In this thesis work, the symptoms in Windows XP operating system for fault monitoring are investigated and a fault monitoring library is developed. A test GUI is implemented to examine this library. Performance tests including memory and CPU usage are done to see its overhead to the system and platform tests on the current version of Windows operating system series (Windows Vista) are done to see for compatibility. In this thesis, fault monitor-fault detector interface is also defined and implemented. To monitor a symptom that is not implemented in the monitoring library, projects can implement their own monitors. A monitoring framework is designed to control and coordinate these monitors with the main one. To create monitors for Java projects easily, a monitor creator library is developed.

Context: Extensive and rapid continuous growth in Internet Protocol (IP) based networks and as the result of increasing dependencies on these networks makes them extremely challenging to manage and keep them running all the time. 24/7 non-stop monitoring is important to minimize the down time of the network. For this reason dependency on automated network monitoring has been increased. Objectives: There are many tools and systems available for network monitoring. This includes expensive commercial solutions to open source products. Nagios and OpenNMS are two of the most popular systems and they are considered to be close competitors. Comparison discussions about them are very common at different forums on internet. But no empirical study for comparison analysis has been done. In this thesis the comparison study between Nagios and OpenNMS was conducted. Methods: Network monitoring functionalities are listed down from literature followed by industrial interviews with the networking professionals. Then taking these functionalities as a base, to evaluate, survey studies for both systems were conducted separately and comparison analysis of the results was performed. Usability evaluation of both systems was done by conducting usability testing and comparison analysis of the results was performed. Results: Besides providing the comparison of both systems this study also can help to findout the strengths and weaknesses of both systems separately. And in the end we suggested a list of functionalities and features which might help in selection of a monitoring system and also might be helpful for improvement of the monitoring systems.

Within industrial systems, dependability is critical to keep the system reliable and available. Faults leading to failures of the whole system must be mitigated by a laborious design, testing, and verification process. This thesis aims to build a Network Management Agent (NMA), capable of fault detection, localization, and recovery in an Ethernet environment. The chosen NMA environment was a distributed industrial system using a redundant controller pair, where the controllers must determine when the roles should switch in case of primary failure. In the industrial context, this role-switching must be bounded and robust enough to withstand mixed traffic classes competing for network resources. An NMA was built to monitor the network with the help of Media Redundancy Protocol (MRP), heartbeats, and industrial switch queue status queries. The NMA could distinguish between node and link failure by localizing the fault while adjusting the network's Quality of Service (QoS). The controllers could safely switch roles after an average difference of 29.7065 ms from the moment the primary failed, and the secondary took over. Link failure was detected in three possible locations within 31.297 ms and the location was found within 373.419 ms. To the authors' best knowledge, other solutions mainly target L3 networks or require specialized supporting technology, whereas MRP was found in the majority of the investigated industrial switches. The proposed solution requires any heartbeat-like function sent from the switch, which MRP offers, and can be generalized to any environment where distinguishing a link from a node failure is important. QoS anomaly detection however requires capable switches and configuration of rules to prioritize the traffic accordingly.

<p>  </p> <p>Polymer films possess many advantageous properties, such as mechanical flexibility, toughness, impact resistance, optical transparency, light weight, and low cost, but their behavior related to temperature stability and thermal conductivity and lack of select functionalities render them unsuitable for key applications. In the context of smart materials, piezoelectric ceramics and single crystals provide unmatched electromechanical couplings, mechanical strength, and chemical inertness, at the expense of being brittle, opaque, and high cost. A synergistic combination of properties can be achieved by combining both materials in an anisotropically structured ceramic/polymer composite (with quasi-1–3 connectivity) by the application of external electric field (E-field). In a process called dielectrophoresis, the particles align into through-thickness columns comprising a nanocolumn forest. As a result, the complementary properties greatly enhance the resulting performance, promising to revolutionize the class of smart materials with high-performance applications in actuators, sensors, and transducers. These particle-filled composites also allow for great design flexibility regarding the type of functionalization and the connectivity of each phase. Following the materials-science paradigm comprising the sequence of processing, structure, and properties, the work on these piezoelectric composite materials is broadly organized into materials selection, processing, and applications.</p> <p>In the first study, the kinetics of particle-chain alignment are modeled as a linear step-growth polymerization and the rheokinetics are modeled with the dual-Arrhenius chemoviscosity model. Employing the direct piezoelectric effect, a characterization of the vibration response of the composites complements an evaluation of their suitability as vibration sensor for motor fault detection. Second, for impact sensing, the efficacy of the piezoelectric composite films is evaluated with respect to a novel conceptual sensing system for automotive applications, such as vehicle-to-pedestrian collision detection. Third, applying the indirect piezoelectric effect for sound production as an electroacoustic loudspeaker, the piezoelectric composite films represent a novel approach to flat-panel loudspeakers that are tunable in modulus, with opportunities for mechanical flexibility, optical transparency, and large-area coverage.</p>