Recommending Faulty Configurations for Interacting Systems Under Test Using Multi-objective Search

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Safdar Aqeel Safdar ◽  
Tao Yue ◽  
Shaukat Ali

Modern systems, such as cyber-physical systems, often consist of multiple products within/across product lines communicating with each other through information networks. Consequently, their runtime behaviors are influenced by product configurations and networks. Such systems play a vital role in our daily life; thus, ensuring their correctness by thorough testing becomes essential. However, testing these systems is particularly challenging due to a large number of possible configurations and limited available resources. Therefore, it is important and practically useful to test these systems with specific configurations under which products will most likely fail to communicate with each other. Motivated by this, we present a search-based configuration recommendation ( SBCR ) approach to recommend faulty configurations for the system under test (SUT) based on cross-product line (CPL) rules. CPL rules are soft constraints, constraining product configurations while indicating the most probable system states with a certain degree of confidence. In SBCR , we defined four search objectives based on CPL rules and combined them with six commonly applied search algorithms. To evaluate SBCR (i.e., SBCR NSGA-II , SBCR IBEA , SBCR MoCell , SBCR SPEA2 , SBCR PAES , and SBCR SMPSO ), we performed two case studies (Cisco and Jitsi) and conducted difference analyses. Results show that for both of the case studies, SBCR significantly outperformed random search-based configuration recommendation ( RBCR ) for 86% of the total comparisons based on six quality indicators, and 100% of the total comparisons based on the percentage of faulty configurations (PFC). Among the six variants of SBCR, SBCR SPEA2 outperformed the others in 85% of the total comparisons based on six quality indicators and 100% of the total comparisons based on PFC.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 4632
Author(s):  
Varun Gupta ◽  
Luis Rubalcaba

Context: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic led to a turbulent business environment, resulting in market uncertainties, frustrations, and rumors. Wrongly held beliefs—or myths—can hinder startups from turning new market opportunities into their favor (for example, by failing at diversification decisions) or undertaking wrong business decisions, e.g., diversifying in industries that have products of no real market value). Objectives: The objective of the paper is to identify the beliefs that drive the business decisions of startups in a pandemic and to isolate those beliefs that are merely myths. Further, this paper proposes strategic guidelines in the form of a framework to help startups make sound decisions that can lead to market success. Method: The two-step research method involved multiple case studies with five startups based in India, France, Italy, and Switzerland, to identify perceptual beliefs that drove strategic business decisions, followed by a case study of 36 COVID-19-solution focused startups, funded by the European Union (EU). The findings were validated through a survey that involved 102 entrepreneurs. The comparative analysis of two multiple case studies helped identify beliefs that were merely “myths”; myths that drove irrational strategic decisions, resulting in business failures. Results: The results indicate that startups make decisions in pandemic situations that are driven by seven myths, pertaining to human, intellectual, and financial resources. The decision on whether to diversify or continue in the same business operation can be divided into four strategic options of the Competency-Industry Relatedness (C-IR) framework: ignore, delay, phase-in, and diversify. Diversification in the same (or different industry) is less risky for startups if they have the skills, as needed, to diversify in related industries. Diversification in related industries helps startups leverage their experiences and learning curves (those associated with existing product lines) to adapt their existing products in new markets, or utilize their technologies to solve new problems via new products. The desired outcome for these startups should be sustainable business growth—to meet sustainability goals by contributing to the society and the economy. Conclusion: The C-IR framework is a strategic guide for startups to make business decisions based on internal factors, rather than myths. Accurately assessing skill diversity and the nature of new industries (or markets) will help startups leverage their existing resources optimally, without the need for (pricey) external funding. This will foster sustained business growth resulting in a nation economic development. Knowledge transfer from the Innovation ecosystem will further strengthen the C-IR framework effectiveness.


2021 ◽  
Vol 193 (S1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Bethwell ◽  
Benjamin Burkhard ◽  
Katrin Daedlow ◽  
Claudia Sattler ◽  
Moritz Reckling ◽  
...  

AbstractProvisioning ecosystem services play a vital role in sustaining human well-being. Agro-ecosystems contribute a significant share of these services, besides food and fodder and also fuel and fibre as well as regulating and cultural ecosystem services. Until now, the indication of provisioning ecosystem services of agro-ecosystems has been based almost only on yield numbers of agricultural products. Such an indication is problematic due to several reasons which include a disregard of the role of significant anthropogenic contributions to ecosystem service co-generation, external environmental effects and strong dependence on site conditions. We argue for an enhanced indication of provisioning ecosystem services that considers multiple aspects of their delivery. The conceptual base for such an indication has been made by prior publications which have been reviewed. Relevant points were taken up in this article and condensed into a conceptual model in order to develop a more holistic and expanded set of indictors, which was then exemplarily applied and tested in three case studies in Germany. The case studies represent different natural conditions, and the indicator set application showed that ecosystem services (ES) flow—in terms of output alone—does not characterise agro-ecosystems sufficiently. The proposed aspects of provisioning ecosystem services can give a fuller picture, for example, by input-output relationships, as it is possible by just using single indicators. Uncertainties as well as pros and cons of such an approach are elaborated. Finally, recommendations for an enhanced indication of provisioning ecosystem services in agro-ecosystems that can help to integrate agricultural principles with ideas of sustainability and site-specific land use are derived.


DYNA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 85 (207) ◽  
pp. 74-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Correa ◽  
Raúl Mazo ◽  
Gloria Lucia Giraldo Goméz

Software product lines facilitate the industrialization of software development. The main goal is to create a set of reusable software components for the rapid production of a software systems family. Many authors have proposed different approaches to design and implement the components of a product line. However, the construction and integration of these components continue to be a complex and time-consuming process. This paper introduces Fragment-oriented programming (FragOP), a framework to design and implement software product line domain components, and derive software products. FragOP is based on: (i) domain components, (ii) fragmentations points and (iii)fragments. FragOP was implemented in the VariaMos tool and using it we created a clothing stores software product line. We derivedfive different products, integrating automatically thousands of lines of code. On average, only three lines of code were manually modified;which provided preliminary evidence that using FragOP reduces manual intervention when integrating domain components.


F1000Research ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 1453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zeeshan Ahmed ◽  
Thomas Dandekar

Published scientific literature contains millions of figures, including information about the results obtained from different scientific experiments e.g. PCR-ELISA data, microarray analysis, gel electrophoresis, mass spectrometry data, DNA/RNA sequencing, diagnostic imaging (CT/MRI and ultrasound scans), and medicinal imaging like electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), echocardiography  (ECG), positron-emission tomography (PET) images. The importance of biomedical figures has been widely recognized in scientific and medicine communities, as they play a vital role in providing major original data, experimental and computational results in concise form. One major challenge for implementing a system for scientific literature analysis is extracting and analyzing text and figures from published PDF files by physical and logical document analysis. Here we present a product line architecture based bioinformatics tool ‘Mining Scientific Literature (MSL)’, which supports the extraction of text and images by interpreting all kinds of published PDF files using advanced data mining and image processing techniques. It provides modules for the marginalization of extracted text based on different coordinates and keywords, visualization of extracted figures and extraction of embedded text from all kinds of biological and biomedical figures using applied Optimal Character Recognition (OCR). Moreover, for further analysis and usage, it generates the system’s output in different formats including text, PDF, XML and images files. Hence, MSL is an easy to install and use analysis tool to interpret published scientific literature in PDF format.


2021 ◽  
Vol 331 ◽  
pp. 04010
Author(s):  
Fakira Mohan Nahak

Odisha is a natural disaster prone state. Its geographical location contributes a lot for the disasters. The eastern Indian state has a 480 Kilometre long coastline. The Bay of Bengal which is the house of cyclonic storms is the major contributor for the calamities in the state. From time immemorial till today Odisha has been facing hundreds of calamities in the form of cyclones, floods and famines. It is a regular phenomenon that in the period of September to December every year Odisha faces varieties of cyclones. These affect human life, properties and agriculture to the maximum extent. After the super cyclone of 1999 the government became sensitive so also the media. In these two decades Odisha media has played a vital role in creating awareness about the disasters and helped people in displacement and rehabilitation. In recent pasts media helped the Government in reaching the “Zero Casualty” target. The role of media not only limited to this, even post-disasters it followed the condition of people and their lives. The researcher takes some case studies of different disasters and their handling by media. Also tries to find out the people’s perception about media in disaster preparedness and management.


Author(s):  
Elham Darmanaki Farahani ◽  
Jafar Habibi

The aim of the Software Product Line (SPL) approach is to improve the software development process by producing software products that match the stakeholders’ requirements. One of the important topics in SPLs is the feature model (FM) configuration process. The purpose of configuration here is to select and remove specific features from the FM in order to produce the required software product. At the same time, detection of differences between application’s requirements and the available capabilities of the implementation platform is a major concern of application requirements engineering. It is possible that the implementation of the selected features of FM needs certain software and hardware infrastructures such as database, operating system and hardware that cannot be made available by stakeholders. We address the FM configuration problem by proposing a method, which employs a two-layer FM comprising the application and infrastructure layers. We also show this method in the context of a case study in the SPL of a sample E-Shop website. The results demonstrate that this method can support both functional and non-functional requirements and can solve the problems arising from lack of attention to implementation requirements in SPL FM selection phase.


Author(s):  
Camila Nunes ◽  
Uirá Kulesza ◽  
Roberta Coelho ◽  
Carlos Lucena ◽  
Flávia Delicato ◽  
...  

Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) has evolved as a software development paradigm over the last decade. Recent research work has explored the use of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) to modularize variations in product lines. This chapter presents a strategy for modeling and documenting aspect-oriented variations by integrating two existing approaches: (1) use cases are used to express the crosscutting nature of the variations of a mobile product line; and (2) crosscutting interfaces help the definition of the relevant variation join points that are raised by the mobile product line core and are extended by its respective variations. The synergy and benefits of the integration between these approaches are demonstrated by modeling and documenting MobileMedia, a software product line that provides support to manage different media (photo, music, and video) on mobile devices. Evolution scenarios of the MobileMedia are used to illustrate the benefits of the integrated usage of use cases and crosscutting interfaces in order to identify and analyze the change impact on the mobile product line.


Author(s):  
Jesús Rodríguez ◽  
Eduardo Fernández-Medina ◽  
Mario Piattini ◽  
Daniel Mellado

The concepts of Service-Oriented Architectures and Software Product Lines are currently being paid a considerable amount of attention, both in research and in practice. Both disciplines promise to make the development of flexible, cost-effective software systems possible and to support high levels of reuse, and may sometimes be complementary to each other. In both paradigms, security is a critical issue, although most of the existing product line practices do not comprise all the security requirements engineering activities or provide automated support through which to perform these activities, despite the fact that it is widely accepted that the application of any requirements engineering process or methodology is much more difficult without a CARE (Computer-Aided Requirements Engineering) tool, since it must be performed manually. Therefore, this chapter shall present a tool denominated as SREPPLineTool, which provides automated support through which to facilitate the application of the security quality requirements engineering process for software product lines, SREPPLine. SREPPLineTool simplifies the management of security requirements in product lines by providing us with a guided, systematic and intuitive manner in which to deal with them from the early stages of product line development, thus simplifying the management and the visualization of artefact variability and traceability links and the integration of security standards, along with the management of the security reference model proposed by SREPPLine.


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