Describing Web Service Architectures through Design-by-Contract

Architectural description languages (ADLs) are used to specify a high-level, compositional view of a software application, specifying how a system is to be composed from coarse-grain components. ADLs usually come equipped with a formal dynamic semantics, facilitating specification and analysis of distributed and event-based systems. In this paper, we describe the TrustME, an ADL framework that provides both a process and a structural view of web service-based systems. We use Petri-net descriptions to give a dynamic view of business workflow for web service collaboration. We adapt the approach of Schmidt to define a form of Meyer's design-by-contract for configuring workflow architectures. This serves as a configuration-level means of constructing safer, more robust systems.

Trust-By-Contract: Modelling, Analysing and Predicting Behaviour in Software Architectures

Architecture description languages (ADLs) are used to specify high-level, compositional views of a software application. ADL research focuses on software composed of prefabricated parts, so-called software components. ADLs usually come equipped with rigorous state-transition style semantics, facilitating verification and analysis of specifications. Consequently, ADLs are well suited to configuring distributed and event-based systems. However, additional expressive power is required for the description of enterprise software architectures – in particular, those built upon newer middleware, such as implementations of Java’s EJB specification, or Microsoft’s COM+/.NET. The enterprise requires distributed software solutions that are scalable, business-oriented and mission-critical. We can make progress toward attaining these qualities at various stages of the software development process. In particular, progress at the architectural level can be leveraged through use of an ADL that incorporates trust and dependability analysis. Also, current industry approaches to enterprise development do not address several important architectural design issues. The TrustME ADL is designed to meet these requirements, through combining approaches to software architecture specification with rigorous design-by-contract ideas. In this paper, we focus on several aspects of TrustME that facilitate specification and analysis of middleware-based architectures for trusted enterprise computing systems.

Dynamically Adapting BDI Agent Architectures based on High-level User Specifications

Users are facing an increasing challenge of managing information and being available anytime anywhere, as the web exponentially grows. As a consequence, assisting them in their routine tasks has become a relevant issue to be addressed. In this paper, we introduce a software framework that supports the development of Personal Assistance Software (PAS). It relies on the idea of exposing a high level user model in order to increase user trust in the task delegation process as well as empowering them to manage it. The framework provides a synchronization mechanism that is responsible for dynamically adapting an underlying BDI agent-based running implementation in order to keep this high-level view of user customizations consistent with it.

A survey of control architectures for autonomous mobile robots

MEDEIROS, Adelardo A. D.A survey of control architectures for autonomous mobile robots. J. Braz. Comp. Soc., Campinas, v. 4, n. 3, abr. 1998 .Disponível em: Acesso: 27 set. 2010.

Calibração cega de receptores cinco-portas baseada em separação cega de fontes

The exponential growth in the applications of radio frequency (RF) is accompanied by great challenges as more efficient use of spectrum as in the design of new architectures for multi-standard receivers or software defined radio (SDR) . The key challenge in designing architecture of the software defined radio is the implementation of a wide-band receiver, reconfigurable, low cost, low power consumption, higher level of integration and flexibility. As a new solution of SDR design, a direct demodulator architecture, based on fiveport technology, or multi-port demodulator, has been proposed. However, the use of the five-port as a direct-conversion receiver requires an I/Q calibration (or regeneration) procedure in order to generate the in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) components of the transmitted baseband signal. In this work, we propose to evaluate the performance of a blind calibration technique without additional knowledge about training or pilot sequences of the transmitted signal based on independent component analysis for the regeneration of I/Q five-port downconversion, by exploiting the information on the statistical properties of the three output signals

Contribuição para o estudo do embarque de uma rede neural artificial em field programmable gate array (FPGA)

This study shows the implementation and the embedding of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) in hardware, or in a programmable device, as a field programmable gate array (FPGA). This work allowed the exploration of different implementations, described in VHDL, of multilayer perceptrons ANN. Due to the parallelism inherent to ANNs, there are disadvantages in software implementations due to the sequential nature of the Von Neumann architectures. As an alternative to this problem, there is a hardware implementation that allows to exploit all the parallelism implicit in this model. Currently, there is an increase in use of FPGAs as a platform to implement neural networks in hardware, exploiting the high processing power, low cost, ease of programming and ability to reconfigure the circuit, allowing the network to adapt to different applications. Given this context, the aim is to develop arrays of neural networks in hardware, a flexible architecture, in which it is possible to add or remove neurons, and mainly, modify the network topology, in order to enable a modular network of fixed-point arithmetic in a FPGA. Five synthesis of VHDL descriptions were produced: two for the neuron with one or two entrances, and three different architectures of ANN. The descriptions of the used architectures became very modular, easily allowing the increase or decrease of the number of neurons. As a result, some complete neural networks were implemented in FPGA, in fixed-point arithmetic, with a high-capacity parallel processing

Exploiting Distinct Molecular Architectures of Ultrathin Films Made with Iron Phthalocyanine for Sensing

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Modeling of optoelectronic devices through neuro-fuzzy architectures

The advantages offered by the electronic component LED (Light Emitting Diode) have caused a quick and wide application of this device in replacement of incandescent lights. However, in its combined application, the relationship between the design variables and the desired effect or result is very complex and it becomes difficult to model by conventional techniques. This work consists of the development of a technique, through comparative analysis of neuro-fuzzy architectures, to make possible to obtain the luminous intensity values of brake lights using LEDs from design data.

Efficient microwave-assisted hydrothermal synthesis of CuO sea urchin-like architectures via a mesoscale self-assembly

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

ZnO architectures synthesized by a microwave-assisted hydrothermal method and their photoluminescence properties

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Design of a simplified neuro-fuzzy system based on CMAC Architectures

This work presents the design of a fuzzy controller with simplified architecture that use an artificial neural network working as the aggregation operator for several active fuzzy rules. The simplified architecture of the fuzzy controller is used to minimize the time processing used in the closed loop system operation, the basic procedures of fuzzification are simplified to maximum while all the inference procedures are computed in a private way. As consequence, this simplified architecture allows a fast and easy configuration of the simplified fuzzy controller. The structuring of the fuzzy rules that define the control actions is previously computed using an artificial neural network based on CMAC Cerebellar Model Articulation Controller. The operational limits are standardized and all the control actions are previously calculated and stored in memory. For applications, results and conclusions several configurations of this fuzzy controller are considered.

A simple mechanism to deal with sequential code in dataflow architectures

The aim of this work is to propose a simple and efficient mechanism to deal with the problem of executing sequential code in a pure dataflow machine. Our results is obtained with a simulator of Wolf [4] architecture. The implemented mechanism improved the architecture performance when executing sequential code and we expect that this improvement could be better if we use some heuristics to deal with some special groups of instructions such as branch operations. Further research will show us if this is true.