A framework for memory contention analysis in multi-core platforms

The last decade has witnessed a major shift towards the deployment of embedded applications on multi-core platforms. However, real-time applications have not been able to fully benefit from this transition, as the computational gains offered by multi-cores are often offset by performance degradation due to shared resources, such as main memory. To efficiently use multi-core platforms for real-time systems, it is hence essential to tightly bound the interference when accessing shared resources. Although there has been much recent work in this area, a remaining key problem is to address the diversity of memory arbiters in the analysis to make it applicable to a wide range of systems. This work handles diverse arbiters by proposing a general framework to compute the maximum interference caused by the shared memory bus and its impact on the execution time of the tasks running on the cores, considering different bus arbiters. Our novel approach clearly demarcates the arbiter-dependent and independent stages in the analysis of these upper bounds. The arbiter-dependent phase takes the arbiter and the task memory-traffic pattern as inputs and produces a model of the availability of the bus to a given task. Then, based on the availability of the bus, the arbiter-independent phase determines the worst-case request-release scenario that maximizes the interference experienced by the tasks due to the contention for the bus. We show that the framework addresses the diversity problem by applying it to a memory bus shared by a fixed-priority arbiter, a time-division multiplexing (TDM) arbiter, and an unspecified work-conserving arbiter using applications from the MediaBench test suite. We also experimentally evaluate the quality of the analysis by comparison with a state-of-the-art TDM analysis approach and consistently showing a considerable reduction in maximum interference.

A framework for robustness assessment in the context of corroded RC structures

Structural robustness is an emergent concept related to the structural response to damage. At the present time, robustness is not well defined and much controversy still remains around this subject. Even if robustness has seen growing interest as a consequence of catastrophic consequences due to extreme events, the fact is that the concept can also be very useful when considered on more probable exposure scenarios such as deterioration, among others. This paper intends to be a contribution to the definition of structural robustness, especially in the analysis of reinforced concrete structures subjected to corrosion. To achieve this, first of all, several proposed robustness definitions and indicators and misunderstood concepts will be analyzed and compared. From this point and regarding a concept that could be applied to most type of structures and dam-age scenarios, a robustness definition is proposed. To illustrate the proposed concept, an example of corroded reinforced concrete structures will be analyzed using nonlinear analysis numerical methods based on a contin-uum strong discontinuities approach and isotropic damage models for concrete. Finally the robustness of the presented example will be assessed.

Implementação sistema gestão de desempenho aos responsáveis de departamento numa empresa transitária: o caso DSV

Com este trabalho pretende-se desenvolver um projeto de intervenção no âmbito da gestão do desempenho a aplicar aos responsáveis de departamento da DSV Portugal. O Sistema de Gestão de Desempenho afigura-se como um importante instrumento, estratégico para a gestão das organizações, tendo sido um enorme desafio para quem o tem implementado. Avaliar desempenhos constitui um aspeto central e uma função essencial da gestão de recursos humanos nas organizações de hoje. Ao avaliar o desempenho e o contributo dos recursos humanos para o desenvolvimento e a prossecução dos seus objetivos, a organização obtém informação que lhe permite uma tomada de decisão mais eficaz. Se os desempenhos não se encontram de acordo com o esperado, deverão ser desenvolvidas estratégias para corrigir este efeito, se o desempenho é satisfatório ou excede as expectativas, deverão os colaboradores ser premiados e valorizados. Assim, propomo-nos à criação de um projeto de intervenção numa empresa Transitária, estrategicamente alinhado com a missão, a visão, os valores e as competências valorizadas pela empresa DSV Transitários, Lda. Na elaboração deste projeto foi num primeiro momento realizada a identificação do tema junto da empresa e revisão da literatura. Foi realizado um diagnóstico interno aos procedimentos e práticas existentes, analisando assim o enquadramento organizacional onde se pretende intervir. A partir da conjugação das análises previamente indicadas e tendo por base a definição e os objetivos a que este projeto se propõem alcançar foi definido o planeamento estratégico que consta da estratégia, os objetivos estratégicos e respetivos âmbitos. Assim como foi definido o planeamento operacional, a metodologia a usar, o cronograma de atividades e momento de avaliação do projeto. Descreve-se depois a implementação, assim como os processos, procedimentos e instrumentos desenvolvidos e, finalmente realiza-se a avaliação de todo o projeto.

A Visual Programming Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks in Smart Home Applications

International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing (ISSNIP 2015). 7 to 9, Apr, 2015. Singapure, Singapore.

Supporting NAT traversal and secure communications in a protocol implementation framework

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

An automated maneuver control framework for a remotely operated vehicle

OCEANS, 2001. MTS/IEEE Conference and Exhibition (Volume:2 )

A control framework for a remotely operated vehicle

A control framework enabling the automated maneuvering of a Remotely Operate Vehicle (ROV) is presented. The control architecture is structured according to the principle of composition of vehicle motions from a minimal set of elemental maneuvers that are designed and verified independently. The principled approach is based on distributed hybrid systems techniques, and spans integrated design, simulation and implementation as the same model is used throughout. Hybrid systems control techniques are used to synthesize the elemental maneuvers and to design protocols, which coordinate the execution of elemental maneuvers within a complex maneuver. This work is part of the Inspection of Underwater Structures (IES) project whose main objective is the implementation of a ROV-based system for the inspection of underwater structures.

P-SOCRATES: A parallel software framework for time-critical many-core systems

Article in Press, Corrected Proof

Toward a Run-Time Verification Framework for Real-Time Safety-Critical Systems

Presented at SEMINAR "ACTION TEMPS RÉEL:INFRASTRUCTURES ET SERVICES SYSTÉMES". 10, Apr, 2015. Brussels, Belgium.

Industrie 4.0 Framework, Challenges and Perspectives

The world is increasingly in a global community. The rapid technological development of communication and information technologies allows the transmission of knowledge in real-time. In this context, it is imperative that the most developed countries are able to develop their own strategies to stimulate the industrial sector to keep up-to-date and being competitive in a dynamic and volatile global market so as to maintain its competitive capacities and by consequence, permits the maintenance of a pacific social state to meet the human and social needs of the nation. The path traced of competitiveness through technological differentiation in industrialization allows a wider and innovative field of research. Already we are facing a new phase of organization and industrial technology that begins to change the way we relate with the industry, society and the human interaction in the world of work in current standards. This Thesis, develop an analysis of Industrie 4.0 Framework, Challenges and Perspectives. Also, an analysis of German reality in facing to approach the future challenge in this theme, the competition expected to win in future global markets, points of domestic concerns felt in its industrial fabric household face this challenge and proposes recommendations for a more effective implementation of its own strategy. The methods of research consisted of a comprehensive review and strategically analysis of existing global literature on the topic, either directly or indirectly, in parallel with the analysis of questionnaires and data analysis performed by entities representing the industry at national and world global placement. The results found by this multilevel analysis, allowed concluding that this is a theme that is only in the beginning for construction the platform to engage the future Internet of Things in the industrial environment Industrie 4.0. This dissertation allows stimulate the need of achievements of more strategically and operational approach within the society itself as a whole to clarify the existing weaknesses in this area, so that the National Strategy can be implemented with effective approaches and planned actions for a direct training plan in a more efficiently path in education for the theme.

Parallel Software framework for time-critical many-core systems

The recent technological advancements and market trends are causing an interesting phenomenon towards the convergence of High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Embedded Computing (EC) domains. On one side, new kinds of HPC applications are being required by markets needing huge amounts of information to be processed within a bounded amount of time. On the other side, EC systems are increasingly concerned with providing higher performance in real-time, challenging the performance capabilities of current architectures. The advent of next-generation many-core embedded platforms has the chance of intercepting this converging need for predictable high-performance, allowing HPC and EC applications to be executed on efficient and powerful heterogeneous architectures integrating general-purpose processors with many-core computing fabrics. To this end, it is of paramount importance to develop new techniques for exploiting the massively parallel computation capabilities of such platforms in a predictable way. P-SOCRATES will tackle this important challenge by merging leading research groups from the HPC and EC communities. The time-criticality and parallelisation challenges common to both areas will be addressed by proposing an integrated framework for executing workload-intensive applications with real-time requirements on top of next-generation commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms based on many-core accelerated architectures. The project will investigate new HPC techniques that fulfil real-time requirements. The main sources of indeterminism will be identified, proposing efficient mapping and scheduling algorithms, along with the associated timing and schedulability analysis, to guarantee the real-time and performance requirements of the applications.

Proactive services ecosystem framework

Dissertation presented to obtain the degree of Doctor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, specialization on Collaborative Enterprise Networks

A framework for supporting knowledge representation – an ontological based approach

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

SHõWA: A Self-healing Framework for Web-based Applications

The complexity of systems is considered an obstacle to the progress of the IT industry. Autonomic computing is presented as the alternative to cope with the growing complexity. It is a holistic approach, in which the systems are able to configure, heal, optimize, and protect by themselves. Web-based applications are an example of systems where the complexity is high. The number of components, their interoperability, and workload variations are factors that may lead to performance failures or unavailability scenarios. The occurrence of these scenarios affects the revenue and reputation of businesses that rely on these types of applications. In this article, we present a self-healing framework for Web-based applications (SHõWA). SHõWA is composed by several modules, which monitor the application, analyze the data to detect and pinpoint anomalies, and execute recovery actions autonomously. The monitoring is done by a small aspect-oriented programming agent. This agent does not require changes to the application source code and includes adaptive and selective algorithms to regulate the level of monitoring. The anomalies are detected and pinpointed by means of statistical correlation. The data analysis detects changes in the server response time and analyzes if those changes are correlated with the workload or are due to a performance anomaly. In the presence of per- formance anomalies, the data analysis pinpoints the anomaly. Upon the pinpointing of anomalies, SHõWA executes a recovery procedure. We also present a study about the detection and localization of anomalies, the accuracy of the data analysis, and the performance impact induced by SHõWA. Two benchmarking applications, exercised through dynamic workloads, and different types of anomaly were considered in the study. The results reveal that (1) the capacity of SHõWA to detect and pinpoint anomalies while the number of end users affected is low; (2) SHõWA was able to detect anomalies without raising any false alarm; and (3) SHõWA does not induce a significant performance overhead (throughput was affected in less than 1%, and the response time delay was no more than 2 milliseconds).

The moral status of animals within the framework of Peter Singer's preference utilitarianism

Dissertação apresentada para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Filosofia