Models@ Run.time to Support Dynamic Adaptation

Today's society increasingly depends on software systems deployed in large companies, banks, airports, and so on. These systems must be available 24/7 and continuously adapt to varying environmental conditions and requirements. Such dynamically adaptive systems exhibit degrees of variability that depend on user needs and runtime fluctuations in their contexts. The paper presents an approach for specifying and executing dynamically adaptive software systems that combines model-driven and aspect-oriented techniques to help engineers tame the complexity of such systems while offering a high degree of automation and validation.     

Syntax extension using a run time model

We describe a method of syntax extension for programming languages which involves using an augmented BNF notation to add new syntactic constructs to the language, and where the meaning of the constructs is usually given by ordinary user subroutines to be executed at run time. This requires fewer special constructs in the language, and also makes it simpler to specify the extensions because the programmer does not have to worry about compile time vs. run time distinctions. The extended BNF may also be used to give specialized syntax to particular data structures.This research was supported under NSF Grant GJ 34342X.     

Parameter passing mechanisms and run time data structures

The relationship between parameter passing mechanisms and run time data structures in languages with statically-nested scopes is examined. It is shown that simpler data structures can be used in some cases, with increased efficiency in accessing non-local variables. In particular it is true for the call-by-value-result mechanism, where the usage of displays can be eliminated altogether; however there is some additional cost associated with procedure calls. Under certain conditions the same implementation applies to call-by-reference.     

Detecting component changes at run time with behavior models

Modern software systems are composed of several services which may be developed and maintained by third parties and thus they can change independently and without notice during the system’s runtime execution. In such systems, changes may possibly be a threat to system functional correctness, and thus to its reliability. Hence, it is important to detect them as soon as they happen to enable proper reaction. Change detection can be done by monitoring system execution and comparing the observed execution traces against models of the services composing the application. Unfortunately, formal specifications for services are not usually provided and developers have to infer them. In this paper we propose a methodology which exactly addresses these issues by using software behavior models to monitor component execution and detect changes. In particular, we describe a technique to infer behavior model specifications with a dynamic black box approach, keep them up-to-date with run time observations and detect behavior changes. Finally, we present a case study to validate the effectiveness of the approach in component change detection for a component that implements a complex, real communication protocol.     

Iterative support vector machine with guaranteed accuracy and run time

Abstract: Using a conjugate gradient method, a novel iterative support vector machine (FISVM) is proposed, which is capable of generating a new non‐linear classifier. We attempt to solve a modified primal problem of proximal support vector machine (PSVM) and show that the solution of the modified primal problem reduces to solving just a system of linear equations as opposed to a quadratic programming problem in SVM. This algorithm not only has no requirement for special optimization solvers, such as linear or quadratic programming tools, but also guarantees fast convergence. The full algorithm merely needs four lines of MATLAB codes, which gives results that are similar to or better than that of several new learning algorithms, in terms of classification accuracy. Besides, the proposed stand‐alone approach is capable of dealing with instability of classification performance of smooth support vector machine, generalized proximal support vector machine, PSVM and reduced support vector machine. Experiments carried out on UCI datasets show the effectiveness of our approach.     

Efficient parallel reasoning on fuzzy goal models for run time requirements verification

As software applications become highly interconnected in dynamically provisioned platforms, they form the so-called systems-of-systems. Therefore, a key issue that arises in such environments is whether specific requirements are violated, when these applications interact in new unforeseen ways as new resources or system components are dynamically provisioned. Such environments require the continuous use of frameworks for assessing compliance against specific mission critical system requirements. Such frameworks should be able to (a) handle large requirements models, (b) assess system compliance repeatedly and frequently using events from possibly high velocity and high frequency data streams, and (c) use models that can reflect the vagueness that inherently exists in big data event collection and in modeling dependencies between components of complex and dynamically re-configured systems. In this paper, we introduce a framework for run time reasoning over medium and large-scale fuzzy goal models, and we propose a process which allows for the parallel evaluation of such models. The approach has been evaluated for time and space performance on large goal models, exhibiting that in a simulation environment, the parallel reasoning process offers significant performance improvement over a sequential one.     

Optimal production run length in deteriorating production processes with fuzzy elapsed time

This paper investigates the optimal production run length in deteriorating production processes, where the elapsed time until the production process shifts is characterized as a fuzzy variable, also the setup cost and the holding cost are characterized as fuzzy variables, respectively. A mathematical formula representing the expected average cost per unit time is derived, and some properties are obtained to establish an efficient solution procedure. Since there is no closed-form expression for the optimal production run length, an approximate solving approach is presented. Finally, two numerical examples are given to illustrate the procedure of searching the optimal solutions.     

CAMPUS: A middleware for automated context-aware adaptation decision making at run time

At present, in most context-aware systems, decisions on when and how to adapt an application are made a priori by developers during the compile time. While such approaches empower developers with sufficient flexibility to specify what they want in terms of adaptation rules, they inevitably place an immense load on developers, especially in an extremely dynamic environment, to anticipate and formulate all potential run-time situations during development time. These challenges motivated us to explore an approach to automating context-aware adaptation decisions by a middleware layer at run time. The resulting middleware, CAMPUS, exploits technologies from semantic computing to dynamically derive adaptation decisions according to run-time contextual information. The CAMPUS implementation has been evaluated with a number of case applications to validate the operation of the system in a realistic environment and to provide us with an opportunity to obtain experimental results for further analysis. The results are significant in that they show that CAMPUS can effectively free developers from the need to predict, formulate, and maintain adaptation rules, thereby greatly reducing the efforts required to develop context-aware applications.     

Determination of production run time and warranty length under system maintenance and trade credits

Manufacturers offer a warranty period within which they will fix failed products at no cost to customers. Manufacturers also perform system maintenance when a system is in an out-of-control state. Suppliers provide a credit period to settle the payment to manufacturers. This study considers manufacturer's production and warranty decisions for an imperfect production system under system maintenance and trade credit. Specifically, this study uses the economic production quantity to model the decisions under system maintenance and trade credit. These decisions involve how long the production run time and warranty length should be to maximise total profit. This study provides lemmas for the conditions of optimality and develops a theorem and an algorithm for solving the problems described. Numerical examples illustrate the solution procedures and provide a variety of managerial implications. Results show that simultaneously determining production and warranty decisions is superior to only determining production. This study also discusses the effects of the related parameters on manufacturer's decisions and profits. The results of this study are a useful reference for managerial decision-making and administration.     

Use of run time predictions for automatic co-allocation of multi-cluster resources for iterative parallel applications

Metaschedulers co-allocate resources by requesting a fixed number of processors and usage time for each cluster. These static requests, defined by users, limit the initial scheduling and prevent rescheduling of applications to other resource sets. It is also difficult for users to estimate application execution times, especially on heterogeneous environments. To overcome these problems, metaschedulers can use performance predictions for automatic resource selection. This paper proposes a resource co-allocation technique with rescheduling support based on performance predictions for multi-cluster iterative parallel applications. Iterative applications have been used to solve a variety of problems in science and engineering, including large-scale computations based on the asynchronous model more recently. We performed experiments using an iterative parallel application, which consists of benchmark multiobjective problems, with both synchronous and asynchronous communication models on Grid’5000. The results show run time predictions with an average error of 7% and prevention of up to 35% and 57% of run time overestimations to support rescheduling for synchronous and asynchronous models, respectively. The performance predictions require no application source code access. One of the main findings is that as the asynchronous model masks communication and computation, it requires no network information to predict execution times. By using our co-allocation technique, metaschedulers become responsible for run time predictions, process mapping, and application rescheduling; releasing the user from these burden tasks.     

Note on “replenishment run time problem with machine breakdown and failure in rework”

A recursive search algorithm along with mathematical analysis was used in a recent paper (Chiu, Y.-S.P., Chen, K.-K., Ting, C.-K., 2012. Replenishment run time problem with machine breakdown and failure in rework. Expert Systems with Applications, 39, 1291–1297) to determine the optimal operating policy for a specific replenishment run time problem. In its optimization procedure a conditional convexity theorem on the cost function was adopted. This paper presents a direct proof of convexity of the function to enhance quality of their solution process and eliminate unnecessary computational efforts in verifying the conditional convexity.     

Mathematical modeling for solving manufacturing run time problem with defective rate and random machine breakdown

This paper employs mathematical modeling for solving manufacturing run time problem with random defective rate and stochastic machine breakdown. In real life manufacturing systems, generation of nonconforming items and unexpected breakdown of production equipment are inevitable. For the purpose of addressing these practical issues, this paper studies a system that may produce defective items randomly and it is also subject to a random equipment failure. A no resumption inventory control policy is adopted when breakdown occurs. Under such a policy, the interrupted lot is aborted and malfunction machine is immediately under repair. A new lot will be started only when all on-hand inventory are depleted. Modeling and numerical analyses are used to establish the solution procedure for such a problem. As a result, the optimal manufacturing run time that minimizes the long-run average production–inventory cost is derived. A numerical example is provided to show how the solution procedure works as well as the usages of research results.     

含随机测量时延的EWMA批间控制器设计

批间控制(RtR)是半导体晶圆生产过程控制的有效算法. 然而, 受测量手段与测量成本的限制, 难以实时检 测晶圆的品质数据, 即: 存在一定的测量时延, 通常该测量时延是随机, 时变的, 且直接影响批间控制器的性能. 为 此, 本文基于指数加权移动平均(EWMA)算法, 提出一种含随机测量时延的扰动估计方法. 在分析测量概率的基础 上, 建立包含测量时延概率的扰动估计表达式; 并采用期望最大化(EM)算法估计该测量时延的概率; 然后分析系统 可能存在的静差项, 给出相应的补偿算法; 最后讨论系统的稳定性. 仿真实例验证所提算法的有效性.     

Using information communication technologies (ICTs) for motivating female adolescents to exercise/run in their leisure time

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of a 12-week intervention program on motivational climate in physical education (PE) lessons, on female adolescents' self-efficacy for independent training in leisure time, and on physical fitness measures. Participants were 154 female high school students divided into three groups: (1) received a program to enhance motivation for physical activity (PA) during PE lessons and in leisure time, using the internet; (2) followed the regular curriculum in addition to self-report at the end of each lesson, using smartphone application; (3) engaged in standard PE lesson activities. A self-efficacy for training questionnaire, a motivational climate questionnaire, and tests of physical fitness were administered. Findings indicated improvement pre-post in motivational climate and in the physical fitness measures, and a decline in the intensity of negative affect towards running, in all three groups. Incorporating innovative ways, and promoting self-accountability using self-documentation encourage students to exercise during their leisure time.     

<Emphasis FontCategory="SansSerif">Mnemonics</Emphasis>: type-safe bytecode generation at run time

Mnemonics is a Scala library for generating method bodies in JVM bytecode at run time. Mnemonics supports a large subset of the JVM instructions, for which the static typing of the generator guarantees the well-formedness of the generated bytecode.     

External sorting: run formation revisited

External mergesort begins with a run formation phase creating the initial sorted runs. Run formation can be done by a load-sort-store algorithm or by replacement selection. A load-sort-store algorithm repeatedly fills available memory with input records, sorts them, and writes the result to a run file. Replacement selection produces longer runs than load-sort-store algorithms and completely overlaps sorting and I/O, but it has poor locality of reference resulting in frequent cache misses and the classical algorithm works only for fixed-length records. This paper introduces batched replacement selection: a cache-conscious version of replacement selection that works also for variable-length records. The new algorithm resembles AlphaSort in the sense that it creates small in-memory runs and merges them to form the output runs. Its performance is experimentally compared with three other run formation algorithms: classical replacement selection, Quicksort, and AlphaSort. The experiments show that batched replacement selection is considerably faster than classic replacement selection. For small records (average 100 bytes), CPU time was reduced by about 50 percent and elapsed time by 47-63 percent. It was also consistently faster than Quicksort, but it did not always outperform AlphaSort. Replacement selection produces fewer runs than Quicksort and AlphaSort. The experiments confirmed that this reduces the merge time whereas the effect on the overall sort time depends on the number of disks available.