Opening web applications for third-party development: a service-oriented solution

Web applications are nowadays prevalent software systems in our everyday’s life. A lot of these applications have been developed for end users only. Thus, they are not designed by considering future extensions that would be developed by third parties. One possible and interesting solution for opening these applications for such kind of extension development is to create and deploy Web services starting from these applications. In this paper, we present a method and a tool for semiautomatically creating Web service implementations from applications having Web interfaces. The proposed method generates operations that are published in Web services for each functionality provided by a Web application. In addition, it generates new operations starting from Web interfaces. Our approach goes further in the creation of services by generating executable orchestrations, as BPEL processes, starting from navigations in the Web interfaces of these applications and by providing BPMN choreography specifications starting from the collaborations between the generated Web services. We implemented and experimented our solution in the migration of three real-world Web applications toward Web service-oriented systems.     

Driver–vehicle cooperation: a hierarchical cooperative control architecture for automated driving systems

The concept of automated driving changes the way humans interact with their cars. However, how humans should interact with automated driving systems remains an open question. Cooperation between a driver and an automated driving system—they exert control jointly to facilitate a common driving task for each other—is expected to be a promising interaction paradigm that can address human factors issues caused by driving automation. Nevertheless, the complex nature of automated driving functions makes it very challenging to apply the state-of-the-art frameworks of driver–vehicle cooperation to automated driving systems. To meet this challenge, we propose a hierarchical cooperative control architecture which is derived from the existing architectures of automated driving systems. Throughout this architecture, we discuss how to adapt system functions to realize different forms of cooperation in the framework of driver–vehicle cooperation. We also provide a case study to illustrate the use of this architecture in the design of a cooperative control system for automated driving. By examining the concepts behind this architecture, we highlight that the correspondence between several concepts of planning and control originated from the fields of robotics and automation and the ergonomic frameworks of human cognition and control offers a new opportunity for designing driver–vehicle cooperation.

     

A family of languages for architecture constraint specification

During software development, architecture decisions should be documented so that quality attributes guaranteed by these decisions and required in the software specification could be persisted. An important part of these architectural decisions is often formalized using constraint languages which differ from one stage to another in the development process. In this paper, we present a family of architectural constraint languages, called ACL. Each member of this family, called a profile, can be used to formalize architectural decisions at a given stage of the development process. An ACL profile is composed of a core constraint language, which is shared with the other profiles, and a MOF architecture metamodel. In addition to this family of languages, this paper introduces a transformation-based interpretation method of profiles and its associated tool.     

Market orientation,restructuring and collaboration: The impact of digital design on organizational competitiveness

Design is commonly understood as a key element of products, contributing to their distinctiveness, usability and aesthetics. The success of a product is increasingly related to the user experience or the aesthetics of the user interface, meaning that design is increasingly important in the digital environment. The shift in competitive focus to the customer induced by digital design encourages companies to innovate and can also lead to changes in internal operations, market orientation and the reconfiguration of external collaboration procedures. This dimension of digital design-induced effects has to date seen very little research. The objective of this study is to investigate how digital design-induced changes in market orientation, internal restructuring and external cooperation affect firms' competitive orientation. The simultaneous equation framework was applied to a survey of 515 user interface and experience designers from France. Our results suggest that market orientation is not the only channel through which digital design influences firm competitiveness. Digital design leads to organizational change and the reconfiguration of external relationships that directly and indirectly help companies build competitive advantages and increase customer satisfaction.     

Towards a Complete SNMP-Based Supervision of System-on-Chips

This work proposes an adaptation of classical network management protocols for the purpose of a deep testing and management of network-based electronic systems such as routers, switches, and personal computers. The basic idea of this work is to extrapolate the advantages of network management functions (monitoring, control, test…) to the level of an electronic device. To this end, the proposed approach starts very early in the design process of integrated circuits where the concept of managed integrated circuit is introduced. A widely known design-for-test (DFT) technique is extended to render it useful through classical TCP/IP networks. The suggested solution is described and its efficiency is illustrated through extensive experimentations.     

Graceful degradation for reducing jitter of battery life in fault-tolerant embedded systems

Tolerating faults and minimising energy consumption in embedded systems is a difficult task due to the fact that the two objectives are antagonistic. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on graceful degradation to reduce jitter of battery life and thereby energy consumption in fault-tolerant embedded systems. In case of faults, the affected task is re-executed. In our solution, the energy level of battery is periodically verified, and if we detect that the continuity with the current operating mode leads to jitter, the system gracefully degrades to the adequate operating mode. In such degraded mode, the dynamic voltage scaling technique is used to save energy. The effectiveness of using graceful degradation is depending on the application criticality level. Simulation results show that the use of graceful degradation can reduce jitter of battery life, and thereby can minimise energy consumption.     

Simplified dipole concept for the assessment of transient electromagnetic field in the vicinity of grounding grid

The objective of this work is to provide a simplified model to analyse the electromagnetic emission of the grounding grid thus enabling engineers to perform parametric studies rapidly without greater loss of accuracy. The proposed approach is based on the use of the transmission line theory and the concept of dipole radiation in the presence of a lossy half‐space including the Sommerfeld integral approach. The model proposes to determine the electromagnetic fields (soil and air) and current distribution in a grounding system. The proposed model is described and illustrated with applications. The limitations and advantages are also discussed and compared against antenna theory counter parts. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

QoS-aware optimal and automated semantic web service composition with user’s constraints

Automated semantic web service composition is one of the critical research challenges of service-oriented computing, since it allows users to create an application simply by specifying the inputs that the application requires, the outputs it should produce, and any constraints it should respect. The composition problem has been handled using a variety of techniques, from artificial intelligence planning to optimization algorithms. However no approach so far has focused on handling three composition dimensions simultaneously, producing solutions that are: (1) fully functional (i.e., fully executable) by using a mechanism of semantic matching between the services involved in the solutions, (2) are optimized according to non-functional quality-of-service (QoS) measurements, and (3) respect global QoS constraints. This paper presents a novel approach based on a Harmony Search algorithm that addresses these three dimensions simultaneously through a fitness function, to select the optimal or near-optimal solution in semantic web service composition. In our approach, the search space is modeled as a planning-graph structure which encodes all the possible composition solutions for a given user request. To improve the selection process we have compared the original Harmony Search algorithm with its recently developed variants Improved Harmony Search (IHS) algorithm and Global Best Harmony Search (GHS) algorithm. An experimentation of the approach conducted with an extended version of the Web Service Challenge 2009 dataset showed that: (1) our approach is efficient and effective to extract the optimal or near-optimal composition in diverse scenarios; and (2) both variants IHS and GHS algorithms have brought improvements in terms of fitness and execution time.