Towards a capability and maturity model for Collaborative Software-as-a-Service

Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering - Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been attracting providers and customers due to the facilities of cloud computing and the outsourcing of IT...     

A New Approach to Receding Horizon State Estimation for LTI Systems in the Presence of Non-uniform Sampled Measurements

International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems - This paper proposes a recursive solution as an estimation strategy that incorporates non-uniform sampled measurements for a Linear...     

and control design for polytopic continuous‐time Markov jump linear systems with uncertain transition rates

This paper investigates the problems of and state feedback control design for continuous‐time Markov jump linear systems. The matrices of each operation mode are supposed to be uncertain, belonging to a polytope, and the transition rate matrix is considered partly known. By appropriately modeling all the uncertain parameters in terms of a multi‐simplex domain, new design conditions are proposed, whose main advantage with respect to the existing ones is to allow the use of polynomially parameter‐dependent Lyapunov matrices to certify the mean square closed‐loop stability. Synthesis conditions are derived in terms of matrix inequalities with a scalar parameter. The conditions, which become LMIs for fixed values of the scalar, can cope with and state feedback control in both mode‐independent and mode‐dependent cases. Using polynomial Lyapunov matrices of larger degrees and performing a search for the scalar parameter, less conservative results in terms of guaranteed costs can be obtained through LMI relaxations. Numerical examples illustrate the advantages of the proposed conditions when compared with other techniques from the literature. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Situated design of line-oriented flight training (LOFT): a case study in a Brazilian airline

This paper describes an exploratory situated approach for the design, development, standardization, and implementation of line-oriented flight training (LOFT) in a major airline. LOFT was conceived in aviation industry to be a practical application of crew resource management (CRM) concepts. The situated approach combines a set of methods and techniques from ergonomics and human factors disciplines. These methods were supported by social construction enabling the involvement and participation of different actors of the operational, tactical, and strategic level of the company. Under this framework, situated design is progressively established by socially constructed patterns up to a situated design comprising the construction of scenarios, training tools, procedures, structures, organization, flight documents, operations, and further training management contents. Our findings indicate that LOFT situated design, framed by social construction, can be applied to any aviation system with a specific culture and organization, which may be different from the ones that were implicitly or explicitly taken into account during the development of general LOFT guidelines.     

A behavioral reflective architecture for managing the integration of personal ubicomp systems: automatic SNMP-based discovery and management of behavior context in smart-spaces

Context-aware ubiquitous computing systems should be able to introspect the surrounding environment and adapt their behavior according to other existing systems and context changes. Although numerous ubiquitous computing systems have been developed that are aware of different types of context such as location, social situation, and available computational resources, few are aware of their computational behavior. Computational behavior introspection is common in reflective systems and can be used to improve the awareness and autonomy of ubicomp systems. In this paper, we propose a decentralized approach based on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), and on state transition models to model and expose computational behavior. Typically, SNMP and UPnP are targeted to retrieve raw operational variables from managed network devices and consumer electronic devices, e.g., checking network interface bandwidth and automating device discovery and plug and play operations. We extend the use of these protocols by exposing the state of different ubicomp systems and associated state transitions statistics. This computational behavior may be collected locally or remotely from ubicomp systems that share a physical environment, and sent to a coordinator node or simply shared among ubicomp systems. We describe the implementation of this behavior awareness approach in a home health-care environment equipped with a VoIP Phone and a drug dispenser. We provide the means for exposing and using the behavior context in managing a simple home health-care setting. Our approach relies on a system state specification being provided by manufacturers. In the case where the specification is not provided, we show how it can be automatically discovered. We propose two machine learning approaches for automatic behavior discovery and evaluate them by determining the expected state graphs of our two systems (a VoIP Phone and a drug dispenser). These two approaches are also evaluated regarding the effectiveness of generated behavior graphs.     

Quantitative feedback control for multivariable model matching and disturbance rejection

This article extends two recent contributions in the field of quantitative feedback theory to the multivariable case. They concern the model matching and the measured disturbance rejection problems. The model matching problem is a tracking control problem with specifications given as acceptable deviations from an ideal response. The measured disturbance rejection problem balances feedback and feedforward actions to reject disturbances. Both perspectives present advantages over classical quantitative feedback theory techniques in certain situations. This paper develops the necessary tools to solve both control problems in the case of multi‐input multi‐output plants. In particular, it shows how to derive nonconservative controller bounds for each of the single‐input single‐output control problems in which the overall multivariable problem is divided. The result is a systematic controller design methodology for multi‐input multi‐output plants with structured uncertainty. The application of the technique to the well‐known quadruple‐tank process illustrates the benefits of the method. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Color and texture applied to a signature-based bag of visual words method for image retrieval

Multimedia Tools and Applications - This article addresses the problem of representation, indexing and retrieval of images through the signature-based bag of visual words (S-BoVW) paradigm, which...     

Reusing enterprise models to build platform independent computer models

Enterprises use enterprise models to represent and analyse their processes, products, decisions, organisation, information flows, etc. Nevertheless, the enterprise knowledge that exists in enterprise models is not used beyond these purposes. The main goal of this paper is to present a framework that allows enterprises to reuse enterprise models to build software. The framework includes these dimensions: (1) a methodology that guides the use of the other dimensions in the reutilisation of enterprise models in software generation; (2) a set of metamodels to represent enterprises at the Computation Independent Model (CIM) level; (3) a modelling guide to make enterprise models using the metamodels proposed in this paper; (4) an extraction algorithm to discriminate the part of the CIM model to reuse; and (5) a set of transformation rules to reuse enterprise models to build Platform Independent Models. In addition, a case example is shown to validate the work that was carried out and to identify limitations.     

Scaling of continuous twin screw wet granulation

Scaling rules were developed and tested for a continuous twin screw wet granulation process using three scales (11, 16, and 24 mm barrel diameter) of twin screw granulators (TSG). The distributive feed screw configuration used produced high porosity granules (50–60%) with broad bimodal size distributions, especially in the 16 and 24 mm TSGs. Three dimensionless numbers, Froude number (Fr), liquid‐to‐solid ratio (LSR), and powder feed number (PFN), were identified and their effect on granule size distribution (GSD), porosity and liquid distribution tested. Granule size increased with increasing LSR as expected. However, Fr and PFN had no significant effect on d₁₀ or d₅₀ and only a small effect on d₉₀. In contrast, granulator scale had a strong effect on GSD, with d₉₀ increasing almost linearly with barrel diameter. This is consistent with breakage of large granules being a dominant mechanism and directly controlled by the geometry of the screw. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 63: 921–932, 2017