-based systems to the physical device level in manufacturing and other industrial automation systems. Our work focuses on the development of hybrid physical/simulation environment that can be used to perform tests at both the physical device level, as well as the planning and scheduling level of control. As part of this work, we have extended the proxy design pattern for this application. This paper focuses on the resulting software design pattern for distributed control system benchmarking and provides examples of its use in our hybrid physical/simulation environment. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
A number of high-level languages and libraries have been proposed that offer novel and simple to use abstractions for concurrent, asynchronous, and distributed programming. The execution models that realise them, howe...
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A number of high-level languages and libraries have been proposed that offer novel and simple to use abstractions for concurrent, asynchronous, and distributed programming. The execution models that realise them, however, often change over time-whether to improve performance, or to extend them to new language features-potentially affecting behavioural and safety properties of existing programs. This is exemplified by Scoop, a message-passing approach to concurrent object-oriented programming that has seen multiple changes proposed and implemented, with demonstrable consequences for an idiomatic usage of its core abstraction. We propose a semantics comparison workbench for Scoop with fully and semi-automatic tools for analysing and comparing the state spaces of programs with respect to different execution models or semantics. We demonstrate its use in checking the consistency of properties across semantics by applying it to a set of representative programs, and highlighting a deadlock-related discrepancy between the principal execution models of Scoop. Furthermore, we demonstrate the extensibility of the workbench by generalising the formalisation of an execution model to support recently proposed extensions for distributed programming. Our workbench is based on a modular and parameterisable graph transformation semantics implemented in the Groove tool. We discuss how graph transformations are leveraged to atomically model intricate language abstractions, how the visual yet algebraic nature of the model can be used to ascertain soundness, and highlight how the approach could be applied to similar languages.
Software cost estimation is important for budgeting, risk analysis, project planning and software improvement analysis. There are numerous estimation techniques. During the past three decades there had been some signi...
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Software cost estimation is important for budgeting, risk analysis, project planning and software improvement analysis. There are numerous estimation techniques. During the past three decades there had been some significant developments in effort estimation, size of software and cost estimation methodology. Current software cost estimation models have been experiencing increasing difficulties in estimating the costs of software, as new software development methodologies and technologies are emerging very rapidly. Most of the software cost models generally rely on such inputs as estimates of lines of source code, delivered sets of instructions, function points and processing complexity or experience levels to produce cost estimates. These models generally produce inaccurate results when used to estimate the cost of software development in current development environments such as those that use component-based software development environments like visual languages. The authors present in this study a new technique for software cost estimation that can be used for software projects developed using component-based fourth-generation-language environment. The model was calibrated using the empirical data collected from 19 software systems. Efficiency of the model was also compared with an existing model used for such environment. The proposed model achieved better predictive accuracy.
In this paper, the bill of materials (BOM) system is defined as the central hub of a general product data management (PDM) system that provides essential data for running a manufacturing system to produce products. In...
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In this paper, the bill of materials (BOM) system is defined as the central hub of a general product data management (PDM) system that provides essential data for running a manufacturing system to produce products. Information that is relevant to products and their components is defined in the BOM. The information is critically related to data from product design, manufacturing planning, production management, procurement, inventory control, and accounting within a company. A conventional BOM structure (or product configuration), which manages data only in a stand-alone relational database management style, cannot satisfy the needs requested by all departments within a company. A BOM should relate to and communicate with other domains of the information system. In this research, a newly designed BOM system uses the object-oriented programming (OOP) concept to represent product information. The object-oriented BOM (OOBOM) system can capture and encapsulate data that will simultaneously serve the information needs of various departments. In order to manage product data dynamically, the system provides several interfaces for easy data access and manipulation. The linkage between BOM and its corresponding CAD/CAM system is enabled through the X-window manager: thus an integrated PDM environment is developed. This product management approach improves the consistency and efficiency of product data representation.
Component-based software development (CBD) is based on building software systems from previously-existing software components. In CBD, reuse of common parts in component form can reduce the development cost of new sys...
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Component-based software development (CBD) is based on building software systems from previously-existing software components. In CBD, reuse of common parts in component form can reduce the development cost of new systems, and reduce the maintenance cost associated with the support of these systems. However, existing programs have usually been built using another paradigm, such as the object-oriented (00) paradigm. 00 programs cannot be reused rapidly or effectively in the CBD paradigm even if they contain reusable functions. In this paper, we propose a technique for extracting components from existing 00 programs by our new refactoring "Extract Component". Our technique of refactoring can identify and extract reusable components composed of classes from 00 programs, and modify the surrounding parts of extracted components in original programs. We have developed a system that performs our refactoring automatically and extracts Java-Beans components from Java programs. As a result of evaluation experiments, it is found that our system is useful for extracting reusable components along with usage examples from Java programs. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
作者:
Thiery, RCREGU
BP 23 F-54501 Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy Cedex France
A new global approach for calculating thermodynamic properties of fluids with equations of state is proposed. This method uses an object-oriented library, written in C++, and containing a number of routines that facil...
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A new global approach for calculating thermodynamic properties of fluids with equations of state is proposed. This method uses an object-oriented library, written in C++, and containing a number of routines that facilitate thermodynamic calculations. It is applicable to any equation of state formulated by an analytical expression of the Helmholtz free energy. The programming work of the user is limited to the building of a parse representation of the Helmholtz free energy. This parse graph is then processed by the program for analytically calculating the required derivatives and thermodynamic properties of fluids. A demonstration of this library is made with the Anderko and Fitter equation of state for H2O-NaCl-KCl fluids. The Helmholtz free energy has been differentiated analytically up to the fourth order with respect to the temperature, molar volume, and composition. Calculated derivatives are used to calculate the critical line of H2O-NaCl mixtures and other thermodynamic properties, which otherwise would be difficult to obtain. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd
Intelligent assistants facilitate design and construction of complex software. In this article, we propose a model for an intelligent assistant to aid in building one kind of software-knowledge-based systems—and disc...
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Intelligent assistants facilitate design and construction of complex software. In this article, we propose a model for an intelligent assistant to aid in building one kind of software-knowledge-based systems—and discuss a preliminary implementation. The assistant participates in knowledge-based system (KBS) construction, including acquisition of an initial model of a problem domain, acquisition of control and task-specific inference knowledge, testing and validation, and long-term maintenance of encoded knowledge. We present a hypothetical scenario in which the assistant and a KBS designer cooperate to create an initial domain model, and discuss five categories of knowledge the assistant requires to offer such help. We then discuss two software technologies upon which the assistant is based—an object-oriented programming language, and a user-interface framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Progress in the field of structural optimization naturally leads to an increasing number of structural models and optimization algorithms that need to be considered for design. Software architecture is of central impo...
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Progress in the field of structural optimization naturally leads to an increasing number of structural models and optimization algorithms that need to be considered for design. Software architecture is of central importance in the ability to account for the complex links tying new structural models and optimizers. An object-oriented programming pattern for interfacing simulation and optimization codes is described in this article. The concepts of optimization variable, criteria, optimizers and simulation environment are the building blocks of the pattern. The resulting interface is logical, flexible and extensive. It encompasses constrained single or multiple objective formulations with continuous, discrete or mixed design variables. Applications are given for composite laminate design. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
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