Software Engineering Commons^™

Modeling Heterogeneous User Churn And Local Resilience Of Unstructured P2p Networks, Zhongmei Yao, Derek Leonard, Dmitri Loguinov, Xiaoming Wang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Previous analytical results on the resilience of unstructured P2P systems have not explicitly modeled heterogeneity of user churn (i.e., difference in online behavior) or the impact of in-degree on system resilience. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a generic model of heterogeneous user churn, derive the distribution of the various metrics observed in prior experimental studies (e.g., lifetime distribution of joining users, joint distribution of session time of alive peers, and residual lifetime of a randomly selected user), derive several closed-form results on the transient behavior of in-degree, and eventually obtain the joint in/out degree isolation probability as a simple …

Robust Control Techniques Enabling Duty Cycle Experiments Utilizing A 6-Dof Crewstation Motion Base, A Full Scale Combat Hybrid Electric Power System, And Long Distance Internet Communications, Marc Compere, Jarrett Goodell, Miguel Simon, Wilford Smith, Mark Brudnak

Publications

The RemoteLink effort supports the U.S. Army's objective for developing and fielding next generation hybrid-electric combat vehicles. It is a distributed soldierin- the-Ioop and hardware-in-the-Ioop environment with a 6-DOF motion base for operator realism, a full-scale combat hybrid electric power system, and an operational context provided by OneSAF. The driver/gunner crewstations rest on one of two 6-DOF motion bases at the U.S. Army TARDEC Simulation Laboratory (TSL). The hybrid power system is located 2,450 miles away at the TARDEC Power and Energy System Integration Laboratory (P&E SIL). The primary technical challenge in the RemoteLink is to operate both laboratories together …

Icodes (Integrated Computerized Deployment System) Technical And Operational Description, Cesar Diaz, Billy Waiters, Jerry Pickard, Jason Naylor, Steven Gollery, Patrick Mcgraw, Michael Huffman, John Fanshier, Matt Parrott, Steve O'Driscoll-Packer, Boone Pendergrast, Evan Sylvester, Jens Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Over the past decade CDM Technologies, Inc. (CDM) in conjunction with the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center (CADRC) at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo, has developed a suite of information-centric software tools in support of military deployment and distribution processes. All of these tools feature agents that are capable of reasoning about data in the context provided by an internal information model. Together they represent an evolving suite of adaptive Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (KMES) that can be readily configured into a net-centric planning and decision-support toolset for a particular application domain.

As a set …

Low-Latency Broadcast In Multirate Wireless Mesh Networks, Chun Tung Chou, Archan Misra, Junaid Qadir

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a multirate wireless network, a node can dynamically adjust its link transmission rate by switching between different modulation schemes. In the current IEEE802.11a/b/g standards, this rate adjustment is defined for unicast traffic only. In this paper, we consider a wireless mesh network (WMN), where a node can dynamically adjust its link-layer multicast rates to its neighbors, and address the problem of realizing low-latency network-wide broadcast in such a mesh. We first show that the multirate broadcast problem is significantly different from the single-rate case. We will then present an algorithm for achieving low-latency broadcast in a multirate mesh which …

Dcma: A Label-Switching Mac For Efficient Packet Forwarding In Multi-Hop Wireless Networks, Arup Acharya, Sachin Ganu, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper addresses the problem of efficient packet forwarding in a multihop, wireless "mesh" network. We present an efficient interface contained forwarding (ICF) architecture for a "wireless router," i.e., a forwarding node with a single wireless network interface card (NIC) in a multihop wireless network that allows a packet to be forwarded entirely within the NIC of the forwarding node without requiring per-packet intervention by the node's CPU. To effectively forward packets in a pipelined fashion without incurring the 802.11-related overheads of multiple independent channel accesses, we specify a slightly modified version of the 802.11 MAC, called data driven cut-through …

Smartic: Towards Building An Accurate, Robust And Scalable Specification Miner, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Improper management of software evolution, compounded by imprecise, and changing requirements, along with the “short time to market ” requirement, commonly leads to a lack of up-to-date specifications. This can result in software that is characterized by bugs, anomalies and even security threats. Software specification mining is a new technique to address this concern by inferring specifications automatically. In this paper, we propose a novel API specification mining architecture called SMArTIC (Specification Mining Architecture with Trace fIltering and Clustering) to improve the accuracy, robustness and scalability of specification miners. This architecture is constructed based on two hypotheses: (1) Erroneous traces …

India’S Rise As A Software Power: Governmental Policy Factors, Tad Drozdowski, Hai Huynh, Brian Lininger, Yicheng Peng, Naruedom Sakulyong

Engineering and Technology Management Student Projects

The Indian government’s policies toward an open, global market, support of educational institutions, and enhancement of appropriate infrastructure helped enable their software industry to become critical components of India’s economic growth in the 1990s. The Technical, Organizational, and Personal perspective (T, O, and P) model is utilized to examine different affects that each perspective, inclusive of government policies, has on a socio-technical system (Software development in India). The Indian government has provided substantial economic liberalization to support their software industries, though continued reform is necessary to ensure that they remain a software superpower.

Design And Analysis Of A Class-Aware Recursive Loop Scheduler For Class-Based Scheduling, Raphael Rom, Moshe Sidi, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we consider the problem of devising a loop scheduler that allocates slots to users according to their relative weights as smoothly as possible. Instead of the existing notion of smoothness based on balancedness, we propose a variance-based metric which is more intuitive and easier to compute.

We propose a recursive loop scheduler for a class-based scheduling scenario based on an optimal weighted round-robin scheduler. We show that it achieves very good allocation smoothness with almost no degradation in intra-class fairness. In addition, we also demonstrate the equivalence between our proposed metric and the balancedness-based metric.

A Pattern Language For Extensible Program Representation, Andrew P. Black, Daniel Vainsencher

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

For the last 15 years, implementors of multiple view programming environments have sought a single code model that would form a suitable basis for all of the program analyses and tools that might be applied to the code. They have been unsuccessful. The consequences are a tendency to build monolithic, single-purpose tools, each of which implements its own specialized analyses and optimized representation. This restricts the availability of the analyses, and also limits the reusability of the representation by other tools. Unintegrated tools also produce inconsistent views, which reduce the value of multiple views. This article describes a set of …

A Multi-Agent Framework For Testing Distributed Systems, Hany Elyamany, Miriam Capretz, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Software testing is a very expensive and time consuming process. It can account for up to 50% of the total cost of the software development. Distributed systems make software testing a daunting task. The research described in this paper investigates a novel multi-agent framework for testing 3-tier distributed systems. This paper describes the framework architecture as well as the communication mechanism among agents in the architecture. Web-based application is examined as a case study to validate the proposed framework. The framework is considered as a step forward to automate testing for distributed systems in order to enhance their reliability within …

Minimum Latency Broadcasting In Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Multi-Rate Wireless Meshes, Junaid Qadir, Archan Misra, Chun Tung Chou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of minimizing the worst-case broadcast delay in multi-radio multi-channel multi-rate (MR2-MC) wireless mesh networks (WMN). The problem of 'efficient' broadcast in such networks is especially challenging due to the numerous interrelated decisions that have to be made. The multi-rate transmission capability of WMN nodes, interference between wireless transmissions, and the hardness of optimal channel assignment adds complexity to our considered problem. We present four heuristic algorithms to solve the minimum latency broadcast problem for such settings and show that the 'best' performing algorithms usually adapt themselves to the available radio interfaces and channels. We also study …

Pre-Conference Proceedings Of The Focus Symposium On Advances In Intelligent Software Systems, Collaborative Agent Design Research Center

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

A very powerful new type of information systems technology is rapidly emerging, driven by government and commercial needs for expert decision-support and knowledge management. One very apparent result of this technology is increasingly intelligent software systems. Computer programs with collaborative agents that are capable of automatically reasoning about data and the dynamic changes in data that occur in real world decision-making situations are already in use by the military and are now transitioning to the commercial world.

Tabu Search For Optimization Of Military Supply Distribution, Ben Weber, Brett Bojduj, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The dynamic and non-hierarchical nature of the military domain presents a challenge for traditional supply chain optimization. Flow networks and simulation techniques have been applied to the military distribution problem, but are unable to provide time-definite delivery to customers. Recently, optimization approaches have been independently applied towards strategic and operational levels of planning. However, decomposing military distribution into separate problems forces optimization techniques to utilize imprecise data. The size of the military distribution problem has prevented optimization techniques from providing end-to-end planning capabilities. This paper presents a Tabu Search algorithm for simultaneously solving strategic and operational levels of planning. The …

Elements Of Human Decision-Making, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The purpose of this paper is to present some understandings of the human problem-solving activity that we have gained in the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center (CADRC) over the past two decades. Since we feel strongly that the human decision-maker should be an integral component of any computer-based decision-support system, it follows that we would have endeavored to incorporate many of the elements that appear to be important to the user in the design of these systems. The complexity of the human cognitive system is evidenced by the large body of literature that describes problem-solving behavior and the relatively fewer …

Transway®: Planning With The Tabu Search Algorithm, Joshua Nibecker, Dennis Taylor, Robert Chambers, Harmony Larsen, Ken Cudworth, Clay Warren, Mark Porczak, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Military deployment and distribution responsibilities call for intelligent collaborative tools in support of strategic and operational planning functions involving the sustainment and movement of military forces. The sustainment requirement is generated at the operational level and is dynamic. It is composed of shifting priorities responding to changes in commander’s intent and changes in the operational situation.

The TRANSWAY software application is designed as a set of intelligent collaborative tools supporting operators performing planning and re-planning tasks in a dynamically changing decision-making environment. TRANSWAY includes several agents with strategic and operational planning and re-planning capabilities. The principal agent is based on …

A Framework For Transforming, Analyzing, And Realizing Software Designs In Unified Modeling Language, Zhijiang Dong

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the most comprehensive and widely accepted object-oriented modeling language due to its multi-paradigm modeling capabilities and easy to use graphical notations, with strong international organizational support and industrial production quality tool support. However, there is a lack of precise definition of the semantics of individual UML notations as well as the relationships among multiple UML models, which often introduces incomplete and inconsistent problems for software designs in UML, especially for complex systems. Furthermore, there is a lack of methodologies to ensure a correct implementation from a given UML design. The purpose of this investigation is …

Student Interactive Campus Map At Marshall University, Edward Aractingi, Jamie Wolfe

IT Research

Marshall University is a state-funded university in Huntington, West Virginia. Like many universities, it is a large organization with multiple and diverse units (colleges, departments, centers, etc.) and depends on data to run efficiently. Much of this data is used by multiple entities. To better manage the needed data collected by the university, the Marshall University Geographic Information System (MUGIS) has been developed. MUGIS will address several needs of Marshall University’s principal stakeholders. Stakeholders include the university administration, faculty, and students. One of the first applications developed for MUGIS was an interactive campus map. This Web-based application is intended to …

Efficient Querying And Resource Management Using Distributed Presence Information In Converged Networks, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Koustuv Dasgupta, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Next-generation converged networks shall deliver many innovative services over the standardized SIPbased IMS signaling infrastructure. Several such services exploit the joint presence information of a consumer, i.e. SIP entity requesting a service, and a vendor, i.e. SIP resource providing a service. Presence information is a collection of contextual attributes (e.g. location, availability, reputation), some of which change dynamically. Moreover, this collective presence information is distributed across multiple presence servers. While performing query matching based on joint presence information, a server usually routes each query to a locally available resource. However, skews in the spatio-temporal distribution of queries and resources may …

Osprey: A Practical Type System For Validating Dimensional Unit Correctness Of C Programs, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Misuse of measurement units is a common source of errors in scientific applications, but standard type systems do not prevent such errors. Dimensional analysis in physics can be used to manually detect such errors in physical equations. It is, however, not feasible to perform such manual analysis for programs computing physical equations because of code complexity. In this paper, we present a type system to automatically detect potential errors involving measurement units. It is constraint-based: we model units as types and flow of units as constraints. However, standard type checking algorithms are not powerful enough to handle units because of …

Efficient Client-To-Server Assignments For Distributed Virtual Environments, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Suiping Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs) are distributed systems that allow multiple geographically distributed clients (users) to interact simultaneously in a computer-generated, shared virtual world. Applications of DVEs can be seen in many areas nowadays, such as online games, military simulations, collaborative designs, etc. To support large-scale DVEs with real-time interactions among thousands or more distributed clients, a geographically distributed server architecture (GDSA) is generally needed, and the virtual world can be partitioned into many distinct zones to distribute the load among the servers. Due to the geographic distributions of clients and servers in such architectures, it is essential to efficiently assign …

Effect Of Changing Requirements: A Tracking Mechanism For The Analysis Workflow, Subhajit Datta, Robert Van Engelen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Managing the effects of changing requirements remains one of the greatest challenges of enterprise software development. The iterative and incremental model provides an expedient framework for addressing such concerns. This paper presents a set of metrics - Mutation Index, Component Set, Dependency Index - and a methodology to measure the effects of requirement changes in the analysis workflow from one iteration to another. Results from a sample case study are included to highlight a usage scenario. Future directions of our work based on this mechanism are also discussed.

Development Of Integrated Process Simulation System Model For Spent Fuel Treatment Facility (Sftf) Design: Quarterly Progress Report January 1-March 31, 2006, Yitung Chen, Sean Hsieh

Separations Campaign (TRP)

The UNLV developed TRPSEMPro software package can access engineering modeling software, ASPEN Plus through its own interface. The new interface eliminates the user interaction with the complex ASPEN Plus package and also provides input and output results for analysis purpose. The current interface will keep improving on collecting multiple scenario runs and database population.

Two separation processes, acid and plutonium separations, are near completion. The unit operations were finished while some sensitive chemical data for certain species are unknown. Graduate student, Matthew Hodges, continues on finishing those processes using dummy values for those restricted variables. Once the processes complete, researchers …

Perspective Models As A Means For Achieving True Representational Accuracy, Kym Jason Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Accurate and expressive representation of the subject matter over which a context-oriented, decision-support system operates is fundamental to the effectiveness and longevity of the resulting solution. Often taking the form of an ontology, such extensive representational models, by their very nature, are rich in both relationships and fine-grained objects. It is, however, these two strengths that can significantly increase complexity for its users in addition to adversely affecting system performance. Further, due to the multitude of compartmentalized facets (i.e., populations of distinct, reasoning agents) inherent in such software solutions, it is important to recognize that a single-minded omniscient set of …

Maturity Assessment Framework For Business Dimension Of Software Product Family, Faheem Ahmed, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The software product family approach aims at curtailing the concept of “reinventing the wheel” in the software development process. The business has been highlighted as one of the critical dimensions in the process of software product family. This work presents an assessment framework for evaluating the business dimension of software product family process. Additionally, a software product family business evaluation tool has been designed and implemented on the basis of the presented framework. The tool preprocesses the data of key business factors, and it evaluates the overall business maturity of an organization. To demonstrate the application of the framework, and …

Caps: Energy-Efficient Processing Of Continuous Aggregate Queries In Sensor Networks, Wen Hu, Archan Misra, Rajiv Shorey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we design and evaluate an energy efficient data retrieval architecture for continuous aggregate queries in wireless sensor networks. We show how the modification of precision in one sensor affects the sample-reporting frequency of other sensors, and how the precisions of a group of sensors may be collectively modified to achieve the target quality of information (QoI) with higher energy-efficiency. The proposed collective adaptive precision setting (CAPS) architecture is then extended to exploit the observed temporal correlation among successive sensor samples for even greater energy efficiency. Detailed simulations with synthetic and real data traces demonstrate how the combination …

Crosscutting Score: An Indicator Metric For Aspect Orientation, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) provides powerful techniques for modeling and implementing enterprise software systems. To leverage its full potential, AOP needs to be perceived in the context of existing methodologies such as Object Oriented Programming (OOP). This paper addresses an important question for AOP practitioners - how to decide whether a component is best modeled as a class or an aspect? Towards that end, we present an indicator metric, the Crosscutting Score and a method for its calculation and interpretation. We will illustrate our approach through a sample calculation.

Agility Measurement Index: A Metric For The Crossroads Of Software Development Methodologies, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software engineering's journey to maturity has been marked by the advent of different development methodologies. While each paradigm has its context and cognoscenti, project teams are often faced with the choice of one approach over another in the grind of delivering software on time and within budget. In this paper, we briefly review the three major techniques of addressing enterprise software development, namely the Waterfall, Unified and Extreme styles. The metric Agility Measurement Index is then proposed, which helps organizations choose the methodology that best suites a particular project.

A Binary Data Stream Scripting Language, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Lihua Wang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Any file is fundamentally a binary data stream. A practical solution was achieved to interpret binary data stream. A new scripting language named Data Format Scripting Language (DFSL) was developed to describe the physical layout of the data in a structural, more intelligible way. On the basis of the solution, a generic software application was implemented; it parses various binary data streams according to their respective DFSL scripts and generates human-readable result and XML document for data sharing. Our solution helps eliminate the error-prone low-level programming, especially in the hardware devices or network protocol development/debugging processes.

Energy Efficiency And Capacity For Tcp Traffic In Multi-Hop Wireless Networks, Sorav Bansal, Rajeev Shorey, Rajeev Gupta, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the performance metrics associated with TCP-regulated traffic in multi-hop, wireless networks that use a common physical channel (e.g., IEEE 802.11). In contrast to earlier analyses, we focus simultaneously on two key operating metrics—the energy efficiency and the transport-layer (TCP) throughput. Using analysis and simulations, we show how these metrics are strongly influenced by the radio transmission range of individual nodes. Due to tradeoffs between the individual packet transmission energy and the likelihood of retransmissions, the total energy consumption is a convex function of the number of hops (and hence, of the transmission range). On the other hand, the …

Design Synthesis From Interaction And State-Based Specifications, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Interaction-based and state-based modeling are two complementary approaches of behavior modeling. The former focuses on global interactions between system components. The latter concentrates on the internal states of individual components. Both approaches have been proven useful in practice. One challenging and important research objective is to combine the modeling power of both effectively and then use the combination as the basis for automatic design synthesis. We present a combination of interaction-based and state-based modeling, namely, Live Sequence Charts and Z, for system specification. We then propose a way of generating distributed design from the combinations. Our approach handles systems with …