1.1 Scope This paper deals with the following subjects: 1. Introduction 2. Feasibility study definition in IT 3. Forming a feasibility study team 4. The feasibility study work 5. The feasibility study report 6. Discussion 1.2 Information Technology (IT) Information was defined as anything sensed by at least one of the human senses and that may change the level of his knowledge. The information may be true or false, sent by premeditation or generated by coincidence, needed by the interceptor or intended to create new needs. The creation of the information may be very costly or free of charge. The information may be an essential need or just a luxury. Each information may be a one shot nature, eg., announcing a marriage, or a constant update need one, eg., news. Information technology as defined herein means all the types of systems needed to deal wi.th the information, transfer it to any place, store it, adapt it, etc. Information technology is usually bused on Telecommunications. Telecommunications means a large variety of possibilities. Usually, the IT's are based on the creation, updating, processing and transmission of information. The information itself is usually alphanumeric and graphic. Gradually, there is a tendency to step over to what is seen as more natural information, audio and visual.

The primary audience for this book are advanced undergraduate students and graduate students. Computer architecture, as it happened in other fields such as electronics, evolved from the small to the large, that is, it left the realm of low-level hardware constructs, and gained new dimensions, as distributed systems became the keyword for system implementation. As such, the system architect, today, assembles pieces of hardware that are at least as large as a computer or a network router or a LAN hub, and assigns pieces of software that are self-contained, such as client or server programs, Java applets or pro tocol modules, to those hardware components. The freedom she/he now has, is tremendously challenging. The problems alas, have increased too. What was before mastered and tested carefully before a fully-fledged mainframe or a closely-coupled computer cluster came out on the market, is today left to the responsibility of computer engineers and scientists invested in the role of system architects, who fulfil this role on behalf of software vendors and in tegrators, add-value system developers, R&D institutes, and final users. As system complexity, size and diversity grow, so increases the probability of in consistency, unreliability, non responsiveness and insecurity, not to mention the management overhead. What System Architects Need to Know The insight such an architect must have includes but goes well beyond, the functional properties of distributed systems.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2013, held as part of the European Joint Conference on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2013, which took place in Rome, Italy, in March 2013. The 25 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 112 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: model-driven engineering; verification and validation; software comprehension; analysis tools; model-driven engineering: applications; model transformations; and testing.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Graph Structures for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, GKR 2011, held in Barcelona, Spain, in July 2011 as satellite event of IJCAI 2011, the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The 7 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 12 submissions. The papers feature current research involved in the development and application of graph-based knowledge representation formalisms and reasoning techniques and investigate further developments of knowledge representation and reasoning graph based techniques. Topics addressed are such as: bayesian networks, semantic networks, conceptual graphs, formal concept analysis, cp-nets, gai-nets, euler diagrams, existential graphs all of which have been successfully used in a number of applications (semantic Web, recommender systems, bioinformatics etc.).

Software architectures have gained wide popularity in the last decade. They generally play a fundamental role in coping with the inherent difficulties of the development of large-scale and complex software systems. Component-oriented and aspect-oriented programming enables software engineers to implement complex applications from a set of pre-defined components. Software Architectures and Component Technology collects excellent chapters on software architectures and component technologies from well-known authors, who not only explain the advantages, but also present the shortcomings of the current approaches while introducing novel solutions to overcome the shortcomings.The unique features of this book are: * evaluates the current architecture design methods and component composition techniques and explains their shortcomings; * presents three practical architecture design methods in detail; * gives four industrial architecture design examples; * presents conceptual models for distributed message-based architectures; * explains techniques for refining architectures into components; * presents the recent developments in component and aspect-oriented techniques; * explains the status of research on Piccola, Hyper/J(R), Pluggable Composite Adapters and Composition Filters. Software Architectures and Component Technology is a suitable text for graduate level students in computer science and engineering, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

This book reviews current state of the art methods for building intelligent systems using type-2 fuzzy logic and bio-inspired optimization techniques. Combining type-2 fuzzy logic with optimization algorithms, powerful hybrid intelligent systems have been built using the advantages that each technique offers. This book is intended to be a reference for scientists and engineers interested in applying type-2 fuzzy logic for solving problems in pattern recognition, intelligent control, intelligent manufacturing, robotics and automation. This book can also be used as a reference for graduate courses like the following: soft computing, intelligent pattern recognition, computer vision, applied artificial intelligence, and similar ones. We consider that this book can also be used to get novel ideas for new lines of re-search, or to continue the lines of research proposed by the authors.

This volume contains invited and contributed papers presented at the NATO Advanced study Insti tute on "Recent Advances in Speech Understanding and Dialog systems" held in Bad Windsheim, Federal Republic of Germany, July 5 to July 18, 1987. It is divided into the three parts Speech coding and Segmentation, Word Recognition, and Linguistic Processing. Although this can only be a rough organization showing some overlap, the editors felt that it most naturally represents the bottom-up strategy of speech understanding and, therefore, should be useful for the reader. Part 1, SPEECH CODING AND SEGMENTATION, contains 4 invited and 14 contributed papers. The first invited paper summarizes basic properties of speech signals, reviews coding schemes, and describes a particular solution which guarantees high speech quality at low data rates. The second and third invited papers are concerned with acoustic-phonetic decoding. Techniques to integrate knowledge sources into speech recognition systems are presented and demonstrated by experimental systems. The fourth invited paper gives an overview of approaches for using prosodic knowledge in automatic speech recogni tion systems, and a method for assigning a stress score to every syllable in an utterance of German speech is reported in a contributed paper. A set of contributed papers treats the problem of automatic segmentation, and several authors successfully apply knowledge-based methods for interpreting speech signals and spectrograms. The last three papers investigate phonetic models, Markov models and fuzzy quantization techniques and provide a transi tion to Part 2 ."

This volume contains the papers presented at the Second International Work ing Conference on Dependable Computing for Critical Applications, sponsored by IFIP Working Group lOA and held in Tucson, Arizona on February 18-20, 1991. In keeping with the first such conference on this topic, which took place at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1989, this meeting was like wise concerned with an important basic question: Can we rely on Computers? In more precise terms, it addressed various aspects of computer system de pendability, a broad concept defined as th'e trustworthiness of computer service such that reliance can justifiably be placed on this service. Given that this term includes attributes such as reliability, availability, safety, and security, it is our hope that these papers will contribute to further integration of these ideas in the context of critical applications. The program consisted of 20 papers and three panel sessions. The papers were selected from a total of 61 submissions at a November 1990 meeting of the Program Committee in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We were very fortunate to have a broad spectrum of interests represented, with papers in the final program coming from seven different countries, representing work at universities, corporations, and government agencies. The process was greatly facilitated by the diligent work of the Program Committee and the quality of reviews provided by outside referees. In addition to the paper presentations, there were three panel sessions or ganized to examine particular topics in detail."

The International Working Conference on Dependable Computing for Critical Applications was the first conference organized by IFIP Working Group 10. 4 "Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance," in cooperation with the Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing of the IEEE Computer Society, and the Technical Committee 7 on Systems Reliability, Safety and Security of EWlCS. The rationale for the Working Conference is best expressed by the aims of WG 10. 4: " Increasingly, individuals and organizations are developing or procuring sophisticated computing systems on whose services they need to place great reliance. In differing circumstances, the focus will be on differing properties of such services - e. g. continuity, performance, real-time response, ability to avoid catastrophic failures, prevention of deliberate privacy intrusions. The notion of dependability, defined as that property of a computing system which allows reliance to be justifiably placed on the service it delivers, enables these various concerns to be subsumed within a single conceptual framework. Dependability thus includes as special cases such attributes as reliability, availability, safety, security. The Working Group is aimed at identifying and integrating approaches, methods and techniques for specifying, designing, building, assessing, validating, operating and maintaining computer systems which should exhibit some or all of these attributes. " The concept of WG 10. 4 was formulated during the IFIP Working Conference on Reliable Computing and Fault Tolerance on September 27-29, 1979 in London, England, held in conjunction with the Europ-IFIP 79 Conference. Profs A. Avi ienis (UCLA, Los Angeles, USA) and A.

This volume contains a selection of papers that focus on the state-of the-art in real-time scheduling and resource management. Preliminary versions of these papers were presented at a workshop on the foundations of real-time computing sponsored by the Office of Naval Research in October, 1990 in Washington, D.C. A companion volume by the title Foundations of Real-Time Computing: Fonnal Specifications and Methods complements this book by addressing many of the most advanced approaches currently being investigated in the arena of formal specification and verification of real-time systems. Together, these two texts provide a comprehensive snapshot of current insights into the process of designing and building real-time computing systems on a scientific basis. Many of the papers in this book take care to define the notion of real-time system precisely, because it is often easy to misunderstand what is meant by that term. Different communities of researchers variously use the term real-time to refer to either very fast computing, or immediate on-line data acquisition, or deadline-driven computing. This text is concerned with the very difficult problems of scheduling tasks and resource management in computer systems whose performance is inextricably fused with the achievement of deadlines. Such systems have been enabled for a rapidly increasing set of diverse end-uses by the unremitting advances in computing power per constant-dollar cost and per constant-unit-volume of space. End-use applications of deadline-driven real-time computers span a spectrum that includes transportation systems, robotics and manufacturing, aerospace and defense, industrial process control, and telecommunications."

This book presents the technical program of the International Embedded Systems Symposium (IESS) 2009. Timely topics, techniques and trends in embedded system design are covered by the chapters in this volume, including modelling, simulation, verification, test, scheduling, platforms and processors. Particular emphasis is paid to automotive systems and wireless sensor networks. Sets of actual case studies in the area of embedded system design are also included. Over recent years, embedded systems have gained an enormous amount of proce- ing power and functionality and now enter numerous application areas, due to the fact that many of the formerly external components can now be integrated into a single System-on-Chip. This tendency has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the size and cost of embedded systems. As a unique technology, the design of embedded systems is an essential element of many innovations. Embedded systems meet their performance goals, including real-time constraints, through a combination of special-purpose hardware and software components tailored to the system requirements. Both the development of new features and the reuse of existing intellectual property components are essential to keeping up with ever more demanding customer requirements. Furthermore, design complexities are steadily growing with an increasing number of components that have to cooperate properly. Embedded system designers have to cope with multiple goals and constraints simul- neously, including timing, power, reliability, dependability, maintenance, packaging and, last but not least, price.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International KR4HC 2011 workshop held in conjunction with the 13th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in medicine, AIME 2011, in Bled, Slovenia, in July 2011. The 11 extended papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. The papers cover topics like health care knowledge sharing; health process; clinical practice guidelines; and patient records, ontologies, medical costs, and clinical trials.

Within 50 years computers could have capabilities rivaling that of the human brain. Effective utilization of such new technologies poses a significant challenge to the computer science community, which finds an ever increasing number of complex applications within its technological grasp. In addition to increased complexity, most, if not all, of these applications are also accompanied by an inherent increase in the consequences associated with their failure, resulting in the construction of increasingly high consequence complex systems. Systems that fall within this domain are beyond the ability to construct in a brute force manner. There are two major challenges in developing such systems: manage complexity and provide sufficient evidence that the system satisfies dependability constraints. Society is tacitly relying on the research community to solve these problems on a timetable satisfying the needs of industry. While impressive results have been obtained, the research community is still, to some extent, hamstrung by the lack of realistic case study problems against which to benchmark new techniques and approaches.The purpose of High Integrity Software is to explore a cross-section of some of the most promising areas of research in the construction of high consequence complex systems, for example, a case study involving the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. Because of its scope and complexity, the BART case study is being recognized by many in the formal methods community as one of the definitive case study problems, and as such provides a valuable insight into the challenges that must be faced in the upcoming years. High Integrity Software is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

This volume contains papers representing a comprehensive record of the contributions to the fifth workshop at EG '90 in Lausanne. The Eurographics hardware workshops have now become an established forum for the exchange of information about the latest developments in this field of growing importance. The first workshop took place during EG '86 in Lisbon. All participants considered this to be a very rewarding event to be repeated at future EG conferences. This view was reinforced at the EG '87 Hardware Workshop in Amsterdam and firmly established the need for such a colloquium in this specialist area within the annual EG conference. The third EG Hardware Workshop took place in Nice in 1988 and the fourth in Hamburg at EG '89. The first part of the book is devoted to rendering machines. The papers in this part address techniques for accelerating the rendering of images and efficient ways of improv ing their quality. The second part on ray tracing describes algorithms and architectures for producing photorealistic images, with emphasis on ways of reducing the time for this computationally intensive task. The third part on visualization systems covers a num ber of topics, including voxel-based systems, radiosity, animation and special rendering techniques. The contributions show that there is flourishing activity in the development of new algorithmic and architectural ideas and, in particular, in absorbing the impact of VLSI technology. The increasing diversity of applications encourage new solutions, and graphics hardware has become a research area of high activity and importance.

This book contains papers presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on "Real-time Object and Environment Measurement and Classification" held in Maratea, Italy, August 31 - September 3, 1987. This workshop was organized within the activities of the NATO Special Programme on Sensory Systems for Robotic Control. Four major themes were discussed at this workshop: Real-time Requirements, Feature Measurement, Object Representation and Recognition, and Architecture for Measurement and Classification. A total of twenty-five technical presentations, contained in this book, cover a wide spectrum of topics including hardware implementation of specific vision algorithms, a complete vision system for object tracking and inspection, using three cameras (trinocular stereo) for feature measurement, neural network for object recognition, integration of CAD (Computer Aided Design) and vision systems, and the use of pyramid architectures for solving various computer vision problems. These papers are written by some of the very well-known researchers in the computer vision and pattern recognition community, and represent both industrial and academic viewpoints. The authors come from thirteen different countries from Europe and North America. Therefore, readers will get a first hand and current information about the status of computer vision research in various western countries. Further, this book will also be useful in understanding the current research issues in computer vision and the difficulties in designing real-time vision systems.

A Practitioner's Handbook for Real-Time Analysis: Guide to Rate Monotonic Analysis for Real-Time Systems contains an invaluable collection of quantitative methods that enable real-time system developers to understand, analyze, and predict the timing behavior of many real-time systems. The methods are practical and theoretically sound, and can be used to assess design tradeoffs and to troubleshoot system timing behavior. This collection of methods is called rate monotonic analysis (RMA). The Handbook includes a framework for describing and categorizing the timing aspects of real-time systems, step-by-step techniques for performing timing analysis, numerous examples of real-time situations to which the techniques can be applied, and two case studies. A Practitioner's Handbook for Real-Time Analysis: Guide to Rate Monotonic Analysis for Real-Time Systems has been created to serve as a definitive source of information and a guide for developers as they analyze and design real-time systems using RMA. The Handbook is an excellent reference, and may be used as the text for advanced courses on the subject.

This book is about time-domain modelling, stability, stabilization, control design and filtering for JTDS. It gives readers a thorough understanding of the basic mathematical analysis and fundamentals, offers a straightforward treatment of the different topics and provides broad coverage of the recent methodologies.

This book is a collection of some of the papers that were presented during a NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) on "Intelligent Systems: Safety, Reliability and Maintainability Issues" that was held in Kusadasi, Turkey during August 24- 28, 1992. Attendance at this workshop was mainly by invitation only, drawing people internationally representing industry, government and the academic community. Many of the participants were internationally recognized leaders in the topic of the workshop. The purpose of the ARW was to bring together a highly distinguished group of people with the express purpose of debating where the issues of safety, reliability and maintainability place direct and tangible constraints on the development of intelligent systems. As a consequence, one of the major debating points in the ARW was the definition of intelligence, intelligent behaviour and their relation to complex dynamic systems. Two major conclusions evolved from the ARW are: 1. A continued need exists to develop formal, theoretical frameworks for the architecture of such systems, together with a reflection on the concept of intelligence. 2. There is a need to focus greater attention to the role that the human play in controlling intelligent systems. The workshop began by considering the typical features of an intelligent system. The complexity associated with multi-resolutional architectures was then discussed, leading to the identification of a necessity for the use of a combinatorial synthesis/approach. This was followed by a session on human interface issues.

Cellular automata are fully discrete dynamical systems with dynamical variables defined at the nodes of a lattice and taking values in a finite set. Application of a local transition rule at each lattice site generates the dynamics. The interpretation of systems with a large number of degrees of freedom in terms of lattice gases has received considerable attention recently due to the many applications of this approach, e.g. for simulating fluid flows under nearly realistic conditions, for modeling complex microscopic natural phenomena such as diffusion-reaction or catalysis, and for analysis of pattern-forming systems. The discussion in this book covers aspects of cellular automata theory related to general problems of information theory and statistical physics, lattice gas theory, direct applications, problems arising in the modeling of microscopic physical processes, complex macroscopic behavior (mostly in connection with turbulence), and the design of special-purpose computers.

The book provides an in-depth understanding of the fundamentals of superconducting electronics and the practical considerations for the fabrication of superconducting electronic structures. Additionally, it covers in detail the opportunities afforded by superconductivity for uniquely sensitive electronic devices and illustrates how these devices (in some cases employing high-temperature, ceramic superconductors) can be applied in analog and digital signal processing, laboratory instruments, biomagnetism, geophysics, nondestructive evaluation and radioastronomy. Improvements in cryocooler technology for application to cryoelectronics are also covered. This is the first book in several years to treat the fundamentals and applications of superconducting electronics in a comprehensive manner, and it is the very first book to consider the implications of high-temperature, ceramic superconductors for superconducting electronic devices. Not only does this new class of superconductors create new opportunities, but recently impressive milestones have been reached in superconducting analog and digital signal processing which promise to lead to a new generation of sensing, processing and computational systems. The 15 chapters are authored by acknowledged leaders in the fundamental science and in the applications of this increasingly active field, and many of the authors provide a timely assessment of the potential for devices and applications based upon ceramic-oxide superconductors or hybrid structures incorporating these new superconductors with other materials. The book takes the reader from a basic discussion of applicable (BCS and Ginzburg-Landau) theories and tunneling phenomena, through the structure and characteristics of Josephson devices and circuits, to applications that utilize the world's most sensitive magnetometer, most sensitive microwave detector, and fastest arithmetic logic unit.

Visualization in scientific computing is getting more and more attention from many people. Especially in relation with the fast increase of com puting power, graphic tools are required in many cases for interpreting and presenting the results of various simulations, or for analyzing physical phenomena. The Eurographics Working Group on Visualization in Scientific Com puting has therefore organized a first workshop at Electricite de France (Clamart) in cooperation with ONERA (Chatillon). A wide range of pa pers were selected in order to cover most of the topics of interest for the members of the group, for this first edition, and 26 of them were presented in two days. Subsequently 18 papers were selected for this volume. 1'he presentations were organized in eight small sessions, in addition to discussions in small subgroups. The first two sessions were dedicated to the specific needs for visualization in computational sciences: the need for graphics support in large computing centres and high performance net works, needs of research and education in universities and academic cen tres, and the need for effective and efficient ways of integrating numerical computations or experimental data and graphics. Three of those papers are in Part I of this book. The third session discussed the importance and difficulties of using stan dards in visualization software, and was related to the fourth session where some reference models and distributed graphics systems were discussed. Part II has five papers from these sessions.

Reactive systems are computing systems which are interactive, such as real-time systems, operating systems, concurrent systems, control systems, etc. They are among the most difficult computing systems to program. Temporal logic is a formal tool/language which yields excellent results in specifying reactive systems. This volume, the first of two, subtitled Specification, has a self-contained introduction to temporal logic and, more important, an introduction to the computational model for reactive programs, developed by Zohar Manna and Amir Pnueli of Stanford University and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, respectively.

Software Diversity is one of the fault-tolerance means to achieve dependable systems. In this volume, some experimental systems as well as real-life applications of software diversity are presented. The history, the current state-of-the-art and future perspectives are given. Although this technique is used quite successfully in industrial applications, further research is necessary to solve some open questions. We hope to report on new results and applications in another volume of this series within some years. Acknowledgements The idea of the workshop was put forward by the chairpersons of IFIP WG lOA, J. -c. Laprie, J. F. Meyer and Y. Tohma, in January 1986, and the edi tor of this volume was asked to organize the workshop. This volume was edited with the assistance of the editors of the series, A. AviZienis, H. Kopetz and J. -C. Laprie, who also had the function of reviewers. Karlsruhe, October 1987 U. Voges, Editor Table of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1. Introduction U. Voges 2. Railway Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 ERICSSON Safety System for Railway Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 G. Hagelin 3. Nuclear Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Use of Diversity in Experimental Reactor Safety Systems . 29 U. Voges The PODS Diversity Experiment . 51 P. G. Bishop 4. Flight Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 AIRBUS and ATR System Architecture and Specification. . 95 P. Traverse 5. University Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Tolerating Software Design Faults in a Command and Control System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 T. Anderson, P. A. Barrett, D. N. Halliwell, M. R. Moulding DEDIX 87 - A Supervisory System for Design Diversity Experiments at UCLA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ."

For the editors of this book, as well as for many other researchers in the area of fault-tolerant computing, Dr. William Caswell Carter is one of the key figures in the formation and development of this important field. We felt that the IFIP Working Group 10.4 at Baden, Austria, in June 1986, which coincided with an important step in Bill's career, was an appropriate occasion to honor Bill's contributions and achievements by organizing a one day "Symposium on the Evolution of Fault-Tolerant Computing" in the honor of William C. Carter. The Symposium, held on June 30, 1986, brought together a group of eminent scientists from all over the world to discuss the evolu tion, the state of the art, and the future perspectives of the field of fault-tolerant computing. Historic developments in academia and industry were presented by individuals who themselves have actively been involved in bringing them about. The Symposium proved to be a unique historic event and these Proceedings, which contain the final versions of the papers presented at Baden, are an authentic reference document."

In recent years, increases in the amount and changes in the distribution of air traffic have been very dramatic and are continuing. The need for changes in the current air traffic systems is equally clear. While automation is generally accepted as a method of improving system safety and performance, high levels of automation in complex human-machine systems can have a negative effect on total system performance and have been identified as contributing factors in many accidents and failures. Those responsible for designing the advanced air traffic control systems to be implemented throughout the alliance during the next decade need to be aware of recent progress concerning the most effective application of automation and artificial intelligence in human-computer systems. This volume gives the proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute held in Maratea, Italy, June 18-29, 1990, at which these issues were discussed.