O custo de serviços na Internet tem encorajado o uso de cache a nível de aplicação para suprir as demandas dos usuários e melhorar a escalabilidade e disponibilidade de aplicações. Cache a nível de aplicação, onde desenvolvedores manualmente controlam o conteúdo cacheado, tem sido adotada quando soluções tradicionais de cache não são capazes de atender aos requisitos de desempenho desejados. Apesar de sua crescente popularidade, este tipo de cache é tipicamente endereçado de maneira ad-hoc, uma vez que depende de detalhes específicos da aplicação para ser desenvolvida. Dessa forma, tal cache consiste em uma tarefa que requer tempo e esforço, além de ser altamente suscetível a erros. Esta dissertação avança o trabalho relacionado a cache a nível de aplicação provendo uma compreensão de seu estado de prática e automatizando a identificação de conteúdo cacheável, fornecendo assim suporte substancial aos desenvolvedores para o projeto, implementação e manutenção de soluções de caching. Mais especificamente, este trabalho apresenta três contribuições: a estruturação de conhecimento sobre caching derivado de um estudo qualitativo, um levantamento do estado da arte em abordagens de cache estáticas e adaptativas, e uma técnica que automatiza a difícil tarefa de identificar oportunidades de cache O estudo qualitativo, que envolveu a investigação de dez aplicações web (código aberto e comercial) com características diferentes, permitiu-nos determinar o estado de prática de cache a nível de aplicação, juntamente com orientações práticas aos desenvolvedores na forma de padrões e diretrizes. Com base nesses padrões e diretrizes derivados, também propomos uma abordagem para automatizar a identificação de métodos cacheáveis, que é geralmente realizado manualmente por desenvolvedores. Tal abordagem foi implementada como um framework, que pode ser integrado em aplicações web para identificar automaticamente oportunidades de cache em tempo de execução, com base na monitoração da execução do sistema e gerenciamento adaptativo das decisões de cache. Nós avaliamos a abordagem empiricamente com três aplicações web de código aberto, e os resultados indicam que a abordagem é capaz de identificar oportunidades de cache adequadas, melhorando o desempenho das aplicações em até 12,16%. / Latency and cost of Internet-based services are encouraging the use of application-level caching to continue satisfying users’ demands, and improve the scalability and availability of origin servers. Application-level caching, in which developers manually control cached content, has been adopted when traditional forms of caching are insufficient to meet such requirements. Despite its popularity, this level of caching is typically addressed in an adhoc way, given that it depends on specific details of the application. Furthermore, it forces application developers to reason about a crosscutting concern, which is unrelated to the application business logic. As a result, application-level caching is a time-consuming and error-prone task, becoming a common source of bugs. This dissertation advances work on application-level caching by providing an understanding of its state-of-practice and automating the decision regarding cacheable content, thus providing developers with substantial support to design, implement and maintain application-level caching solutions. More specifically, we provide three key contributions: structured knowledge derived from a qualitative study, a survey of the state-of-the-art on static and adaptive caching approaches, and a technique and framework that automate the challenging task of identifying cache opportunities The qualitative study, which involved the investigation of ten web applications (open-source and commercial) with different characteristics, allowed us to determine the state-of-practice of application-level caching, along with practical guidance to developers as patterns and guidelines to be followed. Based on such patterns and guidelines derived, we also propose an approach to automate the identification of cacheable methods, which is often manually done and is not supported by existing approaches to implement application-level caching. We implemented a caching framework that can be seamlessly integrated into web applications to automatically identify and cache opportunities at runtime, by monitoring system execution and adaptively managing caching decisions. We evaluated our approach empirically with three open-source web applications, and results indicate that we can identify adequate caching opportunities by improving application throughput up to 12.16%. Furthermore, our approach can prevent code tangling and raise the abstraction level of caching.

In this work, I view incremental experiential learning in intelligent software agents as progressive agent self-adaptation. When an agent produces an incorrect behavior, then it may reflect on, and thus diagnose and repair, the reasoning and knowledge that produced the incorrect behavior. In particular, I focus on the self-diagnosis and self-repair of an agent's domain knowledge. The implementation of systems with the capability to self-diagnose and self-repair involves building both reasoning processes capable of such learning and knowledge representations capable of supporting those reasoning processes. The core issue my dissertation addresses is: what kind of metaknowledge (knowledge about knowledge) may enable the agent to diagnose faults in its domain knowledge? In providing a solution to this issue, the central contribution of this research is a theory of the kind of metaknowledge that enables a system to reason about and adapt its conceptual knowledge. For this purpose, I propose a representation that explicitly encodes metaknowledge in the form of procedures called Empirical Verification Procedures (EVPs). In the proposed knowledge representation, an EVP is associated with each concept within the agent's domain knowledge. Each EVP explicitly semantically grounds the associated concept in the agent's perception, and can thus be used as a test to determine the validity of knowledge of that concept during diagnosis. I present the formal and empirical evaluation of a system, Augur, that makes use of EVP metaknowledge to adapt its own domain knowledge in the context of a particular subclass of classification problem that I call compositional classification, in which the overall classification task can be broken into a hierarchically organized set of subtasks. I hypothesize that EVP metaknowledge will enable a system to automatically adapt its knowledge in two ways: first, by adjusting the ways that inputs are categorized by a concept, in accordance with semantics fixed by an associated EVP; and second, by adjusting the semantics of concepts themselves when they fail to contribute appropriately to system goals. The latter adaptation is realized by altering the EVP associated with the concept in question. I further hypothesize that the semantic grounding of domain concepts in perception through the use of EVPs will increase the generalization power of a learner that operates over those concepts, and thus make learning more efficient. Beyond the support of these hypotheses, I also present results pertinent to the understanding of learning in compositional classification settings using structured knowledge representations.

Thesis (M.S.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Computer Science and Engineering. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

The overall contribution of this thesis is to propose an integrated approach for modeling and verifying the requirements of Self Adaptive Systems using Model Driven Engineering techniques. Model Driven Engineering is primarily concerned with reducing the gap between problem and software implementation domains through the use of technologies that support systematic transformation of problem level abstractions to software implementations. By using these techniques, we have bridged this gap through the use of models that describe complex systems at multiple levels of abstraction and through automated support for transforming and analyzing these models. We take requirements as input and divide it into Functional and Non Functional Requirements. We then use a process to identify those requirements that are adaptable and those that cannot be changed. We then introduce the concepts of Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering for modeling the requirements of Self Adaptive Systems, where Non Functional Requirements are expressed in the form of goals which is much more rich and complete in defining relations between requirements. We have identified some problems in the conventional methods of requirements modeling and properties verification using existing techniques, which do not take into account the adaptability features associated with Self Adaptive Systems. Our proposed approach takes into account these adaptable requirements and we provide various tools and processes that we developed for the requirements modeling and verification of Self Adaptive Systems. We validate our proposed approach by applying it on two different case studies in the domain of Self Adaptive Systems.

This research proposes, implements and analyses a novel framework for multiobjective optimisation through evolutionary computing aimed at, but not restricted to, real-world problems in the engineering design domain. Evolutionary algorithms have been used to tackle a variety of non-linear multiobjective optimisation problems successfully, but their success is governed by key parameters which have been shown to be sensitive to the nature of the particular problem, incorporating concerns such as the number of objectives and variables, and the size and topology of the search space, making it hard to determine the best settings in advance. This work describes a real-encoded multi-objective optimising evolutionary algorithm framework, incorporating a genetic algorithm, that uses self-adaptive mutation and crossover in an attempt to avoid such problems, and which has been benchmarked against both standard optimisation test problems in the literature and a real-world airfoil optimisation case. For this last case, the minimisation of drag and maximisation of lift coefficients of a well documented standard airfoil, the framework is integrated with a freeform deformation tool to manage the changes to the section geometry, and XFoil, a tool which evaluates the airfoil in terms of its aerodynamic efficiency. The performance of the framework on this problem is compared with those of two other heuristic MOO algorithms known to perform well, the Multi-Objective Tabu Search (MOTS) and NSGA-II, showing that this framework achieves better or at least no worse convergence. The framework of this research is then considered as a candidate for smart (electricity) grid optimisation. Power networks can be improved in both technical and economical terms by the inclusion of distributed generation which may include renewable energy sources. The essential problem in national power networks is that of power flow and in particular, optimal power flow calculations of alternating (or possibly, direct) current. The aims of this work are to propose and investigate a method to assist in the determination of the composition of optimal or high-performing power networks in terms of the type, number and location of the distributed generators, and to analyse the multi-dimensional results of the evolutionary computation component in order to reveal relationships between the network design vector elements and to identify possible further methods of improving models in future work. The results indicate that the method used is a feasible one for the achievement of these goals, and also for determining optimal flow capacities of transmission lines connecting the bus bars in the network.

O custo de serviços na Internet tem encorajado o uso de cache a nível de aplicação para suprir as demandas dos usuários e melhorar a escalabilidade e disponibilidade de aplicações. Cache a nível de aplicação, onde desenvolvedores manualmente controlam o conteúdo cacheado, tem sido adotada quando soluções tradicionais de cache não são capazes de atender aos requisitos de desempenho desejados. Apesar de sua crescente popularidade, este tipo de cache é tipicamente endereçado de maneira ad-hoc, uma vez que depende de detalhes específicos da aplicação para ser desenvolvida. Dessa forma, tal cache consiste em uma tarefa que requer tempo e esforço, além de ser altamente suscetível a erros. Esta dissertação avança o trabalho relacionado a cache a nível de aplicação provendo uma compreensão de seu estado de prática e automatizando a identificação de conteúdo cacheável, fornecendo assim suporte substancial aos desenvolvedores para o projeto, implementação e manutenção de soluções de caching. Mais especificamente, este trabalho apresenta três contribuições: a estruturação de conhecimento sobre caching derivado de um estudo qualitativo, um levantamento do estado da arte em abordagens de cache estáticas e adaptativas, e uma técnica que automatiza a difícil tarefa de identificar oportunidades de cache O estudo qualitativo, que envolveu a investigação de dez aplicações web (código aberto e comercial) com características diferentes, permitiu-nos determinar o estado de prática de cache a nível de aplicação, juntamente com orientações práticas aos desenvolvedores na forma de padrões e diretrizes. Com base nesses padrões e diretrizes derivados, também propomos uma abordagem para automatizar a identificação de métodos cacheáveis, que é geralmente realizado manualmente por desenvolvedores. Tal abordagem foi implementada como um framework, que pode ser integrado em aplicações web para identificar automaticamente oportunidades de cache em tempo de execução, com base na monitoração da execução do sistema e gerenciamento adaptativo das decisões de cache. Nós avaliamos a abordagem empiricamente com três aplicações web de código aberto, e os resultados indicam que a abordagem é capaz de identificar oportunidades de cache adequadas, melhorando o desempenho das aplicações em até 12,16%. / Latency and cost of Internet-based services are encouraging the use of application-level caching to continue satisfying users’ demands, and improve the scalability and availability of origin servers. Application-level caching, in which developers manually control cached content, has been adopted when traditional forms of caching are insufficient to meet such requirements. Despite its popularity, this level of caching is typically addressed in an adhoc way, given that it depends on specific details of the application. Furthermore, it forces application developers to reason about a crosscutting concern, which is unrelated to the application business logic. As a result, application-level caching is a time-consuming and error-prone task, becoming a common source of bugs. This dissertation advances work on application-level caching by providing an understanding of its state-of-practice and automating the decision regarding cacheable content, thus providing developers with substantial support to design, implement and maintain application-level caching solutions. More specifically, we provide three key contributions: structured knowledge derived from a qualitative study, a survey of the state-of-the-art on static and adaptive caching approaches, and a technique and framework that automate the challenging task of identifying cache opportunities The qualitative study, which involved the investigation of ten web applications (open-source and commercial) with different characteristics, allowed us to determine the state-of-practice of application-level caching, along with practical guidance to developers as patterns and guidelines to be followed. Based on such patterns and guidelines derived, we also propose an approach to automate the identification of cacheable methods, which is often manually done and is not supported by existing approaches to implement application-level caching. We implemented a caching framework that can be seamlessly integrated into web applications to automatically identify and cache opportunities at runtime, by monitoring system execution and adaptively managing caching decisions. We evaluated our approach empirically with three open-source web applications, and results indicate that we can identify adequate caching opportunities by improving application throughput up to 12.16%. Furthermore, our approach can prevent code tangling and raise the abstraction level of caching.

Submitted by Aelson Maciera (aelsoncm@terra.com.br) on 2017-04-17T18:58:23Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DissMAS.pdf: 4063634 bytes, checksum: deabb30ec4d63266b4b9dc58fe79287a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Ronildo Prado (ronisp@ufscar.br) on 2017-04-20T12:22:31Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DissMAS.pdf: 4063634 bytes, checksum: deabb30ec4d63266b4b9dc58fe79287a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Ronildo Prado (ronisp@ufscar.br) on 2017-04-20T12:22:39Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DissMAS.pdf: 4063634 bytes, checksum: deabb30ec4d63266b4b9dc58fe79287a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-04-20T12:26:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DissMAS.pdf: 4063634 bytes, checksum: deabb30ec4d63266b4b9dc58fe79287a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-08-19 / Não recebi financiamento / Adaptive systems are able to adapt themselves according to changes in its execution environment or the user's needs. Monitors are essential for the development of such systems because they are responsible for collecting and pre-processing the context data. By a search in systems found in repositories and literature, it was observed that monitors are sometimes designed and implemented in an inappropriate way, exhibiting the following characteristics: i) they are Obscure in the source code; ii) they have a unique monitoring rate and iii) they are forced to have a pre-determined execution order. These characteristics lead to difficulties in maintenance, evolution and often problems related to performance. Design decisions that lead to these difficulties can be characterized as architectural smells. The documentation of smells helps developers identifying refactoring opportunities of a system and also highlights practices that should be analyzed during the design and development of new systems. Therefore, this master thesis proses two architectural smells for adaptive systems: the Obscure Monitor and Oppressed Monitors. The first occurs when the monitors are not evident in the system and the second occurs when the monitors are subject to the same monitoring rate and have a strict execution order. In order to check the influence of the presence of theses smells five maintenance activities were applied in two versions of a system called PhoneAdapter, the original version with the presence of the smells and the refactored one in which the smells were removed. The results indicate that the maintenance and evolution of the refactored system are facilitated in most activities. / Sistemas Adaptativos são capazes de se adaptarem às mudanças de seu ambiente de execução ou das necessidades do usuário. Monitores são essenciais para o desenvolvimento desse tipo de sistema, pois, são responsáveis por coletar e preprocessar dados do contexto. Em um levantamento de sistemas realizado em repositórios e na literatura especializada, notou-se que monitores são por vezes projetados e implementados de uma forma inadequada, exibindo as seguintes características: i) ficam obscuros no código-fonte; ii) possuem uma taxa de monitoramento única e iii) são forçados a ter uma ordem de execução pré-determinada. Isso leva a dificuldades na manutenção, evolução e muitas vezes problemas relacionados a desempenho. Decisões de projetos que levam a essas dificuldades podem ser caracterizadas como smells arquiteturais. A documentação de smells auxilia desenvolvedores a identificar oportunidades de refatorações do sistema, bem como evidenciar práticas que devem ser avaliadas durante o projeto e desenvolvimento de novos sistemas. Portanto, nesta dissertação de mestrado são propostos dois smells arquiteturais: o Obscure Monitor e o Oppressed Monitors. O primeiro ocorre quando os monitores não estão evidentes no sistema e o segundo ocorre quando os monitores estão sujeitos a uma mesma taxa de monitoramento e também possuem uma ordem de execução rígida. Como avaliação preliminar foi realizado um estudo exploratório em um sistema adaptativo chamado PhoneAdapter. Para verificar a influência da presença desses smells foram realizadas cinco atividades de manutenção em duas versões desse sistema, a original com os smells e uma refatorada na qual os smells foram removidos. Os resultados obtidos indicam que a manutenção e evolução de tais sistemas são facilitadas na maioria dessas atividades.

O custo de serviços na Internet tem encorajado o uso de cache a nível de aplicação para suprir as demandas dos usuários e melhorar a escalabilidade e disponibilidade de aplicações. Cache a nível de aplicação, onde desenvolvedores manualmente controlam o conteúdo cacheado, tem sido adotada quando soluções tradicionais de cache não são capazes de atender aos requisitos de desempenho desejados. Apesar de sua crescente popularidade, este tipo de cache é tipicamente endereçado de maneira ad-hoc, uma vez que depende de detalhes específicos da aplicação para ser desenvolvida. Dessa forma, tal cache consiste em uma tarefa que requer tempo e esforço, além de ser altamente suscetível a erros. Esta dissertação avança o trabalho relacionado a cache a nível de aplicação provendo uma compreensão de seu estado de prática e automatizando a identificação de conteúdo cacheável, fornecendo assim suporte substancial aos desenvolvedores para o projeto, implementação e manutenção de soluções de caching. Mais especificamente, este trabalho apresenta três contribuições: a estruturação de conhecimento sobre caching derivado de um estudo qualitativo, um levantamento do estado da arte em abordagens de cache estáticas e adaptativas, e uma técnica que automatiza a difícil tarefa de identificar oportunidades de cache O estudo qualitativo, que envolveu a investigação de dez aplicações web (código aberto e comercial) com características diferentes, permitiu-nos determinar o estado de prática de cache a nível de aplicação, juntamente com orientações práticas aos desenvolvedores na forma de padrões e diretrizes. Com base nesses padrões e diretrizes derivados, também propomos uma abordagem para automatizar a identificação de métodos cacheáveis, que é geralmente realizado manualmente por desenvolvedores. Tal abordagem foi implementada como um framework, que pode ser integrado em aplicações web para identificar automaticamente oportunidades de cache em tempo de execução, com base na monitoração da execução do sistema e gerenciamento adaptativo das decisões de cache. Nós avaliamos a abordagem empiricamente com três aplicações web de código aberto, e os resultados indicam que a abordagem é capaz de identificar oportunidades de cache adequadas, melhorando o desempenho das aplicações em até 12,16%. / Latency and cost of Internet-based services are encouraging the use of application-level caching to continue satisfying users’ demands, and improve the scalability and availability of origin servers. Application-level caching, in which developers manually control cached content, has been adopted when traditional forms of caching are insufficient to meet such requirements. Despite its popularity, this level of caching is typically addressed in an adhoc way, given that it depends on specific details of the application. Furthermore, it forces application developers to reason about a crosscutting concern, which is unrelated to the application business logic. As a result, application-level caching is a time-consuming and error-prone task, becoming a common source of bugs. This dissertation advances work on application-level caching by providing an understanding of its state-of-practice and automating the decision regarding cacheable content, thus providing developers with substantial support to design, implement and maintain application-level caching solutions. More specifically, we provide three key contributions: structured knowledge derived from a qualitative study, a survey of the state-of-the-art on static and adaptive caching approaches, and a technique and framework that automate the challenging task of identifying cache opportunities The qualitative study, which involved the investigation of ten web applications (open-source and commercial) with different characteristics, allowed us to determine the state-of-practice of application-level caching, along with practical guidance to developers as patterns and guidelines to be followed. Based on such patterns and guidelines derived, we also propose an approach to automate the identification of cacheable methods, which is often manually done and is not supported by existing approaches to implement application-level caching. We implemented a caching framework that can be seamlessly integrated into web applications to automatically identify and cache opportunities at runtime, by monitoring system execution and adaptively managing caching decisions. We evaluated our approach empirically with three open-source web applications, and results indicate that we can identify adequate caching opportunities by improving application throughput up to 12.16%. Furthermore, our approach can prevent code tangling and raise the abstraction level of caching.

Modern software systems are increasingly characterized by uncertainties in the operating context and user requirements. These uncertainties are difficult to predict at design time. Achieving the quality goals of such systems depends on the ability of the software to deal with these uncertainties at runtime. A self-adaptive system employs a feedback loop to continuously monitor and adapt itself to achieve particular quality goals (i.e., adaptation goals) regardless of uncertainties. Current research applies formal techniques to provide guarantees for adaptation goals, typically using exhaustive verification techniques. Although these techniques offer strong guarantees for the goals, they suffer from well-known state explosion problem. In this thesis, we take a broader perspective and focus on two types of guarantees: (1) functional correctness of the feedback loop, and (2) guaranteeing the adaptation goals in an efficient manner. To that end, we present ActivFORMS (Active FORmal Models for Self-adaptation), a formally founded model-driven approach for engineering self-adaptive systems with guarantees. ActivFORMS achieves functional correctness by direct execution of formally verified models of the feedback loop using a reusable virtual machine. To efficiently provide guarantees for the adaptation goals with a required level of confidence, ActivFORMS applies statistical model checking at runtime. ActivFORMS supports on the fly changes of adaptation goals and updates of the verified feedback loop models that meet the changed goals. To demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the approach, we applied ActivFORMS in several domains: warehouse transportation, oceanic surveillance, tele assistance, and IoT building security monitoring. / Marie Curie CIG, FP7-PEOPLE-2011-CIG, Project ID: 303791

[pt] Este trabalho aplica três métodos básicos de malhas auto-adaptativas em problemas de mecânica dos fluidos e transmissão de calor. Um método unidimensional é aplicado a problemas descritos pela equação generalizada de Burgers. Um método bidimensional é aplicado ao problema da. cavidade com tampa móvel para números de Reynolds Iguais a 100, 500 e 1000 e ao problema de convecção natural em uma cavidade para números de Rayleigh iguais a 10 elevado a 3,10 elevado a 4,10 elevado a 5 e 10 elevado a 6. Um terceiro método, fundamentado em um sistema de equações elípticas é proposto e aplicado ao problema de convecção natural na cavidade, para análise de desempenho. Procura-se definir, para cada aplicação, critérios como: a) variável indicada para dirigir a adaptação; b) especiacação da intensidade desejada na adaptação e c) justificação para o uso de malhas auto-adaptativas no problema em estudo. Observa-se, nos problemas unidimensionais, que quando o problema tem uma região única de intensos gradientes, a adaptação da malha funciona convenientemente, especialmente na presença de um termo de fonte. No problema da cavidade com, tampa móvel, verifica-se que a função de corrente deve dirigir a adaptação. Para Re igual a 1000 o método empregado consegue melhorar a descrição geral do problema. O problema de convecção natural apresenta melhores resultados para Ra: 10 elevado a 6 e com a adaptação dirigida pelo gradiente da temperatura que está diretamente relacionado ao termo de fonte do problema (forças de empuxo). São consideradas as características geométricas de ortogonalidade e suavidade das malhas adaptadas. Para isso, compara-se malhas obtidas pelos métodos bidimensionais implementados. Observa-se que o método fundamentado no sistema elíptíco consegue concentrar a malha nas regiões de intensos gradientes, sem danos excessivos naquelas características. / [en] The present work is concerned to the study and implementation of self-adaptive grids to tluid mechanics and heat transfer problems. Initially, a ID method is applied to simple problems described by the generalized Burger-s equation, After that, a 2-D method is applied to the wall driven Cavity with Reynolds numbers equal to 100, 500 and 1000 and to the natural convection problem inside cavltles with Rayleigh numbers equal to 10 to the third power, 10 to the fourth power, 10 to the fifth power and 10 to the sixth power. A third method, based on a system of elliptic equations is proposed and applied to this natural convection problem, for error assessmet. For each application, one seeks to define criteria such as: a) most suitable dependent variable to drive the adaptive technique; b) intensity of the adaptive technique and c) need for the use of the technique at all. From the 1-D problems, it may be concluded that in presence of single regions of strong gradients, the technidne works line, specially shenever a source term is present. From the wall driven cavity problem, it appears that the stream function is most suitable to be the driving force for the adaptation. For instance, for Reynolds number on the order of 1000, the used method works well. The natural convectlon problem indicates best results for high Rayleigh numbers, say 10 to the sixth power, and with the use of the temperature gradient that is straight related to the source term, that is, buoyancy in the case. In the present work, geometric characteristics such as ortogonality and smooth are considered. Among the three methods, studied, it seems that the elliptic one, proposed here, is able to concentrate grid points Whenever needed, without severe penalization to those characteristics.