Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Process patterns allow the modular modelling and adaptable application of business processes. Present descriptions of process patterns show defects like non-uniform and unequivocal description forms and missing relationship definitions. These defects disadvantageously affect the effective usage of process patterns. In this work we introduce the language PROPEL (Process Pattern Description Language), which provides concepts for the semiformal description of process patterns and relationships between process patterns. With the help of PROPEL single process patterns can be modelled and, by definition of relationships, be composed to more complicated processes. With the representation of different views of a process pattern catalog the process patterns and their relationships can be shown clearly. An example illustrates how a process pattern catalog and the contained process patterns are modelled. It is shown that in applying PROPEL the complexity of a process model can be reduced and inconsistencies of processes be eliminated.

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Thesis (M.Tech.) - Central University of Technology, Free State, 2007 / The latest technological trend worldwide, is automation. Reducing human labour and introducing robots to do the work is a pure business decision. The reason for automating a plant can be some, or all, of the following: Improve productivity Reduce labour and equipment costs Reduce product damage System reliability can be monitored Improves plant safety When the automation process is started, Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) will be one of the first commodities that can be used. The reason for this is that they are so versatile. They can be programmed to follow specific paths when moving material from one point to another and the biggest advantage of all is that they can operate for twenty four hours a day. Automatic Guided Vehicles are developed for many different applications and therefore many different types of AGVs are available. All AGVs are equipped with sensors so that they are able to “see” what is happening around them. Since the AGV must be able to function without any human help or control, it must be able to navigate through the work environment. In this study a remote control car was converted to an AGV and thorough research was done on the different types of sensors that can be used to make the AGV more intelligent when it comes to navigating in an unknown environment.

This dissertation investigates current trends concerning exceptions. Exceptions influence the reliability of software systems. In order to develop software systems that are most robust, thus delivering higher availability at a lower development and operating cost, the occurence of exceptions needs to be reduced and the effects of the exceptions controlled. In order to do this, issues such as detection, identification, classification, propagation, handling, language implementation, software testing and reporting of exceptions must be attended to. Although some of these areas are well researched there are remaining problems. The quest is to establish if a unified exception-handling framework is possible and viable, which can address the issues and problems throughout the software development life cycle, and if so, the requirements for such a framework. / Computing / M.Sc. (Information Systems)

Formal methods have been shown to be beneficial in increasing the quality of, and confidence in software systems. Despite the advantages of using formal methods in software development, the uptake in the commercial industry has been limited where the use of informal and semi-formal notations is favoured. To bridge the gap between the ease-of-use of semi-formal notation and correctness of formal methods, a number of approaches to the formalisation of informal and semi-formal notation have been researched and documented. Two of these approaches are discussed in this dissertation using a medium-sized case study to demonstrate the approaches. It was shown that each approach offered results that differed in terms of levels of abstraction, requisite knowledge of the formal target specification language and potential for automation. / Information Science / M.Sc.(Information Systems)

Cache memory is used, in most single-core and multi-core processors, to improve performance by bridging the speed gap between the main memory and CPU. Even though cache increases performance, it poses some serious challenges for embedded systems running real-time applications. Cache introduces execution time unpredictability due to its adaptive and dynamic nature and cache consumes vast amount of power to be operated. Energy requirement and execution time predictability are crucial for the success of real-time embedded systems. Various cache optimization schemes have been proposed to address the performance, power consumption, and predictability issues. However, currently available solutions are not adequate for real-time embedded systems as they do not address the performance, power consumption, and execution time predictability issues at the same time. Moreover, existing solutions are not suitable for dealing with multi-core architecture issues. In this dissertation, we develop a methodology through cache optimization for real-time embedded systems that can be used to analyze and improve execution time predictability and performance/power ratio at the same time. This methodology is effective for both single-core and multi-core systems. First, we develop a cache modeling and optimization technique for single-core systems to improve performance. Then, we develop a cache modeling and optimization technique for multi-core systems to improve performance/power ratio. We develop a cache locking scheme to improve execution time predictability for real-time systems. We introduce Miss Table (MT) based cache locking scheme with victim cache (VC) to improve predictability and performance/power ratio. MT holds information about memory blocks, which may cause more misses if not locked, to improve cache locking performance. / VC temporarily stores the victim blocks from level-1 cache to improve cache hits. In addition, MT is used to improve cache replacement performance and VC is used to improve cache hits by supporting stream buffering. We also develop strategies to generate realistic workload by characterizing applications to simulate cache optimization and cache locking schemes. Popular MPEG4, H.264/AVC, FFT, MI, and DFT applications are used to run the simulation programs. Simulation results show that newly introduced Miss Table based cache locking scheme with victim cache significantly improves the predictability and performance/power ratio. In this work, a reduction of 33% in mean delay per task and a reduction of 41% in total power consumption are achieved by using MT and VCs while locking 25% of level-2 cache size in an 4-core system. It is also observed that execution time predictability can be improved by avoiding more than 50% cache misses while locking one-fourth of the cache size. / by Abu Asaduzzaman. / Vita. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

by Tam Tze Wai. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-114). / Abstract also in Chinese. / ABSTRACT --- p.i / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS --- p.v / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.vi / LIST OF TABLES --- p.viii / LIST OF FIGURES --- p.ix / Chapter CHAPTER1 --- INTRODUCTION / Chapter 1.1 --- Modelling the Dynamics of a Coral Community --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- New Paradigm in Understanding Complex System --- p.2 / Chapter 1.3 --- Ecological Models under the New Paradigm --- p.3 / Chapter 1.4 --- Hong Kong Marine Environment and Its Degradation --- p.6 / Chapter 1.5 --- Objectives of the Present Study --- p.8 / Chapter CHAPTER2 --- FIELD STUDIES OF A CORAL COMMUNITY IN HONG KONG / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2 --- Study Area --- p.10 / Chapter 2.3 --- Materials and Methods --- p.12 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Preliminary Study of the Coral Cover and Diversity / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Extensive Study of the Coral Cover and Diversity / Chapter 2.3.3 --- Relative Abundance and Species Diversity / Chapter 2.4 --- Results and Discussion --- p.14 / Chapter 2.4.1 --- Preliminary Study / Chapter 2.4.2 --- Extensive Study / Chapter CHAPTER3 --- COMPUTER SIMULATION OF A CORAL COMMUNITY / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.40 / Chapter 3.2 --- Object-oriented Programming (OOP) --- p.42 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Objects / Chapter 3.2.2 --- "Classes, Hierarchies and Inheritance" / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Object-oriented Simulation / Chapter 3.3 --- Object-oriented Simulation of a Five-Coral Community --- p.46 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Class BenthicEnvir / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Class Coral / Chapter 3.3.3 --- The Objects Behaviour / Chapter 3.3.4 --- The Simulation / Chapter 3.3.5 --- Diversity Index and Statistical Analysis / Chapter 3.4 --- Results and Discussion --- p.66 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Growing Behaviour of the Corals / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Dynamical Behaviour of the Coral Community in Simulation without Disturbance / Chapter 3.4.3 --- Dynamical Behaviour of the Simulated Coral Community with Disturbance / Chapter 3.4.4 --- Utility of the Object-oriented Model / Chapter CHAPTER4 --- GENERAL DISCUSSION / Chapter 4.1 --- Mechanisms Structuring a Coral Community --- p.94 / Chapter 4.2 --- Comparison between Field Studies and the Computer Model / Chapter 4.3 --- Utilities and Limitations of the Present Model / REFERENCES --- p.107 / APPENDIX --- p.115

Caching is a widely used technique to improve the scalability of distributed systems. A central issue with caching is maintaining object replicas consistent with their master copies. Large distributed systems, such as the Web, typically deploy heuristic-based consistency mechanisms, which increase delay and place extra load on the servers, while not providing guarantees that cached copies served to clients are up-to-date. Server-driven invalidation has been proposed as an approach to strong cache consistency, but it requires servers to keep track of which objects are cached by which clients. We propose an alternative approach to strong cache consistency, called MONARCH, which does not require servers to maintain per-client state. Our approach builds on a few key observations. Large and popular sites, which attract the majority of the traffic, construct their pages from distinct components with various characteristics. Components may have different content types, change characteristics, and semantics. These components are merged together to produce a monolithic page, and the information about their uniqueness is lost. In our view, pages should serve as containers holding distinct objects with heterogeneous type and change characteristics while preserving the boundaries between these objects. Servers compile object characteristics and information about relationships between containers and embedded objects into explicit object management commands. Servers piggyback these commands onto existing request/response traffic so that client caches can use these commands to make object management decisions. The use of explicit content control commands is a deterministic, rather than heuristic, object management mechanism that gives content providers more control over their content. The deterministic object management with strong cache consistency offered by MONARCH allows content providers to make more of their content cacheable. Furthermore, MONARCH enables content providers to expose internal structure of their pages to clients. We evaluated MONARCH using simulations with content collected from real Web sites. The results show that MONARCH provides strong cache consistency for all objects, even for unpredictably changing ones, and incurs smaller byte and message overhead than heuristic policies. The results also show that as the request arrival rate or the number of clients increases, the amount of server state maintained by MONARCH remains the same while the amount of server state incurred by server invalidation mechanisms grows.

In a home environment, there are many tasks that a human may need to accomplish. These activities, which range from picking up a telephone to clearing rooms in the house, all have the common trend of fetching. These tasks can only be completed correctly with the consideration of many things including an understanding of what the human wants, recognition of the correct item from the environment, and manipulation and grasping of the object of interest. The focus of this work is on addressing one aspect of this problem, decomposing an image scene such that a task-specific object of interest can be identified. In this work, communication between human and robot is represented using a feedback formalism. This involves the back-and-forth transfer of textual information between the human and the robot such that the robot receives all information necessary to recognize the task-specific object of interest. We name this new communication mechanism Interactive Text Response (ITR), which we believe will provide a novel contribution to the field of Human Robot Interaction. The methodology employed involves capturing a view of the scene that contains an object of interest. Then, the robot makes inquiries based on its current understanding of the scene to disambiguate between objects in the scene. In this work, we discuss development of ITR in human-robot interaction, and understanding of variability, ease of recognition, clutter, and workload needed to develop an interactive robot system.