Maintaining software product lines — an industrial practice
Improved product quality and accelerated software development through systematic reuse of common software assets have been the key attractions behind software product lines. Magnitude of improvement in industrial practices has been reported in the literature. However, experiences with software product line also showed that it is a rather chall enging task to maintain software product lines and families over a long period of time. The time and resources needed to manage and maintain product lines increase and quality degrades as product lines evolve. This paper describes an industrial practice of software product line maintenance and evolution. The conventional software maintenance process is enhanced with data mining techniques to uncover lost reuse pattern and defects, maintain reuse, and reduce design erosion of product lines. Case studies with mobile phone product lines are described.

title: A Context-Aware Policy Model to Support Autonomic Networking
abstract: Autonomic networking requires that the services and resources offered by the network at any specific time adapt to evolving changes in user needs, business goals and environmental conditions. This paper describes a rich and extensible context-aware policy model as part of the FOCALE autonomic network architecture. This context-aware policy model is built explicitly to support context-awareness that in turn enables the control loops in FOCALE to be adaptive.

title: A Case Study: A Model-Based Approach to Retrofit a Network Fault Management System with Self-Healing Functionality
abstract: Adding self-healing capabilities to network management systems holds great promise for delivering important goals, such as QoS, while simultaneously lowering capital expenditure, operation cost, and maintenance cost. In this paper, we present a model-based approach to add self-healing capabilities to a fault management system for cellular networks. We propose a generic modeling framework to categorize software failures and specify their dispositions at the model level for the target system. This facilitates the deployment of a control loop for adding autonomic capabilities into the system architecture, which include self-monitoring, self-healing, and self-adjusting functionality. While self- monitoring oversees the environmental conditions and system behavior, self-healing is accomplished by instrumenting the system with self-adjusting operations. We include a case study on a prototype intelligent network fault management system to illustrate this approach by showing how these autonomic capabilities can be added and deployed. Specifically, these autonomic capabilities are derived from self-model specifications, and are used to mitigate the risk of specified failures and maintain the health of the system in response to different types of faults encountered.

title: A model-based approach to adding autonomic capabilities to network fault management system
abstract: Adding autonomic capabilities to network management systems provides great promise in delivering high QoS while lowering operation and maintenance cost. In this paper, we present a model-based approach to adding autonomic capabilities to a fault management system for cellular networks. We propose the use of modeling techniques to specify software failures and their dispositions at the model level for the target system. This facilitates the deployment of a control loop for adding autonomic capabilities into the system architecture, which include self-monitoring, self-healing, and self-adjusting. Our case study on the intelligent network fault management system illustrates the proposed approach by adding and deploying these autonomic capabilities derived from self-model specifications, to mitigate the risk of specified failures and maintain the level of healthiness of the system, dynamically and effectively.

title: MDDAS 2008 Workshop Organization
abstract: A combination capacitor and transistor structure is described wherein the capacitor is formed integrally with the emitter electrode of the transistor. The transistor is formed in a monolithic integrated circuit using generally known techniques and constitutes a vertically integrated PNP device. The emitter electrode of the transistor which comprises a P+ diffusion region is of a predetermined area which is large enough to form the bottom plate of the capacitor. The top plate of the capacitor is formed by growing a dielectric material over the diffused emitter region and then forming metallization thereover. The combination capacitor and transistor structure may be utilized in a bias network for biasing the output stage of an operational amplifier in a class AB mode. The capacitor formed in the combination structure may be utilized as the compensation capacitor in such operational amplifier which utilizes pole splitting techniques. The improvement provided by the invention reduces the surface area of the semiconductor die chip required to form the capacitor and transistor which facilitates greater device density on a particular die chip.

title: Enhancing Software Product Line Maintenance with Source Code Mining
abstract: Large-scale reuse and accelerated software development have been some of the key attractions behind software product lines. Various strategies and processes have been developed to facilitate product line development, maintenance, and evolution. However, experiences with software product lines also showed that it is a rather challenging task to maintain software product lines and families over a long period of time. The time and effort needed to manage and maintain product lines increase and quality degrades as product lines evolve. Without proper methods and tools to support the evolution, the cost can outweigh the benefits. 
 
This paper describes an approach to simplifying the maintenance of software product lines and improving software quality by integrating traditional software maintenance practices with pattern-based source code mining for defect detection and correction. Our case studies were performed in an industrial setting where the evolution of multiple mobile phone models of a product line was investigated.

title: Building Accountability Middleware to Support Dependable SOA
abstract: The Intelligent Accountability Middleware Architecture (Llama) project supports dependable service-oriented architecture (SOA) monitoring, runtime diagnosis, and reconfiguration. At its core, Llama implements an accountability service bus that users can install on existing service-deployment infrastructures. It collects and monitors service execution data from a key subset of services; enables Llama users to incorporate others' advanced diagnosis models and algorithms into the framework; and provides enterprise service bus extensions for collecting service profiling data, thus making process problems transparent to diagnose. Finally, experimental results indicate that using Llama contributes a modest amount of system overhead.

title: AMOEBA-RT: Run-Time Verification of Adaptive Software
abstract: Increasingly, software must dynamically adapt its behavior in response to changes in the supporting computing, communication infrastructure, and in the surrounding physical environment. Assurance that the adaptive software correctly satisfies its requirements is crucial if the software is to be used in high assurance systems, such as command and control or critical infrastructure protection systems. Adaptive software development for these systems must be grounded upon formalism and rigorous software engineering methodology to gain assurance. In this paper, we briefly describe AMOebA-RT , a run-time monitoring and verification technique that provides assurance that dynamically adaptive software satisfies its requirements.

title: Dynamic Terrain LOD with Region Preservation in 3D Game Engine
abstract: In the outdoor 3D game, the terrain can be modified because of interaction. This brings two new complexities to render terrain in 3D game. The first lies in the real-time visualization of dynamic terrain, and the second is that the modified terrain surface need to be preserved. We present an algorithm for dynamic terrain LOD(DT LOD) with preserving region in 3D game engine. The algorithm uses a DAG to represent dependency relationship of vertices which split triangles, and employs an active vertices set to update triangles in two consecutive frames for improving rendering performance. The region LOD can be constructed according to the view direction and the distance between the viewpoint and regions. The results of experiments show that our algorithm has a effective performance during rendering terrain.

title: Business Process-Oriented Software Architecture for Supporting Business Process Change
abstract: As a business process is essential in running an enterprise, this paper aims toward improving software architecture by extracting business-relevant semantics from business logic and transforming them as important elements that need to be molded and represented in software architecture. This allows for the development of a business process-oriented software architecture (BPOSA) that can support smoother business process change. The paper introduces the structure of BPOSA and its work mode. Then it describes the steps involved in designing a process-oriented software system, and provides analysis and design methods of extending process-relevant attributes for application in business operations.

title: Explicit Routing for Traffic Engineering in Labeled Optical Burst-Switched WDM Networks
abstract: Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising technique for supporting high-capacity bursty data traffic over optical wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) networks. A label-switched path can be established to forward a burst control packet (BCP) if each OBS node is augmented with an IP/MPLS controller. Such a network is called a labeled OBS (LOBS) network, and it can exploit the explicit routing and constraint-based routing properties supported in the MPLS framework to perform traffic and resource engineering. In this paper, we consider the traffic-engineering problem in a LOBS network, using explicit routing to balance network load and to reduce the burst-loss probability. We model the traffic-engineering problem in a LOBS network as an optimization problem and propose two new objective functions to minimize network congestion. Our illustrative numerical examples show that the burst-loss probability can be significantly reduced using optimization technique, when compared with shortest-path routing.