The objective of modeling, verification, and synthesis of hierarchical hybrid mission control for underwater vehicle is to (i) propose a hierarchical architecture for mission control for an autonomous system, (ii) develop extended hybrid state machine models for the mission control, (iii) use these models to verify for logical correctness, (iv) check the feasibility of a simulation software to model the mission executed by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) (v) perform synthesis of high-level mission coordinators for coordinating lower-level mission controllers in accordance with the given mission, and (vi) suggest further design changes for improvement. The dissertation describes a hierarchical architecture in which mission level controllers based on hybrid systems theory have been, and are being developed using a hybrid systems design tool that allows graphical design, iterative redesign, and code generation for rapid deployment onto the target platform. The goal is to support current and future autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) programs to meet evolving requirements and capabilities. While the tool facilitates rapid redesign and deployment, it is crucial to include safety and performance verification into each step of the (re)design process. To this end, the modeling of the hierarchical hybrid mission controller is formalized to facilitate the use of available tools and newly developed methods for formal verification of safety and performance specifications. A hierarchical hybrid architecture for mission control of autonomous systems with application to AUVs is proposed and a theoretical framework for the models that make up the architecture is outlined. An underwater vehicle like any other autonomous system is a hybrid system, as the dynamics of the vehicle as well as its vehicle level control is continuous whereas the mission level control is discrete, making the overall system a hybrid system i.e., one possessing both continuous and discrete states. The hybrid state machine models of the mission controller modules is derived from their implementation done using TEJA, a software for representing hybrid systems with support for auto code generation. The verification of their logical correctness properties has been done using UPPAAL, a software tool for verification of timed automata a special kind of hybrid system. A Teja to Uppaal converter, called dem2xml, has been created at Applied Reserarch Lab that converts a hybrid (timed) autonomous system description in Teja to an Uppaal system description. Verification work involved developing abstract models for the lower level vehicle controllers with which the mission controller modules interact and follow a hierarchical approach: Assuming the correctness of level-zero or vehicle controllers, we establish the correctness of level-one mission controller modules, and then the correctness of level-two modules, etc. The goal of verification is to show that any valid meaning for a mission formalized in our research verifies the safe and correct execution of actions. Simulation of the sequence of actions executed for each of the operations give a better view of the combined working of the mission coordinators and the low level controllers. So we next looked into the feasibility of simulating the operations executed during a mission. A Perl program has been developed to convert the UPPAAL files in .xml format to OpenGL graphic files. The graphic files simulate the steps involved in the execution of a sequence of operations executed by an AUV. The highest level coordinators send mission orders to be executed by the lower level controllers. So a more generalized design of the highest level controllers would help to incorporate the execution of a variety of missions for a vast field of applications. Initially, we consider manually synthesized mission coordinator modules. Later we design automated synthesis of coordinators. This method synthesizes mission coordinators which coordinate the lower level controllers for the execution of the missions ordered and can be used for any autonomous system.

Automatic image annotation is the process of assigning keywords to digital images depending on the content information. In one sense, it is a mapping from the visual content information to the semantic context information. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach for automatic image annotation problem, where the annotation is formulated as a multivariate mapping from a set of independent descriptor spaces, representing a whole image, to a set of words, representing class labels. For this purpose, a hierarchical annotation architecture, named as HANOLISTIC (Hierarchical Image Annotation System Using Holistic Approach), is dened with two layers. At the rst layer, called level-0 annotator, each annotator is fed by a set of distinct descriptor, extracted from the whole image. This enables us to represent the image at each annotator by a dierent visual property of a descriptor. Since, we use the whole image, the problematic segmentation process is avoided. Training of each annotator is accomplished by a supervised learning paradigm, where each word is represented by a class label. Note that, this approach is slightly dierent then the classical training approaches, where each data has a unique label. In the proposed system, since each image has one or more annotating words, we assume that an image belongs to more than one class. The output of the level-0 annotators indicate the membership values of the words in the vocabulary, to belong an image. These membership values from each annotator is, then, aggregated at the second layer by using various rules, to obtain meta-layer annotator. The rules, employed in this study, involves summation and/or weighted summation of the output of layer-0 annotators. Finally, a set of words from the vocabulary is selected based on the ranking of the output of meta-layer. The hierarchical annotation system proposed in this thesis outperforms state of the art annotation systems based on segmental and holistic approaches. The proposed system is examined in-depth and compared to the other systems in the literature by means of using several performance criteria.

Abstract Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking changes the way of people utilizing Internet, for example, sharing and consuming digital content, from the ground up. It continues to show its power and strength when it is combined with other emerging technologies, such as Web Services. This thesis contributes to the research and development of P2P networks from four aspects. Firstly, a P2P and Web Services converged multiple-tier system architecture is proposed. The architecture proposed enables providing Web Services in the context of heterogeneous access networks in an efficient way by utilizing P2P paradigm. A lightweight middleware architecture is introduced to fit the diversified mobile terminals. A theoretical analysis is given to provide a comparative study with the conventional centralized architecture. Secondly, a General Truncated Pyramid Peer-to-Peer (GTPP) architecture is presented to analyze the performance of hierarchical architecture compared with flat architecture. The motivation behind the GTPP architecture is to see whether an added tier can bring with it added value and functionality. A detailed mathematical analysis is provided which takes into consideration various performance metrics, including the lookup hopcount, lookup latency, maintenance traffic from a single peer point of view, and maintenance traffic from the whole system point of view. Furthermore, simulation results with respect to the lookup hopcount are also provided. Through mathematical analysis and simulation results, an optimal value regarding the number of tiers of the GTPP architecture is found, showing that 2~3 tiers are appropriate for most of situations. A specialized model is also proposed to improve the performance of hierarchical architecture. Thirdly, the performance evaluation of a communication-oriented Kademlia-based P2P system is provided in detail. NetHawk EAST-based simulation models and a prototype are both utilized to evaluate the performance. Simulation results from NetHawk EAST-based simulation models demonstrate the optimal design choices regarding the resource lookup parallelism degree and resource replication degree, and show the unnecessary existence of the messages used to detect the liveness of peers in a DHT overlay. Measurements from the prototype show the feasibility of mobile nodes acting as fully fledged overlay nodes from three different perspectives, namely CPU processing load, network traffic load, and battery consumption. The optimal size of packets which consumes battery in the most efficient way is also found through battery consumption measurements. Fourthly, the effects of different churn models on the performance of structured P2P networks are analyzed. Specifically, three typical churn models are analyzed to provide a comparative result. The simulation results show that the difference among the effects of different churn models on the performance of structured P2P networks is quantitative rather than qualitative. This provides some guidance for the selection of different churn models for the contemporary researchers.

La programmation parallèle et les algorithmes data-parallèles sont depuis plusieurs décennies les principales techniques de soutien l'informatique haute performance. Comme toutes les propriétés non-fonctionnelles du logiciel, la conversion des ressources informatiques dans des performances évolutives et prévisibles implique un équilibre délicat entre abstraction et automatisation avec une précision sémantique. Au cours de la dernière décennie, de plus en plus de professions ont besoin d'une puissance de calcul très élevée, mais la migration des programmes existants vers une nouvelle configuration matérielle et le développement de nouveaux algorithmes à finalité spécifique dans un environnement parallèle n'est jamais un travail facile, ni pour les développeurs de logiciel, ni pour les spécialistes du domaine. Dans cette thèse, nous décrivons le travail qui vise à simplifier le développement de programmes parallèles, en améliorant également la portabilité du code de programmes parallèles et la précision de la prédiction de performance d'algorithmes parallèles pour des environnements hétérogènes. Avec ces objectifs à l'esprit, nous avons proposé un modèle de transition nommé SGL pour la modélisation des architectures parallèles hétérogènes et des algorithmes parallèles, et une mise en œuvre de squelettes parallèles basés sur le modèle SGL pour le calcul haute performance. SGL simplifie la programmation parallèle à la fois pour les machines parallèles classiques et pour les nouvelles machines hiérarchiques. Il généralise les primitives de la programmation BSML. SGL pourra plus tard en utilisant des techniques de Model-Driven pour la génération de code automatique á partir d'une fiche technique sans codage complexe, par exemple pour le traitement de Big-Data sur un système hétérogène massivement parallèle. Le modèle de coût de SGL améliore la clarté de l'analyse de performance des algorithmes, permet d'évaluer la performance d'une machine et la qualité d'un algorithme / Parallel programming and data-parallel algorithms have been the main techniques supporting high-performance computing for many decades. Like all non-functional properties of software, the conversion of computing resources into scalable and predictable performance involves a delicate balance of abstraction and automation with semantic precision. During the last decade, more and more professions require a very high computing power. However, migrating programs to new hardware configuration or developing new specific-purpose algorithms on a parallel environment is never an easy work, neither for software developers nor for domain specialists. In this thesis we describe work that attempts to improve the simplicity of parallel program development, the portability of parallel program code, and the precision of parallel algorithm performance prediction for heterogeneous environments. With these goals in mind we proposed a bridging model named SGL for modelling heterogeneous parallel architectures and parallel algorithms, and an implementation of parallel skeletons based on SGL model for high-performance computing. SGL simplifies the parallel programming either on the classical parallel machines or on the novel hierarchical machines. It generalizes the BSML programming primitives. SGL can be served later with model-driven techniques for automatic code generation from specification sheet without any complex coding, for example processing Big Data on the heterogeneous massive parallel systems. The SGL cost model improves the clarity of algorithms performance analysis; it allows benchmarking machine performance and algorithm quality