Computer Sciences Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

Social Network Dynamics For Open Source Software Projects, Y. Long, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Drawing on social network theories and previous studies, this research is an initial effort to explore the dynamics of the social network structure in Open Source Software (OSS) teams. Three projects were selected from SourceForge.net in term of their similarities as well as their differences. Monthly data were extracted from the bug tracking system in order to achieve a longitudinal view of the interaction pattern of each project. Social network analysis was used to generate the indices of network structure. The finding suggests that the interaction pattern of OSS projects evolves from a single hub at the beginning to a …

Generalized On-Demand Service Architecture For Interactive Applications [Us 2006/0168107 A1], Rajesh K. Balan, Paul C. Castro, Maria R. Ebling, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A method, system, and computer program for executing a network-based distributed application. An infrastructure is described that includes application containers configured to execute an application instance of the distributed application and measure quality of service metrics for the application instance. Workload management elements form a decentralized workload management layer. The workload management layer is configured to assign a workload to application containers based on the quality of service metrics received by the application containers.

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 …

Afit Uav Swarm Mission Planning And Simulation System, James N. Slear

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to design and implement a comprehensive mission planning system for swarms of autonomous aerial vehicles. The system integrates several problem domains including path planning, vehicle routing, and swarm behavior. The developed system consists of a parallel, multi-objective evolutionary algorithm-based path planner, a genetic algorithm-based vehicle router, and a parallel UAV swarm simulator. Each of the system's three primary components are developed on AFIT's Beowulf parallel computer clusters. Novel aspects of this research include: integrating terrain following technology into a swarm model as a means of detection avoidance, combining practical problems of path planning and …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

Toward The Static Detection Of Deadlock In Java Software, Jose E. Fadul

Theses and Dissertations

Concurrency is the source of many real-world software reliability and security problems. Concurrency defects are difficult to detect because they defy conventional software testing techniques due to their non-local and non-deterministic nature. We focus on one important aspect of this problem: static detection of the possibility of deadlock - a situation in which two or more processes are prevented from continuing while each waits for resources to be freed by the continuation of the other. This thesis proposes a flow-insensitive interprocedural static analysis that detects the possibility that a program can deadlock at runtime. Our analysis proceeds in two steps. …

Metamorphism As A Software Protection For Non-Malicious Code, Thomas E. Dube

Theses and Dissertations

Most organizations are aware that threats from trusted insiders pose a great risk to their organization and are very difficult to protect against. Auditing is recognized as an effective technique to detect malicious insider activities. However, current auditing methods are typically applied with a one-size-fits-all approach and may not be an appropriate mitigation strategy, especially towards insider threats. This research develops a 4-step methodology for designing a customized auditing template for a Microsoft Windows XP operating system. Two tailoring methods are presented which evaluate both by category and by configuration. Also developed are various metrics and weighting factors as a …

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.

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 …

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 …

Ontological Implications Of The Levels Of Conceptual Interoperability Model, Andreas Tolk, Charles D. Turnitsa, Saikou Y. Diallo

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

The Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model (LCIM) was developed to cope with the different layers of interoperation of modeling & simulation applications. It introduced technical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, dynamic, and conceptual layers of interoperation and showed how they are related to the ideas of integratability, interoperability, and composability. This paper will be presented in the invited session "Ontology Driven Interoperability for Agile Applications using Information Systems: Requirements and Applications for Agent Mediated Decision Support" at WMSCI 2006.

Semantic Tableaux Program, Sirisha Lakshmi Vadaparty

Theses Digitization Project

This project created a program that takes predicate calculus formulas and creates a visual Semantic Tableaux truth tree, thereby proving or disproving a conclusion. Formal methods used in developing and verifying software and hardware are mathematically based techniques for describing and reasoning about system properties. Such formal methods provide frameworks within which people specify, develop, and verify systems in a systematic, rather than ad hoc, manner. Formal methods include the more specific activities of program specification, program verification and hardware verification.

The Effect Of The Exposure To Domestic Violence On Psychological Well-Being Among American Muslim Women, Soulafa Shakhshir Massoud, Vanessa Francis Romo

Theses Digitization Project

A quantitative study that examines American Muslim women's level of exposure to domestic violence, resources available to them, and the effect of domestic violence on their psychological well-being. Data was collected from 128 Muslim women from the Islamic Center of Riverside in Southern California. The key finding of the study was a significant positive relationship between depression and the use of verbal aggression. In addition, a positive relationship was found to exist between anxiety, depression and the use of violence.

Analysis Of Psp-Like Processes For Software Engineering, Paul Jefferson Conrad

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this thesis is to provide the California State University, San Bernardino, Department of Computer Science with an analysis and recommended solution to improving the software development process.

Parallel Programming On General Block Min Max Criterion, Chuanche Lee

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of the thesis is to develop a parallel implementation of the General Block Min Max Criterion (GBMM). This thesis deals with two kinds of parallel overheads: Redundant Calculations Parallel Overhead (RCPO) and Communication Parallel Overhead (CPO).

Multi-Warehouse Inventory Control System, Tzu-Hsiao Yin

Theses Digitization Project

The thesis discusses the development of Multi-Warehouse Inventory Control System (MWICS), a uniquely designed web application that targets membership based food wholesalers. The main goal of MWICS is to provide a real-time inventory control ability to all warehouses and present them as if it were single warehouse. The program consists of three main components: user account management sub-system, product and purchase management sub-system, and a warehouse inventory management sub-system. User interfaces are constructed primarily in HTML, PHP, and Javascript. MySQL is used to add, access, and process data.

Remote: A Complete Tool To Support Software Process Management, Darrion Todd Demelo

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of the project is to provide the Department of Computer Science at California State University, San Bernardino with a software project management tool that will help companies in their software development. ReMoTe (Recursively Estimating Multi-Threaded Observation Technology Enterprise) will assist software engineering teams with defining their scheduled delivery dates, life-cycle definitions, team hierarchy, and communication. Using the object-oriented approach, ReMoTe can support any software life cycle model. ReMoTe can help manage and control the software process over the Web. It also allows people to manage software artifacts using database systems such as mySQL, Microsoft Access, or Oracle.