6469757
Teaching Formal Methods in Context
The Software Engineering Programme at Oxford teaches formal methods as an integral part of its programme of professional education in software engineering. This paper explains how the methods are taught—in the context of emerging trends in software development, and in the context of existing practice—and how their use is promoted through course design and motivating examples.
26464031
A Taxonomy of Web Services Using CSP
Terms such as conversational and stateless are widely used in the taxonomy of web services. We give formal definitions of these terms using the CSP process algebra. Within this framework we also define the notion of Service-Oriented Architecture. These definitions are then used to prove important scalability properties of stateless services. The use of formalism should allow recent debates, concerning how and whether web services provide standardized access to state, to progress more rigorously.
16348358
Agent Chameleons: Virtual Agents Real Intelligence
Agent Chameleons provides virtual agents powered by real intelligence, delivering next generation autonomic entities that can seamlessly migrate, mutate and evolve on their journey between and within physical and digital information spaces.
2188414
Agents in bioinformatics, computational and systems biology
The adoption of agent technologies and multi-agent systems constitutes an emerging area in bioinformatics. In this article, we report on the activity of the Working Group on Agents in Bioinformatics (BIOAGENTS) founded during the first AgentLink III Technical Forum meeting on the 2nd of July, 2004, in Rome. The meeting provided an opportunity for seeding collaborations between the agent and bioinformatics communities to develop a different (agent-based) approach of computational frameworks both for data analysis and management in bioinformatics and for systems modelling and simulation in computational and systems biology. The collaborations gave rise to applications and integrated tools that we summarize and discuss in context of the state of the art in this area. We investigate on future challenges and argue that the field should still be explored from many perspectives ranging from bio-conceptual languages for agent-based simulation, to the definition of bio-ontology-based declarative languages to be used by information agents, and to the adoption of agents for computational grids.
17355175
Packing Steiner Trees: Separation Algorithms
In this paper, we investigate separation problems for classes of inequalities valid for the polytope associated with the Steiner tree packing problem, a problem that arises, e.g., in very large-scale integration (VLSI) routing. The separation problem for Steiner partition inequalities is \NP-hard in general. We show that it can be solved in polynomial time for those instances that come up in switchbox routing. Our algorithm uses dynamic programming techniques. These techniques are also applied to the much more complicated separation problem for alternating cycle inequalities. In this case, we can compute in polynomial time, given some point $y$, a lower bound for the gap $\alpha-a^Ty$ over all alternating cycle inequalities $a^Tx\ge\alpha$. This gives rise to a very effective separation heuristic. A by-product of our algorithm is the solution of a combinatorial optimization problem that is interesting in its own right: find a shortest path in a graph where the "length" of a path is its usual length minus the length of its longest edge.
18494896
The steiner tree packing problem in VLSI design
In this paper we describe several versions of the routing problem arising in VLSI design and indicate how the Steiner tree packing problem can be used to model these problems mathematically. We focus on switchbox routing problems and provide integer programming formulations for routing in the knock-knee and in the Manhattan model. We give a brief sketch of cutting plane algorithms that we developed and implemented for these two models. We report on computational experiments using standard test instances. Our codes are able to determine optimum solutions in most cases, and in particular, we can show that some of the instances have no feasible solution if Manhattan routing is used instead of knock-knee routing.
34039430
A model of information systems development project performance
. Performance in information systems development (ISD) projects can be critical to business success. But, while project performance has been the subject of much debate, there has been little empirical research into its determinants. A survey of IS projects in the UK and New Zealand is analysed to test hypotheses concerning performance in terms of both project completion and budget (time-cost) variances. Subsequently, a secondary analysis of the findings is used to build a more complete empirical model of project performance. The paper helps to develop the theory of IS development project performance and also has significant implications for practice. Discussion of the findings highlights the importance of project team dynamics, risk management, senior management support for strategic projects and user participation in ensuring successful IS project performance.