Reference Architecture

This handbook documents the QUASAR (QUality Assessment of System ARchitectures) method for assessing the quality of the architecture of a software-intensive system. It begins by discussing the challenges that are faced when assessing a system's architecture and outlines the development history of the method. The next section of the handbook documents the concept of quality cases and the claims, arguments, and evidence that compose them. This is followed by a description of the teams that collaborate to perform QUASAR tasks. Next, individual tasks and associated steps performed as part of the QUASAR method are documented. Next, the work products produced by these teams when performing these tasks are described. Finally, lessons learned during the development and use of the method when assessing the quality of major subsystems during the development of a very large, software-intensive system of systems are presented. Also provided are appendices that define common quality factors ...

In this paper we present the main concepts and principles of a multilevel architecture to help in the development of modularized and reusable software process models under the System Dynamics approach. The conceptual ideas of the multilevel architecture have been formalized using UML as a notation. Metamodeling is used to support the process of abstract modules development. The architecture proposed is also based on ISO's Information Resource Dictionary System. The principles of the architecture and overall guide to develop software process simulation models are described in this work.

This article outlines a reference architecture for social head gaze generation in social robots. The architecture discussed here is grounded in human communication, based on behavioral robotics theory, and captures the commonalities, essence, and experience of 32 previous social robotics implementations of social head gaze. No such architecture currently exists, but such an architecture is needed to: (1) serve as a template for creating or re-engineering systems, (2) provide analyses and understanding of different systems, and (3) provide a common lexicon and taxonomy that facilitates communication across various communities. A constructed reference architecture and the Software Architecture Analysis Method (SAAM) are used to evaluate, improve, and re-engineer two existing head gaze system architectures (Human-Robot Collaboration architecture and Robot Behavior Toolkit architecture). SAAM shows that no existing architecture incorporated the summation of functionalities found in the 32 studies. SAAM suggests several architectural improvements so that the two existing architectures can better support adaptation to a new environment and extension of capability. The resulting reference architecture guides the implementation of social head gaze in a rescue robot for the purpose of victim management in urban

Definition  NUMA is the acronym for Non-Uniform Memory  Access. A NUMA cache is a cache memory in which  the access time is not uniform but depends on the posi tion of the involved block inside the cache. Among  NUMA caches, it possible to distinguish: () the NUCA  (Non-Uniform Cache Access) architectures, in which  the memory space is deeply sub-banked, and the access  latency depends on which sub-bank is accessed; and ()  the shared and distributed cache of a tiled Chip Mul tiprocessor (CMP), in which the latency depends on  which cache slice has to be accessed. 

Cloud Computing is one of the most pervasive ICT changes of the last few years. Usually, Clouds offer a variety of Services, which are accessible over the Internet. These Services are regulated by some contracts called Service Level Agreements between Service providers and customers. The SLAs have already been introduced in Service Oriented Architectures in situations where some computing services need to be structured and regulated. In an SLA, the constraints of use, the duties and responsibilities of the parties involved, the charges and the service levels to guarantee, etc., are clearly stated by dedicated clauses. Despite the efforts made in systems security and the standardisation of SLAs, Cloud Services continues to suffer from various cybercriminal attacks, and unfortunately this phenomenon is likely to escalate within the next few years. It becomes urgent to take some countermeasures against these illegal practices to increase both the customer trust and quality of services of such new technologies. One of the alternatives for this phenomenon is to provide an efficient cloud Forensic Readiness System (FRS) to prevent and alert the provider and/or customer of any suspect attacks or strange behaviour. Much attention has been given to FRSs and they have certainly moved from simple log files and monitoring to very sophisticated components involving both human experts and computer analysis tools. In this paper we study the effect of SLAs on FRSs. As SLAs may be different from one jurisdiction to another we believe that FRSs should also comply with jurisdiction for more efficiency and speed of isolating and resolving forensic cases. Therefore, we propose an FRS that takes into account automatically SLAs and issue warnings and alerts to its users (providers and consumers) based on the jurisdiction and the nature of security breach and attacks. These SLAs are presented to the system as a set of rules (clauses). This will also prevent illegal data transfers and communications among different jurisdictions. Part of this paper will be dedicated to the formalisation of these SLAs and study its consequences on the FRS architecture and functioning. The rest of the paper will be dedicated to the design and development of the FRS reference architecture integrating the proposed SLA formal model.

Software architecture holds the promise of advancing the state of the art in software engineering. The architecture is emerging as the focal point of many modern reuse/evolutionary paradigms, such as Product Line Engineering, Component Based Software Engineering, and COTS-based software development. The author focuses his research work on characterizing some properties of a software architecture. He tries to use software metrics to represent the error propagation probabilities, change propagation probabilities, and requirements change propagation probabilities of a software architecture. Error propagation probability reflects the probability that an error that arises in one component of the architecture will propagate to other components of the architecture at run-time. Change propagation probability reflects, for a given pair of components A and B, the probability that if A is changed in a corrective/perfective maintenance operation, B has to be changed to maintain the overall

As software architecture is becoming an important asset in the development of software systems, the study of quantitative assessment of software architectures is gaining importance due to its role in assessing their quality. Error propagation between software system components is a quantitative factor that reflects on the reliability of a software product. We introduce a framework for experimental error propagation analysis. This framework addresses the problem of estimating error propagation at the architecture ...

Serverless computing has emerged as a significant paradigm shift in the cloud computing landscape, enabling developers to focus on code without the complexity of managing infrastructure. This paper surveys the various benefits of serverless computing, highlighting its impact on application development, scalability, cost efficiency, and operational complexity. We also incorporate insights from recent research and case studies to provide a comprehensive view of the advantages and challenges of adopting serverless architectures. Through this analysis, we aim to outline the potential transformative effects of serverless computing for modern businesses and guide future research directions.

Recent advances in fields such as Cloud Computing, Web Systems, Internet of Things and Distributed NoSQL DBMS are enabling the development of innovative enterprise information systems that significantly increase the productivity of end users and developers. The aim of this thesis is to explore the new opportunities that these new technologies are bringing to the enterprise world. The new opportunities are explored by investigating the scenario of a medium-sized worldwide-trading company, Fiorital S.p.A. The thesis presents the design of a software architecture for the future information system of the company. The architecture is based on the usage of the Container technology and of the Microservice architectural style. Containers have empowered the usage of Microservices architectures by being lightweight, providing fast start-up times, and having low overhead. Candidate technologies for the implementation of the proposed software architecture are singled out, and the selection rationale is presented. This thesis provides an evaluation of both the candidate architecture and the technologies through the implementation of a prototype and the application of synthetic workloads that mimic stressful use scenarios. The results show that, in spite of the relative immaturity of some of the candidate technologies, the information system's candidate architecture is appropriate and that a company like Fiorital would considerably benefit from it.

Several appealing features of cloud computing such as cost-effectiveness and user-friendliness have made many users and enterprises interested to outsource their sensitive data for sharing via cloud. However, it causes many new challenges toward data confidentiality, access control , scalability, and flexibility. Ciphertext-policy Hierarchical attribute-based encryption (CP-HABE) can be a promising solution to the mentioned problems. But, the existing HABE schemes have several limitations in their key delegation and user revocation mechanisms. In this work, to solve these problems, we introduce the concept of fully distributed revocable CP-HABE (FDR-CP-HABE) system and propose the first FDR-CP-HABE scheme. The proposed scheme provides a high level of flexibility and scalability in the key delegation and user revocation mechanisms. Moreover, our proposed system is pairing-free and realizes lightweight computing in decryption phase. Indeed, by exploiting the computational operation outsourcing technique, most of the operations have been done by the powerful cloud service provider and very few computations have been leaved to the data user. Also, in our scheme the storage cost on the data user side has been decreased, compared to the other similar works. Moreover, using the hardness assumption of Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) problem, we show that the proposed scheme is adaptively semantically secure in the standard model.

Architecture patterns are an important tool in architectural design. However, while many architecture patterns have been identified, there is little in-depth understanding of their actual use in software architectures. For instance, there is no overview of how many patterns are used per system or which patterns are the most common or most important for particular domains. In addition, little is known of how architecture patterns ay interact with each other. We studied architecture documentation of 47 systems to learn about their architecture patterns. Most systems had two or more architecture patterns, and certain patterns were prominent in different application domains. We identified several patterns that are commonly used together, and are beginning to learn how such combinations may impact system quality attributes. This information can be used to help designers select architecture patterns, can help people learn both architectures and patterns, and can be useful in architectural reviews.

Architecture patterns are an important tool in architectural design. However, while many architecture patterns have been identified, there is little in-depth understanding of their actual use in software architectures. For instance, there is no overview of how many patterns are used per system or which patterns are the most common or most important for particular domains. In addition, little is known of how architecture patterns ay interact with each other. We studied architecture documentation of 47 systems to learn about their architecture patterns. Most systems had two or more architecture patterns, and certain patterns were prominent in different application domains. We identified several patterns that are commonly used together, and are beginning to learn how such combinations may impact system quality attributes. This information can be used to help designers select architecture patterns, can help people learn both architectures and patterns, and can be useful in architectural reviews.

Cooperating objects (COs) is a recently coined termused to signify the convergence of classical embedded computersystems, wireless sensor networks and robotics and control. Wepresent essential elements of a reference architecture for scalabledata processing for the CO paradigm.

The landscape of warehouse operations is undergoing a transformative shift with the advent of cutting-edge material handling innovations. From autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and advanced conveyor systems to AI-driven inventory management and smart sensors, these technologies are redefining efficiency, accuracy, and scalability. This article explores the latest advancements in material handling, highlighting their impact on reducing operational costs, enhancing worker safety, and meeting the demands of an ever-growing e-commerce sector. By revolutionizing traditional practices, these innovations are paving the way for the next generation of intelligent and agile warehouse ecosystems.

The warehousing world has witnessed a significant transformation, with technological advancements reshaping the landscape. Material Handling Innovations are critical in optimizing operations, improving efficiency, and reducing costs. By leveraging cutting-edge equipment and systems, businesses can enhance productivity and streamline their supply chain processes. In this blog, we delve into the latest innovations in material handling, explore their benefits for business owners, and answer some frequently asked questions about this critical industry.

Ayman Abdalla as well for being my local supervisor. I thank him for his consistent support and encouraging comments during the research stages. I also thank Dr. Shakeel Ahmad for the useful discussion on the research and for his advice on dealing with problems. I thank my colleagues Dr. Muneeb Dawood and Mr. Shadan Khattak for their cooperation and help. I want to thank my beloved De Montfort University and all its familiar staff for the interesting time I spent with them. A special thanks to my colleagues and friends for their help and support: Dr. Osama Abdulhay for the statistical analysis and Dr. Mohammad Daoud and Mr. Hani al-Mimi for their help in the subjective evaluation. I also thank all staff and students of the Department of Multimedia Systems at Al-Zaytoonah University. v Dedication I dedicate this work to the soul of my father who supported me during all stages of my life. I dedicate this work to my mother for encouraging and giving me the power to tackle any task during the PhD. I also dedicate the work to my brothers, sisters and fiancé for their patience and prayers. I would like also to dedicate this thesis to my uncles Dr. Abdelfatah

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) schemes were first proposed in 1978 and standardized in 1988, yet, unlike most cryptographic schemes, PKI schemes were never rigorously defined. Achieving provable security for PKI is necessary and long overdue, as PKI provides the foundation for important applications of public key cryptography, such as TLS/SSL. In response, we present the first precise specifications of a secure PKI scheme, suitable for a variety of PKI designs. PKI schemes have significantly evolved since X.509, with more complex goals, e.g., transparency, to ensure security against corrupt issuers. In addition to the basic PKI properties, our definitions encompass these more recent and advanced aspects. Our results have important implications. First, our specifications allow a better scrutiny and comparison of the multitude of new PKI designs recently proposed, such as Google's Certificate Transparency (CT) and related PKIs, as well as future designs. Second, the specifications facilitate proper analysis of protocols and systems that use PKI, such as TLS/SSL, code signing, IPsec, DNSSEC, RPKI, BGPsec, permissioned blockchains, voting, recommendations, which is of critical importance as most real-world security schemes inherently rely on PKI. Finally, we use our specifications to formalize and prove X.509 version 2 PKI, showing that provable security is achievable for 'real' PKI designs.

A typical component-based system architecture comprises a set of components that have been purposefully designed and structured to ensure that they have "pluggable" interfaces and an acceptable match with a defined system context. However, the black-box nature of many software components means there is never a clean match between system specifications and concrete software components. Systematic architecture analysis can provide an effective, rapid and relatively low-cost mechanism for addressing risks resulting from architectural adaptation and trade-offs. However, a review of current architecture analysis approaches reveals they differ widely with respect to their ability to support black-box software development. This paper describes an analysis approach that integrates the strengths of current approaches to provide a practical architecture analysis framework for black-box component-based development. The approach is illustrated using a real case study.

The migration of monolithic applications to the cloud is a popular trend, with microservice architecture being a commonly targeted architectural pattern. The motivation behind this migration is often rooted in the challenges associated with maintaining legacy applications and the need to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements. To ensure that the migration to microservices is a sound decision for enhancing maintainability, designers must carefully consider the underlying factors driving this software architecture migration. This study proposes a set of software architecture metrics for evaluating the maintainability of microservice architectural designs for monolith to microservice architecture migration. These metrics consider various factors, such as coupling, complexity, cohesion, and size, which are crucial for ensuring that the software architecture remains maintainable in the long term. Drawing upon previous product quality models that share similar design properties with microservice, we have derived maintainability metrics that can help measure the quality of microservice architecture. In this work, we introduced our first version of structural metrics for measuring the maintainability quality of microservice architecture concerning its cloud-native characteristics. This work allows us to get early feedback on proposed metrics before a detailed evaluation. With these metrics, designers can measure their microservice architecture quality to fully leverage the benefits of the cloud environment, thus ensuring that the migration to microservice is a beneficial decision for enhancing the maintainability of their software architecture applications.

The intensive development of hardware and software tools provides many opportunities for solving various real-world tasks, such as working with large data sets. This, in turn, is a powerful incentive and opportunity for the development of different approaches and tools for solving them. After discussing several well-known BigData architectures a model of a BigData architecture is designed. The architecture is organized in three sections: edge section, processing-and-storage section and application section. The model will be implemented using FIWARE components.

Serverless computing and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) have become the new “new hotness” in cloud computing. Since FaaS completely abstracts away the infrastructure, developers are left with having to write only their app logic — a very cost-effective and scalable solution for modern workloads. This paper looks at the rise of serverless architectures through these key platforms. We get answers on the benefits of the scalability and elasticity models and cost implications compared with traditional server-based infrastructures. The case study demonstrates how the pay-per-execution model can prevent resource waste and some problems developers might face in implementing this way of working, such as cold-start latency and informal ecosystems. We further present three case studies on server less machine learning workloads, which show the practical benefits of server less computing.

Architecture conformance checking is an important activity of architecture enforcement where the architect ensures that all architecture concepts are implemented correctly in the source code. In order to support the architect, a lot of tools for conformance checking are available that allow to formalize the architecture in order to perform an automated verification. Typically, the formalization uses a rigid, tool-specific architecture concept language that may strongly deviate from the project-specific architecture concept language. In addition, a high level of formal expertise is required in order to comprehend the created formalization. We present an approach that uses a controlled natural language for the formalization of architecture concepts. This language allows to flexibly express architecture rules directly with project-specific concepts. Consequently, the resulting formalization is easy to understand and might also be used as an architecture documentation at the same time. Nevertheless, the documentation can be automatically verified, since the approach is based on powerful means of the semantic web, i.e., ontologies and description logics. For the evaluation of the approach, we use the real-world software system TEAMMATES and show that architecture rules and concepts can be flexibly designed and checked for conformance in order to detect crucial architecture violations.

Electronic voting requires voting privacy to protect the voter anonymity. We present a novel design framework for credential management called Voting Credential Management System (VCMS) which preserves voting privacy against advanced attackers who do not only monitor the voting transactions and communications but are also capable of compromising an authority involved in the credential management and generation. Such requirement against the advanced threat model based on an authority compromise is inspired by the recent attacks in voting privacy and is adopted in the state of the art credential management systems. VCMS achieves such properties by building on the well-established cryptographic primitives and by separating the voting token (the VCMS output credential used for the voting) and the intermediate key token (which is used within VCMS and bridges the registration/certificate with the voting token). VCMS is specifically applicable to electronic voting and is simpler than other...

Background Healthcare relies on health information systems (HISs) to support the care and receive reimbursement for the care provided. Healthcare providers experience many problems with their HISs due to improper architecture design. To support the design of a proper HIS architecture, a reference architecture (RA) can be used that meets the various stakeholder concerns of HISs. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop and analyze an RA following well-established architecture design methods. Methods Domain analysis was performed to scope and model the domain of HISs. For the architecture design, we applied the views and beyond approach and designed the RA’s views based on the stakeholders and features from the domain analysis. We evaluated the RA with a case study. Results We derived the following four architecture views for HISs: The context diagram, decomposition view, layered view, and deployment view. Each view shows the architecture of the HIS from a different angle,...

In this paper, we introduce Attribute-Based Signatures with User-Controlled Linkability (ABS-UCL). Attribute-based signatures allow a signer who has enough credentials/attributes to anonymously sign a message w.r.t. some public policy revealing neither the attributes used nor his identity. User-controlled linkability is a new feature which allows a user to make some of his signatures directed at the same recipient linkable while still retaining anonymity. Such a feature is useful for many reallife applications. We give a general framework for constructing ABS-UCL and present an efficient instantiation of the construction that supports multiple attribute authorities.

This paper describes our research on both the detection and subsequent resolution of recognition errors in spoken dialogue systems. The paper consists of two major components. The first half concerns the design of the error detection mechanism for resolving city names in our MERCURY flight reservation system, and an investigation of the behavioral patterns of users in subsequent subdialogues involving keypad entry for disambiguation. An important observation is that, upon a request for keypad entry, users are frequently unresponsive to the extent of waiting for a time-out or hanging up the phone. The second half concerns a pilot experiment investigating the feasibility of replacing the solicitation of a keypad entry with that of a "speak-and-spell" entry. A novelty of our work is the introduction of a speech synthesizer to simulate the user, which facilitates development and evaluation of our proposed strategy. We have found that the speak-and-spell strategy is quite effective in simulation mode, but it remains to be tested in real user dialogues.

The GALAXY-II architecture, comprised of a centralized hub mediating the interaction among a suite of human language technology servers, provides both a useful tool for implementing systems and also a streamlined way of configuring the evaluation of these systems. In this paper, we discuss our ongoing efforts in evaluation of spoken dialogue systems, with particular attention to the way in which the architecture facilitates the development of a variety of evaluation configurations. We furthermore propose two new metrics for automatic evaluation of the discourse and dialogue components of a spoken dialogue system, which we call "user frustration" and "information bit rate." 1 GALAXY-II has been designated as the initial common architecture for the multi-site DARPA Communicator project in the United States.

In this talk, we advocate the view that simplification of nomenclature, stated in linguistically well-motivated concepts, leads to an ideal IL for human language communication systems including multilingual machine translation and spoken language dialogue systems. To advocate this view, we describe our method of constructing IL representations in developing our multilingual machine translation system, CCLINC (cf. Tummala et al. 1995, Weinstein et al. 1996, Lee et al. 1997), and give a demonstration of two-way English/Korean translation by CCLINC. At MIT Lincoln Laboratory, we have been developing a multilingual machine translation system, called CCLINC. The core of CCLINC consists of the language understanding system (TINA, cf. Seneff 1992) and the language generation system (GENESIS, cf. Glass et al. 1994). The system has been applied to English-to-French, English-to-Korean and Korean-to-English translations. In designing an IL representation, we have been following two developmental strategies: First, simplification of nomenclature. Second, preservation of the predicate/argument structure of the input sentence. These strategies are largely drawn from the experience of applying the language understanding/generation system to spoken language dialogue systems (cf. Zue et al 1996). Simplification of nomenclature provides a very general IL which can be used in various application areas including information access from a database, language tutoring, and conversational systems. Preservation of predicate/argument structure facilitates generation of multiple output languages, which are accurately ordered in each target language. The intermediate meaning representation, which we call a semantic frame, is derived from the parse tree of the input sentence. All major parse tree constituents (regardless of whether they are semantic or syntactic) are reduced into one of three major categories in the semantic frame, namely, clause, topic and predicate. All noun phrase expressions are mapped onto "topic." All adjectives, prepositional phrases, and verb phrases, are mapped onto "predicate." The frame hierarchy structure encodes dependencies among clauses, topics, and predicates. Thus the predicate/argument structure of the input sentence is preserved. Information regarding the sentence type such as declarative, and imperative, is encoded at the 'clause' level. The ontology of each category in the semantic frame is described in English for reasons of convenience, and the formalism has been incrementally enriched as we develop experience from working with diverse language classes.

To support the development of adaptive, dynamic hypertext systems at CoGenTex, we have been evolving Exemplars, a rule-based object-oriented framework for dynamic hypertext generation. In this paper, we sketch our approach to designing dynamic hypertext systems using the Exemplars framework, and discuss how it fits with the tasks of content authoring and information design.

To our knowledge, no current software development methodology explicitly describes how to transit from the analysis model to the software architecture of the application. This paper presents a method to derive the software architecture of a system from its analysis model. To do this, we are going to use MDA. Both the analysis model and the architectural model are PIMs described with UML 2. The model type mapping designed consists of several rules (expressed using OCL and natural language) that, when applied to the analysis artifacts, generate the software architecture of the application. Specifically the rules act on elements of the UML 2 metamodel (metamodel mapping). We have developed a tool (using Smalltalk) that permits the automatic application of these rules to an analysis model defined in Rose to generate the application architecture expressed in the architectural style C2.

This paper proposes a new efficient signature scheme from bilinear maps that is secure in the standard model (i.e., without the random oracle model). Our signature scheme is more effective in many applications (e.g., blind signatures, group signatures, anonymous credentials etc.) than the existing secure signature schemes in the standard model such as the Boneh-Boyen [6], Camenisch-Lysyanskaya [10], Cramer-Shoup [15] and Waters [33] schemes (and their variants). The security proof of our scheme requires a slightly stronger assumption, the 2SDH assumption, than the SDH assumption used by Boneh-Boyen. As typical applications of our signature scheme, this paper presents efficient blind signatures and partially blind signatures that are secure in the standard model. Here, partially blind signatures are a generalization of blind signatures (i.e., blind signatures are a special case of partially blind signatures) and have many applications including electronic cash and voting. Our blind signature scheme is much more efficient than the existing secure blind signature schemes in the standard model such as the Camenisch-Koprowski-Warinsch [8] and Juels-Luby-Ostrovsky [22] schemes, and is also almost as efficient as the most efficient blind signature schemes whose security has been analyzed heuristically or in the random oracle model. Our partially blind signature scheme is the first one that is secure in the standard model and it is very efficient (almost as efficient as our blind signatures). We also present a blind signature scheme based on the Waters signature scheme.

The paper discusses the development of a multi-agent manufacturing control system for an industrial application. This multi-agent system follows the PROSA reference architecture and applies an ant colony design (stigmergy) to provide coordination and emergent forecasting services. The paper first presents the experimental setup: • The properties of this shop and its particular challenges to control systems • The emulation of an existing production shop in industry • The multi-agent system connected to this emulation Next, the paper discusses the real-time aspect of the emulation. Third, the multiagent control system is presented. Finally, the paper discusses the browser to analyze the results generated during simulation runs.

This paper presents the design of a holonic manufacturing execution system. The design is an instantiation of the PROSA reference architecture [1] augmented with coordination and control mechanisms inspired by natural systems i.e. food foraging behavior in ant colonies. Research prototypes are implemented as multiagent systems. The main coordination and control mechanisms ensure that the process plans are properly executed and emergently forecast the workload of the manufacturing resources as well as well as lead times and routings of the products. The design empowers the product instances to drive their own production; the coordination is completely decentralized. In contrast to many decentralized designs, the manufacturing execution system predicts future behavior and proactively takes measures to prevent impending problems from happening. A social control mechanism ensures that product instances adhere sufficiently to their declared intentions, which is necessary to guarantee adequate forecast accuracy. The design has been applied to an industrial test case, and the paper discusses results of this case study.

Current manufacturing control systems are not easy to maintain. They are vulnerable towards changes in the production mix or towards performance goal changes. These systems are also known for their integration and interoperability problems. Using the environment in a manufacturing control system reduces the effort to make changes. The environment provides functionality that is specific to the underlying physical world, not to current production mix or performance goal. Specific decision algorithms and policies are ...

This manuscript presents a design for the emergent generation of short-term forecasts in coordination and control systems. Food foraging behavior in ant colonies constitutes the main inspiration for this design. The research team applies this design to multi-agent manufacturing control systems and to supply network coordination systems, but its intrinsic applicability is broader.

Depending on the physical structuring of large distributed safety-critical real-time systems, one can distinguish federated and integrated system architectures. The DE-COS architecture combines the complexity management advantages of federated systems with the functional integration and hardware benefits of an integrated approach. This paper investigates the benefits of the DECOS integrated system architecture as an electronic infrastructure for future car generations. The shift to an integrated architecture will result in quantifiable cost reductions in the areas of system hardware cost and system development. In the paper we present a current federated Fiat car E/E architecture and discuss a possible mapping to an integrated solution based on the DECOS architecture. The proposed architecture provides a foundation for mixedcriticality integration with both safety-critical and non safety-critical subsystems. In particular, this architecture supports applications up to the highest criticality classes (10 -9 failures per hour), thereby taking into account the emerging dependability requirements of by-wire functionality in the automotive industry.

The architecture of a software system is both a success and a failure factor. Taking the wrong architectural decisions may break a project, since such errors are often systematic and affect cross-cutting aspects of the system to be built. Moreover, software projects get more and more challenging due to the rising complexity and dynamics of business processes, large team size and distributed development. As the software architecture is the common platform for many project activities, it constitutes a critical success factor. Thus, a comprehensive method for evaluating a software architecture and propagating important properties of it downstream to code is needed. At sd&m, we designed a comprehensive architecture evaluation and management framework in order to satisfy these needs. In this paper, we derive a list of requirements, such a framework should fulfill. We then present the components of our architecture evaluation method and demonstrate, how it fulfills these requirements. In this section, we discuss and motivate the requirements that should be fulfilled by a comprehensive evaluation method for software architectures. The method should support the assessor to spot incomplete, inconsistent or ambivalent architecturally relevant requirements. As architecturally relevant requirements are often interrelated with each other, the method should check whether the architecture addresses the requirements in a balanced manner on which all stakeholders can agree. Software architecture can be seen as the earliest available set of design decisions in the engineering process. As such, the chance should be taken to validate the decisions

Manufacturing systems can be very complex and are often costly to develop and operate. Simulation technology has been shown to be an effective tool for optimizing manufacturing system design, operations, and maintenance procedures. However, each manufacturing simulation is usually developed to address a specific set of industrial issues, and may only apply to a small portion of a complex manufacturing system. To enable manufacturers to more easily use simulation technology to solve complex manufacturing issues, this paper defines a reference architecture for component-based simulation (RACS). With the architecture, complex manufacturing systems are functionally partitioned into smaller interacting subsystems, and simulations of those subsystems are combined to form a federated simulation of the overall manufacturing system. This enables the simultaneous analysis of different aspects of each of the simulated subsystems and the overall manufacturing system.

Manufacturing systems can be very complex and are often costly to develop and operate. Simulation technology has been shown to be an effective tool for optimizing manufacturing system design, operations, and maintenance procedures. However, each manufacturing simulation is usually developed to address a specific set of industrial issues, and may only apply to a small portion of a complex manufacturing system. To enable manufacturers to more easily use simulation technology to solve complex manufacturing issues, this paper defines a reference architecture for component-based simulation (RACS). With the architecture, complex manufacturing systems are functionally partitioned into smaller interacting subsystems, and simulations of those subsystems are combined to form a federated simulation of the overall manufacturing system. This enables the simultaneous analysis of different aspects of each of the simulated subsystems and the overall manufacturing system.

Manufacturing systems can be very complex and are often costly to develop and operate. Simulation technology has been shown to be an effective tool for optimizing manufacturing system design, operations, and maintenance procedures. However, each manufacturing simulation is usually developed to address a specific set of industrial issues, and may only apply to a small portion of a complex manufacturing system. To enable manufacturers to more easily use simulation technology to solve complex manufacturing issues, this paper defines a reference architecture for component-based simulation (RACS). With the architecture, complex manufacturing systems are functionally partitioned into smaller interacting subsystems, and simulations of those subsystems are combined to form a federated simulation of the overall manufacturing system. This enables the simultaneous analysis of different aspects of each of the simulated subsystems and the overall manufacturing system.

Recently, Semantic Web Services have been increasingly adopted to search, access and manipulate information made available from autonomous and heterogeneous systems interacting in a P2P environment. Platform independency is obtained and the possibility of integrating different information sources over the Web is augmented. In P2P networks, characteristic aspects are the highly dynamicity and the absence of a common resource conceptualization. A centralized structure, where providers publish available services and requesters search for them, constitutes a performance bottleneck and a single point of failure; in P2P environments each provider acts as a peer on the network that supplies its own services and it is able to reply to incoming service requests. A semantic infrastructure to organize and support the automatic location of services without a centralized service registry is required. In this paper we present experimental evaluation of a reference architecture to support service-based semantic search, by means of a distributed service registry, DSR, composed of peers providing semantic-enriched services and semantic links between peers holding similar services; each service provider is also equipped with a service knowledge evolution manager, apt to update peer knowledge, and a semantic search assistant, apt to find services satisfying a user's requested search.

Numerous projects in the area of Real-World Internet (RWI), Internet of Things (IoT), and Internet Connected Objects have proposed architectures for the systems they develop. All of these systems are faced with very similar problems in their architecture and design and interoperability among these systems is limited. To address these issues and to speed up development and deployment while at the same time reduce development and maintenance costs, reference architectures are an appropriate tool. As reference architectures require agreement among all stakeholders, they are usually developed in an incremental process. This paper presents the current status of our work on a reference architecture for the RWI as an architectural blueprint.

In this paper we propose a meta-model for architectures with heterogeneous multimedia components. Currently, a generic solution does not exist to automatically deploy a distributed architecture based on multimedia components. The description of the incompatibilities between components is a need in such approaches. Indeed, software architectures validate the functional aspects, which are not sufficient to guarantee a realistic assembly. For instance, the problem of heterogeneity related to the exchanged data flows. In order to highlight these incompatibilities and to find solutions, a model-based approach called MMSA (Meta-model Multimedia Software Architecture) is proposed. It enables the description of the software architectures expressing a software system as a collection of components which handle various types and formats of data, and interacts between them via connectors including the adaptation connectors.

Software Architecture has been recognized both by Academia and software industries as the most promising approach to tackle the problems in the era of Finance, Communications, Medical, Run-time applications etc. Software architecture style is a classification of SA. Software architecture style made the communication more precise and convenient at the level of SA. Different style has different system characteristics. In this paper we propose to model the architecture of medical process Re-engineering represented as instance of UML class diagram based on Service-Oriented Architectural style which is still lacking in the field of medical Domain. We describe architecture of medical process reengineering model which provides clinical staff, patients and other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information, intelligently filtered and presented at appropriate times to enhance health and health care with the concept of using software re-engineering. The Re-engineering process helped to improve understanding about the processes and led to the conclusions with deletion of subsequent improvements to those processes. We discuss the properties that are interesting to be analyzed with the process of analysis and reengineering.

The paper's focus point on understanding of software system with its development on the concept of software architecture styles in the field of medical domain. In order to fasten the software maturity process for patients' recovery and ease the diagnosis even in the lack of the connoisseur hands, an artifact in the form of algorithms which predict the software architecture styles. The proposed algorithms will classify the patients' into different classes that are sound and appropriate for the respective architectural styles. The paper contains three categories of architecture styles namely (i) Communication architecture style (Pipe and filter architecture style) (ii) layered architecture style (iii) Separated Presentation architecture style (Model View Controller). Further the proposed algorithm is tested on the liver data set.