7545798
Verification of fault tolerance and real time
A transformational method is given for specifying and verifying fault-tolerant, real-time programs. Such a program needs to be provably correct according to both its functional and real-time requirements, despite the possible occurrence of system failures. The paper demonstrates that a suitably expressive logic for real-time systems makes it possible to naturally model the state changes caused by system failures and determine their effect on the functional and real-time properties of executions.
39997807
Component-Based Software Engineering
We discuss some of the difficulties and significant issues that we need to consider when developing a formal method for component-based software engineering. We argue that to deal with the challenges, there is a need in research to link existing theories and methods of programming for effective support to component-based software engineering. We then present our initiative on a unified multi-view approach to modelling, design and analysis of component systems, emphasising the integration of models for different views.
5135154
Linking UML models of design and requirement
Both a UML model of requirement and a UML model of a design are defined as a pair of class diagram and a family of sequence diagrams. We then give an unified semantics for models of requirements and designs. We define the consistency between a design class diagram and the interaction diagrams and show how the removal of inconsistency can be treated as a model refinement. We then formally define the correctness of UML model of design with respect to the model of requirement.
7323063
rCOS: Refinement of Component and Object Systems
We present a model of object-oriented and component-based refinement. For object-orientation, the model is class-based and refinement is about correct changes in the structure, methods of classes and the main program, rather than changes in the behaviour of individual objects. This allows us to prove refinement laws for both high level design patterns and low level refactoring. For component-based development, we focus on the separation of concerns of interface and functional contracts, leaving refinement of interaction protocols in future work. The model supports the specification of these aspects at different levels of abstractions and their consistency. 
 
Based on the semantics, we also provide a general definitional approach to defining different relational semantic models with different features and constraints.
16560725
rCOS: A refinement calculus of object systems
This article presents a mathematical characterization of object-oriented concepts by defining an observation-oriented semantics for a relational object-based language with a rich variety of features including subtypes, visibility, inheritance, type casting, dynamic binding and polymorphism. The language can be used to specify object-oriented designs as well as programs. We present a calculus that supports both structural and behavioural refinement of object-oriented designs. The design calculus is based on the predicate logic in Hoare and He's Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP).
14189544
Verification, refinement and scheduling of real-time programs
Abstract A real-time program can be developed by refining a specification into program code. Verification of the timing properties of the program is then usually done at two levels: verification of the ordering of timed actions in the program and proof that execution of the program on a specific system will meet its timing requirements. Refinement is done within a formal model but the second step requires a different framework in which scheduling theory analysis is used and actual program execution times can be taken into account. The implementation of a program on a system is said to be feasible or schedulable if it will meet all the timing deadlines. This paper shows how the feasibility of scheduling a real-time program can also be proved as a step in the refinement of the program from its specification. Verification of this step of refinement makes use of methods from scheduling theory within a formal system development framework.
28562
Content-based indexing and retrieval-by-example in audio
This paper presents a system for audio content-based indexing and retrieval-by-example. An unsupervised method to automatically index the audio content is proposed. To realize a retrieval system where the on-line query can be performed efficiently, a new parametric distance metric is used to allow faster identification of the audio segments that are similar to the given query example. Preliminary experimental results show that the proposed new approach can serve as an effective means in content based indexing and retrieval in audio streams.
3761715
A multicommodity flow model for distributed stream processing
The rapid development of computer technology has enabled streaming applications to emerge from many areas of the IT industry. A fundamental problem in such stream processing systems is how to best utilize the available resources so that the overall system performance is optimized. In most real time systems, applications are often running in a decentralized, distributed environment. At any given time, no server has the global information about all the servers in the system. It is thus desirable to have distributed solutions capable of adapting to or absorbing local changes in production rates and in network conditions. This paper addresses the fundamental resource allocation question in the distributed stream processing setting. Specifically, we consider a generic model for stream processing systems. Each stream is required to complete a series of tasks to become finished product. Each server is responsible for a subset of the processing tasks for possibly a subset of the streams. All servers have finite computing resources and all communication links have finite available bandwidth. We consider the resource allocation problem so as to maximize the total throughput of the system. Our problem can be described as a generalization of the traditional multicommodity flow problem [1]. Traditional multicommodity flow problem looks for the best way to use of the link capacities to deliver the maximum throughput for the flows in the whole network. In our problem, in addition to the link bandwidth constraints, we also have processing power constraints for each server. Furthermore, we allow flow shrinkage or expansion so as to model operations such
12816052
Worst-Case Analysis of Scheduling Heuristics of Parallel Systems
Abstract It is well-known that most scheduling problems arising from parallel systems are NP -hard, even under very special assumptions. Thus, various suboptimal algorithms, in particular heuristics, were proposed in the literature. Worst-case error bounds are established in this paper for heuristics of makespan minimization of parallel computations. Different parallel computation models are investigated, including interprocessor communication, task duplication, multiprocessor tasks and parallel tasks. Due to the heterogeneity of these systems, scheduling heuristics can be far away from the optimal solutions. These bounds provide insights to the design of scheduling heuristics in order to obtain good performance guarantee than arbitrary heuristics. Moreover, the performance guarantee of these special heuristics is independent of model parameters such as the maximal duplication degree, processor requirement and parallelization degree.
18154847
Dynamic domination in fuzzy causal networks
This paper presents a dynamic domination theory for fuzzy causal networks (FCN). There are three major contributions. First, we propose a new inference procedure based on dominating sets. Second, we introduce the concepts of dynamic and minimal dynamic dominating sets (DDS and MDDS) in an FCN. To reflect changes of dominance with time, we also introduce the concept of a dynamic dominating process (DDP) that has significant implications in many real-world problems. We pay a special attention to the minimal dynamic dominating process (MDDP) and develop rules for generating DDP and MDDP. Third, we investigate dynamic dominating sets with extended feedback, which we call effective dynamic dominating sets (EDDS), and related effective dynamic dominating process (EDDP). This study unveils a very important phenomenon in FCN: At any time t, either an EDDS exists or there is a dramatic change of the states of vertices. In the latter case we also identify the special structure of the sub-FCN induced by active vertices.
5196479
Odd Wheels in Graphs
For k?1 the odd wheel of 2k+1 spokes, denoted by W2k+1, is the graph obtained from a cycle of length 2k+1 by adding a new vertex and joining it to all vertices of the cycle. In this paper it is shown that if a graph G of order n with minimum degree greater than 7n/12 is at least 4-chromatic then G contains an odd wheel with at most 5 spokes.