A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering / A multi-layered expert system shell that specifically addresses real-time issues is designed and implemented. The architecture of this expert system shell supports the concepts of parallelism, concurrent computation and competitive reasoning in that it allows several alternatives to be explored simultaneously. An inference engine driven by a hybrid of forward and backward chanining methods is used to achieve real-time response, and certainty factors are used for uncertainty management. Real-time responsiveness is improved by allowing the coexistence of procedural and declarative knowledge within the same system. A test bed that was set up in order to investigate the performance of the implemented shell is described. It was found in the performance analysis that the proposed system meets the real-time requirements as specified in this research. / Andrew Chakane 2018

A project report submitted to the Faculty of Erlglncerlng, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science In Engineering Johannesburg 1993 / This Project Repolt r ''"lorts on the study of an approach to building integrated real-time software systems based on re-usable object-oriented components. The basis of the approach is the development of a a-layered structure of components, where each layer is built on the underlying layer of components, The lower layer of components consists of generic re-usable building blocks that may be re-used for building and integrating other real-time applications. The middle layer consists of components that are generic to the application domain, and the top layer consists of components that are specific to each application of that application domain. The Report includes researching and developing methods of communicating between these building blocks using an OSI/CMIP-conformant 'software highway" and in this regard particular attention is given to the formal and de facto industry standards. With this approach, it is argued that the application engineer can effectively build new applications using the re-usable components. This is demonstrated by reporting on the implementation of a large real-world Telecommunications Network Management application. The Project Report contains a critical analysis of the technical, organisational and project management issues of this Object-oriented component approach as compared to the traditional development approach. The Report concludes that despite certain technical and organisational concerns, the object-oriented approach does indeed yield several worthwhile benefits for developing real-time software systems. These benefits include genuine re-usability, and l"1proved productivity, testability and maintainability.

Natural matte extraction is a difficult and generally unsolved problem. Generating a matte from a nonuniform background traditionally requires a tediously hand drawn matte. This thesis studies recent methods requiring the user to place only modest scribbles identifying the foreground and the background. This research demonstrates a new GPU-based implementation of the recently introduced Fuzzy- Matte algorithm. Interactive matte extraction was achieved on a CUDA enabled G80 graphics processor. Experimental results demonstrate improved performance over the previous CPU based version. In depth analysis of experimental data from the GPU and the CPU implementations are provided. The design challenges of porting a variant of Dijkstra's shortest distance algorithm to a parallel processor are considered. / by Joel Gibson. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2008. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

by Zhao Lei. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-85). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.ii / Acknowledgments --- p.iv / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Background --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Agents --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Deliberative Agents --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Reactive Agents --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Interacting Agents --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1.4 --- Hybrid Architectures --- p.10 / Chapter 2.2 --- Real-time Artificial Intelligence --- p.10 / Chapter 2.3 --- Real-Time Agents --- p.12 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- The Subsumption Architecture --- p.13 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- The InterRAP Architecture --- p.15 / Chapter 2.3.3 --- The 3T Architecture --- p.16 / Chapter 2.4 --- On-line Scheduling in Real-Time Agents --- p.18 / Chapter 3 --- A Real-Time Agent Architecture --- p.20 / Chapter 3.1 --- Human Cognition Model --- p.20 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Perception --- p.22 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Cognition --- p.22 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- Action --- p.23 / Chapter 3.2 --- Real-Time Message Passing Primitives and Process Structuring --- p.24 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Message Passing as IPC --- p.25 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Administrator and Worker Processes --- p.28 / Chapter 3.3 --- Agent Architecture --- p.29 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Sensor Workers and the Sensor Administrator --- p.30 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- The Cognition Workers --- p.32 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- "The Task Administrator, the Scheduler Worker and Ex- ecutor Workers" --- p.32 / Chapter 3.4 --- An Agent-Based Real-time Arcade Game --- p.34 / Chapter 4 --- A Multiple Method Approach to Task Scheduling --- p.37 / Chapter 4.1 --- Task Scheduling Mechanism --- p.37 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- Task and Action --- p.38 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- Task Administrator --- p.40 / Chapter 4.1.3 --- Task Scheduler --- p.43 / Chapter 4.2 --- A Task Scheduling Model --- p.44 / Chapter 4.3 --- Combination Rules and Special Cases --- p.46 / Chapter 4.4 --- Scheduling Algorithms --- p.49 / Chapter 5 --- Task Scheduling Model: Analysis and Experiments --- p.53 / Chapter 5.1 --- Goodness Measure --- p.53 / Chapter 5.2 --- Theoretical Analysis --- p.54 / Chapter 5.3 --- Implementation --- p.59 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Task Generator Implementation --- p.59 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- Executor Workers Implementation --- p.61 / Chapter 5.4 --- Experimental Results --- p.62 / Chapter 5.4.1 --- Hybrid Mechanism and Individual Algorithms --- p.63 / Chapter 5.4.2 --- Effect of Average Execution Time --- p.65 / Chapter 5.4.3 --- Effect of the Greedy Algorithm --- p.65 / Chapter 5.4.4 --- Effect of the Advanced Algorithm --- p.67 / Chapter 5.4.5 --- Effect of Actions and Relations Among Them --- p.68 / Chapter 5.4.6 --- Effect of Deadline --- p.71 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusions --- p.73 / Chapter 6.1 --- Summary of Contributions --- p.73 / Chapter 6.2 --- Future Work --- p.75

by Patrick C.K. Wu. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-[59]). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Research Objectives --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2 --- Organization of the Thesis --- p.2 / Chapter 2 --- Background --- p.4 / Chapter 2.1 --- Reliable Multicasting --- p.4 / Chapter 2.2 --- Related Work --- p.5 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- RMTP --- p.5 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- RMP --- p.6 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- RAMP --- p.7 / Chapter 2.3 --- Multicast with Scalable Reliability (MSR) --- p.8 / Chapter 3 --- Traffic Shaping in MSR --- p.10 / Chapter 3.1 --- Single Queue System --- p.11 / Chapter 3.2 --- Scaling factor α --- p.12 / Chapter 4 --- Retransmission Scheme in MSR --- p.15 / Chapter 4.1 --- Packet Loss Detection and Requests for Retransmission at the Receivers --- p.17 / Chapter 4.2 --- Retransmission at the Sender --- p.19 / Chapter 4.3 --- Dynamic Adjustment of Retransmission Timeout Value --- p.22 / Chapter 4.4 --- Scaling Reliability using Transmit-Display Window --- p.29 / Chapter 5 --- NACK Implosion Prevention --- p.31 / Chapter 5.1 --- Electing a Representative Receiver --- p.32 / Chapter 5.2 --- Determining T --- p.33 / Chapter 5.3 --- Determining β --- p.34 / Chapter 6 --- Performance Study of MSR --- p.38 / Chapter 6.1 --- Performance Study of MSR in Simple Network Topologies --- p.39 / Chapter 6.2 --- Star Topology --- p.40 / Chapter 6.3 --- Tree Topology --- p.44 / Chapter 6.4 --- Exploring the use of MSR Gateway --- p.47 / Chapter 7 --- Conclusion and Future Work --- p.50 / Chapter 7.1 --- Future Work --- p.50 / Chapter 7.2 --- Conclusions --- p.51 / Chapter A --- MSR Packet Formats --- p.52 / Chapter A.1 --- MSR Fixed Header --- p.52 / Chapter A.2 --- MSR Audio Data Header --- p.54 / Chapter A.3 --- MSR NACK Packets --- p.55 / Bibliography --- p.57

by Walter Chi-Woon Fung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-[67]). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Background --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Limitation of Existing Research --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Contributions of This Thesis --- p.3 / Chapter 1.4 --- Organization of the Thesis --- p.4 / Chapter 2 --- Related Work --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Ongoing Efforts For The Support of Real Time Applications on the Internet - RTP --- p.5 / Chapter 2.2 --- Using the Algorithm on top of RTP --- p.7 / Chapter 3 --- An Adaptive Video Retrieval Algorithm --- p.9 / Chapter 3.1 --- Lossless Environment --- p.9 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Adapting the Request Rate to the Available Bandwidth --- p.12 / Chapter 3.2 --- Lossy Environment --- p.17 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Adapting Ar in Lossy Environment --- p.20 / Chapter 3.3 --- Adjusting the Window Size --- p.24 / Chapter 3.4 --- Measurement Issues --- p.27 / Chapter 3.5 --- Mapping between Data Rate and Frame Rate --- p.28 / Chapter 4 --- Rate Measurement --- p.30 / Chapter 4.1 --- Arrival Rate Estimation --- p.30 / Chapter 4.2 --- Loss Rate Estimation --- p.32 / Chapter 5 --- Frame Skipping and Stuffing --- p.37 / Chapter 5.1 --- MPEG-1 Video Stream Basics --- p.37 / Chapter 5.2 --- Frame Skipping --- p.38 / Chapter 5.3 --- Frame Stuffing In Lossy Environment --- p.40 / Chapter 6 --- Experiment Result and Analysis --- p.43 / Chapter 6.1 --- Experiment --- p.43 / Chapter 6.2 --- Analysis --- p.54 / Chapter 6.2.1 --- Interacting With Streams With No Rate Control --- p.56 / Chapter 6.2.2 --- Multiple Streams Running The Algorithm --- p.58 / Chapter 6.2.3 --- Calculation of p --- p.59 / Chapter 7 --- Conclusions --- p.61 / Bibliography --- p.64

Quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for the timely delivery of real-time multimedia raise new challenges for the networking world. A key component of QoS is QoS routing which allows the selection of network routes with sufficient resources for requested QoS parameters. Several techniques have been proposed in the literature to compute QoS routes, most of which require dynamic update of link-state information across the Internet. Given the growing size of the Internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to gather up-to-date state information in a dynamic environment. We propose a new technique to compute QoS routes on the Internet in a fast and efficient manner without any need for dynamic updates. Our method, known as Selective Flooding, checks the state of the links on a set of pre-computed routes from the source to the destination in parallel and based on this information computes the best route and then reserves resources. We implemented Selective Flooding on a QoS routing simulator and evaluated the performance of Selective Flooding compared to source routing for a variety of network parameters. We find Selective Flooding consistently outperforms source routing in terms of call-blocking rate and outperforms source routing in terms of network overhead for some network conditions. The contributions of this thesis include the design of a new QoS routing algorithm, Selective Flooding, extensive evaluation of Selective Flooding under a variety of network conditions and a working simulation model for future research.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaf 94. / by Esteban José Peynado Sánchez. / M.S.

Thesis. 1977. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Bibliography: leaves 203-204. / by Frank C. Conati. / M.S.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING / Bibliography: leaves 158-162. / by Michael Tzu-cheng Yeh. / M.S.