Commercially available military-themed virtual simulations have been developed and sold for entertainment since the beginning of the personal computing era. There exists an intense interest by various branches of the military to leverage the technological advances of the personal computing and video game industries to provide low cost military training. By nature of the content of the commercial military-themed virtual simulations, a large overlap has grown between the interests, resources, standards, and technology of the computer entertainment industry and military training branches. This research attempts to identify these commonalities with the purpose of systematically designing and evaluating a common component-based software architecture that could be used to implement a framework for developing content for both commercial and military virtual simulation software applications.

In today’s complex landscape of embedded software systems, the robust integration testing need is more critical than ever. This bachelor’s thesis project delves into the integration testing of an articulated hauler dumping system for Volvo Construction Equipment (Volvo CE). The study focuses on the architecture, functional and safety requirements and overall performance of the system. The complexity of modern construction machinery, driven by sophisticated Electronic Control Units (ECUs), demands precise coordination and flawless operation. Inaccuracies or failures in integrated ECUs can result in operational inefficiencies, safety risks, and substantial downtime costs. This paper offers valuable insights into a systematic approach designed to tackle these challenges head-on within the domain of articulated hauler dumping systems. Our exploration comprehensiveness employed diverse testing methodologies, encompassing scenario-based, boundary and stress testing, integration testing, and user interaction testing. This multifaceted approach enabled a thorough understanding of the system’s behavior, reliability, and responsiveness. The research aims to clarify the importance of comprehensive integration testing and its role in ensuring optimal performance, safety, and complex embedded systems efficiency. This study is a valuable resource for researchers, engineers, and professionals navigating the complexities of embedded systems integration, offering actionable insights and strategies for achieving robustness and reliability in intricate machinery operations.

This work presents a software framework for power system analysis, PowerFrame. It is composed of four layers. This four-layer architecture is designed for extensibility and reusability so that more complex power system problems can be tackled within the architecture. In the context of PowerFrame, this work explores complex power system problems. Included in these problems are parallel-placed cables with multiple conductors, and distributed resources operating in unbalanced power distribution systems. Mathematical models are derived. Errors between more exact models and conventional approaches are presented. PowerFrame is also designed to handle distributed computation for intensive power system calculations on multiple, networked computers. Distributed power flow algorithms are presented. Tests on Ethernet LANs show the feasibility of distributed computation under current computer network bandwidth. / Ph. D.

Distribution system analysis and design has experienced a gradual development over the past three decades. The once loosely assembled and largely ad hoc procedures have been progressing toward being well-organized. The increasing power of computers now allows for managing the large volumes of data and other obstacles inherent to distribution system studies. A variety of sophisticated optimization methods, which were impossible to conduct in the past, have been developed and successfully applied to distribution systems. Among the many procedures that deal with making decisions about the state and better operation of a distribution system, two decision support procedures will be addressed in this study: phase balancing and phase prediction. The former recommends re-phasing of single- and double-phase laterals in a radial distribution system in order to improve circuit loss while also maintaining/improving imbalances at various balance point locations. Phase balancing calculations are based on circuit loss information and current magnitudes that are calculated from a power flow solution. The phase balancing algorithm is designed to handle time-varying loads when evaluating phase moves that will result in improved circuit losses over all load points. Applied to radial distribution systems, the phase prediction algorithm attempts to predict the phases of single- and/or double phase laterals that have no phasing information previously recorded by the electric utility. In such an attempt, it uses available customer data and kW/kVar measurements taken at various locations in the system. It is shown that phase balancing is a special case of phase prediction. Building on the phase balancing and phase prediction design studies, this work introduces the concept of integrated design, an approach for coordinating the effects of various design calculations. Integrated design considers using results of multiple design applications rather than employing a single application for a distribution system in need of improvement relative to some system aspect. Also presented is a software architecture supporting integrated design. / Ph. D.

Railway has the potential to become one of the most sustainable mediums for passenger and freight transport. This is possible by continuous updates to the asset management regime supporting Prognostics and Health Management (PHM). Railway tracks and catenaries are linear assets, and their length plays a vital role in maintenance. Railway catenary does not present many failures as compared to the rail track, but the failures that occur do not give enough opportunity for quick recovery. These failures cause extensive time delays disrupting railways operations. Such situations can be handled better by updating the maintenance approach. The domain of maintenance explores possible tools, techniques, and technologies to retain and restore the systems. PHM is dependent on data acquisition and analytics to predict the future state of a system with the least possible divergence. In the case of railway catenary and many other domains, this new technology of data acquisition is Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) device-based spatial point cloud collection. Current methods of catenary inspection depend on contact-based methods of inspection of railway catenary and read signals from the pantograph and contact wire while ignoring the rest of the wires and surroundings. Locomotive-mounted LiDAR devices support the collection of spatial data in the form of point-cloud from all the surrounding equipment and environment. This point cloud data holds a large amount of information, waiting for algorithms and technologies to harness it. A Digital Twin (DT) is a virtual representation of a physical system or process, achieved through models and simulations and maintains bidirectional communication for progressive enrichment at both ends. A systems digital twin is exposed to all the same conditions virtually. Such a digital twin can be used to provide prognostics by varying factors such as time, malfunction in components of the system, and conditions in which the system operates. Railways is a multistakeholder domain that depends on many organisations to support smooth function. The development of digital twins depends on the understanding of the system, the availability of sensors to read the state and actuators to affect the system’s state. Enabling a digital twin depends on governance restrictions, business requirements and technological competence. A concrete step towards enablement of the digital twin is designing an architecture to accommodate the technical requirements of content management, processing and infrastructure while addressing railway operations' governance and business aspects.The main objective of this work is to develop and provide architecture and a platform for the enablement of a DT solution based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital technologies aimed at PHM of railway catenary system. The main results of this thesis are i) analysis of content management and processing requirements for railway overhead catenary system ii) methodology for catenary point cloud data processing and information representation iii) architecture and infrastructure requirements for enablement of Digital Twin and iv) roadmap for digital twin enablement for PHM of railway overhead catenary system.

The Swedish government decided in 2017 that Sweden should be the best country in theworld to use the benefits of digitalization, and concluded that education plays a hugerole in reaching their vision. From autumn semester 2022 text-based programming willbe a mandatory part (in mathematics, grade 7-9) in Sweden. Previous research showsthat many teachers feel uncomfortable teaching programming and that text-basedprogramming has a steep learning curve. This leads us to check if there are gaps to fillin the software provided for educational purposes available today. To get an overview ofthe current situation a survey using questionnaires was conducted. To what extent hadthe teachers used the tools and resources recommended by the Swedish NationalAgency for Education, to develop their skills within text-based programming? How didthe view differ for teachers on using complements to the tools and resources providedby the Swedish National Agency for education today, based on their characteristics?Very few teachers had used the available material and tools, or had the time needed todevelop their skills to feel comfortable teaching text-based programming. Most of theteachers within the survey would find complements to the material provided by theSwedish National Agency for Education useful.

Much computer communications activity is invisible to the user, happening without explicit permission. When system administrators investigate network communications activities, they have difficulty tracing them back to the processes that cause them. The strictly layered TCP/IP networking model that underlies all widely used, general-purpose operating systems makes it impossible to trace a packet seen on the network back to the processes that are responsible for generating and receiving it. The TCP/IP model separates the concerns of network routing and process ownership so that the layers cannot share the information needed to correlate packets to processes. But knowing what processes are responsible for communications activities can be a great help in determining whether that activity is benign or malicious. My solution combines a visualization tool, a kernel-level correlation engine, and middleware that ties the two together. My research enables security personnel to visually correlate packets to the processes they belong to helping users determine whether communications are benign or malicious. I present my discoveries about the system administrator community and relate how I created a new correlation technology. I conducted a series of initial interviews with system administrators to clarify the problem, researched available solutions in the literature, identified what was missing, and worked with users to build it. The users were my co-designers as I built a series of prototypes of increasing fidelity and conducted usability evaluations on them. I hope that my work will demonstrate how well the participatory design approach works. My work has implications for the kernel structure of all operating system kernels with a TCP/IP protocol stack and network model. In light of my research, I hope security personnel will more clearly see sets of communicating processes on a network as basic computational units rather than the individual host computers. If kernel designers incorporate my findings into their work, it will enable much better security monitoring than is possible today making the Internet safer for all. / Ph. D.

With the advance of reliable network technology, software development has progressed from traditional, platform-centric software construction to network-centric software evolution. An evidence of this change is largely reflected in the technologies that are supporting the emerging theory of Network-Centric Operations (NCO). Amongst these technologies is software architecture as a software engineering sub-discipline. Although the concepts of network centricity are widely recognized within the software and system engineering communities, no unified characterization of network-centric software systems is unanimously adopted. The state-of-the-practice is characterized by differing interpretations about how we should design and implement this class of systems. In this research, our focus is twofold: 1) Providing a characterization framework to reason about network-centric software systems and 2) introducing one solution approach to designing this class of system based on a new architectural style, the network-centric architectural style. In so doing, we set the stage for the software architecture community to analyze the "fitness of use" of current architectural styles and architecture design practices within this new network-centric paradigm. In addition, we set the stage for our continued research that will address further software engineering challenges pertinent to network-centric software systems, which include capability-based requirements engineering and quality attributes-based design. / Master of Science

Bindings are used to make a software library accessible in languages other than those that the library was originally written for. However, creating and maintaining large amounts of bindings for every library is time-consuming and costly. An alternative approach to bringing functionality to more languages is to use a service-oriented architecture, where functionality is provided as services accessible from another process through message passing. Various middlewares exist to enable message passing between processes. In this thesis, some of the state of the art messaging middlewares are explored and evaluated them in terms of various criteria. Emphasis is given to their suitability for programmable built for industrial vehicles. Three of the most suitable middlewares are used to implement small systems based on a service-oriented architecture for further evaluation. The results indicate that the Data Distribution Service is the most promising candidate, owing to its interface description language, language support, and relatively low RAM and disk space usage. / Bindings används för att göra ett mjukvarubibliotek tillgängliga i andra språk än de som biblioteket till en början var gjort för. Att skapa och underhålla bindings för varje bibliotek är dock tidskrävande och kostsamt. Ett alternativt sätt att tillhandahålla funktionalitet till fler språk är att använda en tjänsteorienterad arkitektur där funktionalitet finns tillgänglig i tjänster som andra processer använder via meddelandeöverföring. Det finns flera mellanprogramvaror för meddelandeöverföring mellan processer. I denna uppsats undersöks några av de främsta mellanprogramvarorna i förhållande till en mängd kriterier, med fokus på hur lämpliga de är för programmerbara displays gjorda för industriella fordon. För ytterligare utvärdering används de tre mest lämpliga mellanprogramvarorna för att implementera små system baserade på en tjänstorienterad arkitektur. Resultaten tyder på att Data Distribution Service är den mest lovande kandidaten tack vare dess Interface Description Language, språkstöd och relativt låga användning av RAM och diskutrymme.

This thesis tackles the challenge of real-time image analysis in resource-constrained embedded systems, focusing specifically on Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) applications. The primary objective of this research is to design a software architecture that integrates features like modularity, real-time capabilities, robustness, and adaptability to meet the demands. The study proposes a unique software architecture based on blackboard and microservices architectures, that facilitates the key strengths from both paradigms, while mitigating their individual limitations. Additionally, it leverages shared memory inter-process communication mechanism for implementing centralized knowledge base of the blackboard, and realizing the API of the microservices architecture. The computer vision system tasks are decomposed into smaller pieces, and developed and implemented as loosely coupled individual software components. The thesis contribution lies in an efficient architecture for real-time image analysis on safety-critical and resource-constrained MAV platforms. The architecture provides an efficient and real-time-capable backbone and offers modularity and reusability for diverse applications.:1. Introduction 2. Fundamentals 3. Literature Review 4. Conceptualization of Real-Time Software Architecture 5. Implementation 6. Test and Evaluation 7. Conclusion and Future Scope Appendix