This innovative resource provides the most comprehensive coverage of software fault tolerance techniques to guide professionals through design, operation and performance. It features an in-depth discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of specific techniques, so practitioners can decide which ones are best suited for their work. The book examines key programming techniques such as assertions, checkpointing, and atomic actions, and provides design tips and models to assist in the development of critical software fault tolerance software systems that help ensure dependable performance. From software reliability, recovery and redundancy to design- and data-diverse software fault tolerance techniques, this practical reference provides detailed insight into techniques that will improve the overall quality of software.

Since the introduction of personal computers, software has emerged as a driving force in the global economy and a major industry in its own right. During this time, the U.S. government has reversed its prior policy against software patents and is now issuing thousands of such patents each year, provoking heated controversy among programmers, lawyers, scholars, and software companies. This book is the first to step outside of the highly-polarized debate and examine the current state of the law, its suitability to the realities of software development, and its implications for day-to-day software development.

Written by a former lawyer and working software developer, "Inventing Software" provides a comprehensive overview of software patents, from the lofty perspectives of legal history and computing theory to the technical details and issues of actual patents. People interested in the legal aspect of software patents will find detailed technical analysis of actual patented software, the legal strategies behind the wording of the patents, and an analysis of the ease or difficulty of detecting infringements. Software developers will find ways to integrate patent planning into their standard software engineering practices, and a practical guide for studying and appraising their competitors' patents and safeguarding the value of their own. Intended primarily for programmers and software industry executives and managers, "Inventing Software" will also be useful, illuminating reading for attorneys and software company investors.

Today's distributed systems are characterized by interactions-often complex-between many different hardware and software components cooperating and exchanging information. To simplify development of interactive systems and facilitate communication and documentation, experts of varying disciplines employ descriptions, or specifications, of a given system's behavior and/or structure. Specification and Development of Interactive Systems offers a unique approach to program and software development suitable for large distributed systems, with an emphasis on modular system development and systems engineering. The authors build a basic method, called FOCUS, that enables interactive systems to be described by characterizing their histories of message interaction. The method covers functional requirements, timing, structure, and implementation issues of systems. In addition, the book describes how to connect the models and techniques to tables and diagram-based methods popular in practical systems engineering. Topics and features: * Specification of interface behavior and modular top-down system development * Specification of time and the modeling of hardware/software systems * Interface refinement and the modeling of development steps leading from one level of abstraction to the next * State transition diagrams and tables and the usage of common description techniques, such as found in UML This book provides a mathematical and logical foundation for the specification and development of interactive systems based on a model that describes systems in terms of their input/output behavior. The reader gains a comprehensive understanding of all fundamental models, techniques, and methods for interactive system design. The book is an essential resource for all researchers and professionals in computer science, software systems engineering and computer engineering.

Communication protocols form the operational basis of computer networks and tele communication systems. They are behavior conventions that describe how com munication systems inter act with each other, defining the temporal order of the interactions and the formats of the data units exchanged - essentially they determine the efficiency and reliability of computer networks. Protocol Engineering is an important discipline covering the design, validation, and implementation of communication protocols. Part I of this book is devoted to the fundamentals of communication protocols, describing their working principles and implicitly also those of computer networks. The author introduces the concepts of service, protocol, layer, and layered architecture, and introduces the main elements required in the description of protocols using a model language. He then presents the most important protocol functions. Part II deals with the description of communication proto cols, offering an overview of the various formal methods, the essence of Protocol Engineering. The author introduces the fundamental description methods, such as finite state machines, Petri nets, process calculi, and temporal logics, that are in part used as semantic models for formal description techniques. He then introduces one represen tative technique for each of the main description approaches, among others SDL and LOTOS, and surveys the use of UML for describing protocols. Part III covers the protocol life cycle and the most important development stages, presenting the reader with approaches for systematic protocol design, with various verification methods, with the main implementation techniques, and with strategies for their testing, in particular with conformance and interoperability tests, and the test description language TTCN. The author uses the simple data transfer example protocol XDT (eXample Data Transfer) throughout the book as a reference protocol to exemplify the various description techniques and to demonstrate important validation and implementation approaches. The book is an introduction to communication protocols and their development for undergraduate and graduate students of computer science and communication technology, and it is also a suitable reference for engineers and programmers. Most chapters contain exercises, and the author's accompanying website provides further online material including a complete formal description of the XDT protocol and an animated simulation visualizing its behavior.

Object-Process Methodology (OPM) is a comprehensive novel approach to systems engineering. Integrating function, structure and behavior in a single, unifying model, OPM significantly extends the system modeling capabilities of current object-oriented methods. Founded on a precise generic ontology and combining graphics with natural language, OPM is applicable to virtually any domain of business, engineering and science. Relieved from technical issues, system architects can use OPM to engage in the creative design of complex systems.The book presents the theory and practice of OPM with examples from various industry segments and engineering disciplines, as well as daily life. It includes a CD-ROM demo version of the award-winning OPM-supporting Object-Process CASE Tool (OPCAT). Using the numerous examples and exercises (with answers) in the book, this software enables the reader to gain hands-on experience in developing complex systems.

This book describes how to apply ICONIX Process (a minimal, use case-driven modeling process) in an agile software project. It's full of practical advice for avoiding common agile pitfalls. Further, the book defines a core agile subset so those of you who want to get agile need not spend years learning to do it. Instead, you can simply read this book and apply the core subset of techniques.

The book follows a real-life .NET/C# project from inception and UML modeling, to working code through several iterations. You can then go on-line to compare the finished product with the initial set of use cases.

The book also introduces several extensions to the core ICONIX Process, including combining Test-Driven Development (TDD) with up-front design to maximize both approaches (with examples using Java and JUnit). And the book incorporates persona analysis to drive the projects goals and reduce requirements churn.

This book provides a coherent methodology for Model-Driven Requirements Engineering which stresses the systematic treatment of requirements within the realm of modelling and model transformations. The underlying basic assumption is that detailed requirements models are used as first-class artefacts playing a direct role in constructing software. To this end, the book presents the Requirements Specification Language (RSL) that allows precision and formality, which eventually permits automation of the process of turning requirements into a working system by applying model transformations and code generation to RSL. The book is structured in eight chapters. The first two chapters present the main concepts and give an introduction to requirements modelling in RSL. The next two chapters concentrate on presenting RSL in a formal way, suitable for automated processing. Subsequently, chapters 5 and 6 concentrate on model transformations with the emphasis on those involving RSL and UML. Finally, chapters 7 and 8 provide a summary in the form of a systematic methodology with a comprehensive case study. Presenting technical details of requirements modelling and model transformations for requirements, this book is of interest to researchers, graduate students and advanced practitioners from industry. While researchers will benefit from the latest results and possible research directions in MDRE, students and practitioners can exploit the presented information and practical techniques in several areas, including requirements engineering, architectural design, software language construction and model transformation. Together with a tool suite available online, the book supplies the reader with what it promises: the means to get from requirements to code "in a snap".

This book provides a comprehensive overview of digital signal processing for a multi-disciplinary audience. It posits that though the theory involved in digital signal processing stems from electrical, electronics, communication, and control engineering, the topic has use in other disciplinary areas like chemical, mechanical, civil, computer science, and management. This book is written about digital signal processing in such a way that it is suitable for a wide ranging audience. Readers should be able to get a grasp of the field, understand the concepts easily, and apply as needed in their own fields. It covers sampling and reconstruction of signals; infinite impulse response filter; finite impulse response filter; multi rate signal processing; statistical signal processing; and applications in multidisciplinary domains. The book takes a functional approach and all techniques are illustrated using Matlab.

Computer interfaces and documentation are notoriously difficult for any user, regardless of his or her level of experience. Advances in technology are not making applications more friendly. Introducing concepts from linguistics and language teaching, Language and Communication proposes a new approach to computer interface design. The book explains for the first time why the much hyped user-friendly interface is treated with such derision by the user community. The author argues that software and hardware designers should consider such fundamental language concepts as meaning, context, function, variety, and equivalence. She goes on to show how imagining an interface as a new language can be an invaluable design exercise, calling into question deeply held beliefs and assumptions about what users will or will not understand. Written for a wide range of computer scientists and professionals, and presuming no prior knowledge of language-related terminology, this volume is a key step in the on-going information revolution.

Component-based software development regards software construction in terms of conventional engineering disciplines where the assembly of systems from readily-available prefabricated parts is the norm. Because both component-based systems themselves and the stakeholders in component-based development projects are different from traditional software systems, component-based testing also needs to deviate from traditional software testing approaches.

Gross first describes the specific challenges related to component-based testing like the lack of internal knowledge of a component or the usage of a component in diverse contexts. He argues that only built-in contract testing, a test organization for component-based applications founded on building test artifacts directly into components, can prevent catastrophic failures like the one that caused the now famous ARIANE 5 crash in 1996. Since building testing into components has implications for component development, built-in contract testing is integrated with and made to complement a model-driven development method. Here UML models are used to derive the testing architecture for an application, the testing interfaces and the component testers. The method also provides a process and guidelines for modeling and developing these artifacts.

This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the intricacies of testing component-based software systems. With its strong modeling background, it appeals to researchers and graduate students specializing in component-based software engineering. Professionals architecting and developing component-based systems will profit from the UML-based methodology and the implementation hints based on the XUnit and JUnit frameworks.

Broadly-scoped requirements such as security, privacy, and response time are a major source of complexity in modern software systems. This is due to their tangled inter-relationships with and effects on other requirements. Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE) aims to facilitate modularisation of such broadly-scoped requirements, so that software developers are able to reason about them in isolation - one at a time. AORE also captures these inter-relationships and effects in well-defined composition specifications, and, in so doing exposes the causes for potential conflicts, trade-offs, and roots for the key early architectural decisions. Over the last decade, significant work has been carried out in the field of AORE. With this book the editors aim to provide a consolidated overview of these efforts and results. The individual contributions discuss how aspects can be identified, represented, composed and reasoned about, as well as how they are used in specific domains and in industry. Thus, the book does not present one particular AORE approach, but conveys a broad understanding of the aspect-oriented perspective on requirements engineering. The chapters are organized into five sections: concern identification in requirements, concern modelling and composition, domain-specific use of AORE, aspect interactions, and AORE in industry. This book provides readers with the most comprehensive coverage of AORE and the capabilities it offers to those grappling with the complexity arising from broadly-scoped requirements - a phenomenon that is, without doubt, universal across software systems. Software engineers and related professionals in industry, as well as advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students and researchers, will benefit from these comprehensive descriptions and the industrial case studies.

The author's aim in this textbook is to provide students with a clear understanding of the relationship between the principles of object-oriented programming and software engineering. Professor Zeigler takes an approach based on state representation to formal specification. Consequently, this book is unique through its - emphasis on formulating primitives from which all other functionality can be built; - integral use of a semi-formal behaviour specification language based on state transition concepts; -differentiation between behaviour and implementation; -a reusable heterogeneous container class library; -ability to show the elegance and power of ensemble methods with non-trivial examples. As a result, students studying software engineering will find this a distinctive and valuable approach to programming and systems engineering.

It is, indeed, widely acceptable today that nowhere is it more important to focus on the improvement of software quality than in the case of systems with requirements in the areas of safety and reliability - especially for distributed, real-time and embedded systems. Thus, much research work is under progress in these fields, since software process improvement impinges directly on achieved levels of quality, and many application experiments aim to show quantitative results demonstrating the efficacy of particular approaches. Requirements for safety and reliability - like other so-called non-functional requirements for computer-based systems - are often stated in imprecise and ambiguous terms, or not at all. Specifications focus on functional and technical aspects, with issues like safety covered only implicitly, or not addressed directly because they are felt to be obvious; unfortunately what is obvious to an end user or system user is progressively less so to others, to the extend that a software developer may not even be aware that safety is an issue. Therefore, there is a growing evidence for encouraging greater understanding of safety and reliability requirements issues, right across the spectrum from end user to software developer; not just in traditional safety-critical areas (e.g. nuclear, aerospace) but also acknowledging the need for such things as heart pacemakers and other medical and robotic systems to be highly dependable.

In any software design project, the analysis stage - documenting and designing technical requirements for the needs of users - is vital to the success of the project.This book provides a thorough introduction & survey to all aspects of analysis. This new edition provides new features including: additional chapters on system Development Life Cycle & Data Element Naming Conventions & Standards; more coverage on converting logical models to physical models, how to generate DDL & testing database functionalities; expansion of database section with concepts such as denormalization, security & change control; developments on new design & technologies, particularly in the area of web analysis and design; a revised Web/Commerce chapter, which addresses component middleware for complex systems design; and, new case studies. This book is a valuable resource and guide for all information systems students, practitioners and professionals who need an in-depth understanding of the principles of the analysis and design process.

In the recent years, fractional-order systems have been studied by many researchers in the engineering field. It was found that many systems can be described more accurately by fractional differential equations than by integer-order models. Advanced Synchronization Control and Bifurcation of Chaotic Fractional-Order Systems is a scholarly publication that explores new developments related to novel chaotic fractional-order systems, control schemes, and their applications. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics including chaos synchronization, nonlinear control, and cryptography, this publication is geared toward engineers, IT professionals, researchers, and upper-level graduate students seeking current research on chaotic fractional-order systems and their applications in engineering and computer science.

This thesis deals with the evaluation of surface and groundwater quality changes in the periods of water scarcity in river catchment areas. The work can be divided into six parts. Existing methods of drought assessment are discussed in the first part, followed by the brief description of the software package HydroOffice, designed by the author. The software is dedicated to analysis of hydrological data (separation of baseflow, parameters of hydrological drought estimation, recession curves analysis, time series analysis). The capabilities of the software are currently used by scientist from more than 30 countries around the world. The third section is devoted to a comprehensive regional assessment of hydrological drought on Slovak rivers, followed by evaluation of the occurrence, course and character of drought in precipitation, discharges, base flow, groundwater head and spring yields in the pilot area of the Nitra River basin. The fifth part is focused on the assessment of changes in surface and groundwater quality during the drought periods within the pilot area. Finally, the results are summarized and interpreted, and rounded off with an outlook to future research.

Modern methods of filter design and controller design often yield systems of very high order, posing a problem for their implementation. Over the past two decades or so, sophisticated methods have been developed to achieve simplification of filters and controllers. Such methods often come with easy-to-use error bounds, and in the case of controller simplification methods, such error bounds will usually be related to closed-loop properties.This book is the first comprehensive treatment of approximation methods for filters and controllers. It is fully up to date, and it is authored by two leading researchers who have personally contributed to the development of some of the methods. Balanced truncation, Hankel norm reduction, multiplicative reduction, weighted methods and coprime factorization methods are all discussed.The book is amply illustrated with examples, and will equip practising control engineers and graduates for intelligent use of commercial software modules for model and controller reduction.

Genetic and evolutionary algorithms (GEAs) have often achieved an enviable success in solving optimization problems in a wide range of disciplines. This book provides effective optimization algorithms for solving a broad class of problems quickly, accurately, and reliably by employing evolutionary mechanisms.

"CASE Technology" presents a collection of papers pertaining to the automation of the software development process. The expectations for computer-aided software engineering (CASE) have been great, but the potential of CASE has not yet been fully realized. Now, with the availability of CASE tools and technologies, software automation is beginning to achieve success. This collection focuses on the integration of tools within a CASE environment.

Object-Oriented Behavioral Specifications encourages builders of complex information systems to accelerate their move to using the approach of a scientific discipline in analysis rather than the approach of a craft. The focus is on understanding customers' needs and on precise specification of understanding gained through analysis. Specifications must bridge any gaps in understanding about business rules among customers, Subject Matter Experts, and `computer people', must inform decisions about reuse of software and systems, and must enable review of semantics over time. Specifications need to describe semantics rather than syntax, and to do that in an abstract and precise manner, in order to create software systems that satisfy business rules. The papers in this book show various ways of designing elegant and clear specifications which are reusable, lead to savings of intellectual effort, time, and money, and which contribute to the reliability of software and systems. Object-Oriented Behavioral Specifications offers a fresh treatment of the object-oriented paradigm by examining the limitations of traditional OO methodologies and by describing the significance of competing trends in OO modeling. The book builds on four years of successful OOPSLA workshops (1991-1995) on behavior semantics. This book deals with precise specifications of `what' is accomplished by the business and `what' is to be done by a system. The book includes descriptions of successful use of abstract and precise specification in industry. It draws on the experience of experts from industrial and academic settings and benefits from international participation. Collective behavior, neglected in some treatment of the OO paradigm, is addressed explicitly in this book. The book does not take `reuse' of specifications or software for granted, but furnishes a foundation for taking as rigorous an approach to reuse decisions as to precise specifications in original developments.

In Part I, the impact of an integro-differential operator on parity logic engines (PLEs) as a tool for scientific modeling from scratch is presented. Part II outlines the fuzzy structural modeling approach for building new linear and nonlinear dynamical causal forecasting systems in terms of fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs). Part III introduces the new type of autogenetic algorithms (AGAs) to the field of evolutionary computing. Altogether, these PLEs, FCMs, and AGAs may serve as conceptual and computational power tools.

There are increasing opportunities to consider the application of semantic technologies for business information systems. Semantic technologies are expected to improve business processes and information systems, and lead to savings in cost and time as well as improved efficiency. Semantic Technologies for Business and Information Systems Engineering: Concepts and Applications investigates the application of semantic technologies to business and information systems engineering. This reference work assists researchers in academia and industry, students, business process analysts, information management professionals, software engineers, and other practitioners in gaining knowledge on applying semantic technologies for advanced business information systems, in annotating semantics to business processes, and in semantically integrating advanced business information systems.

This book reviews the present understanding of the history of software and establishes an agenda for further research. By exploring this current understanding, the authors identify the fundamental elements of software. The problems and questions addressed in the book range from purely technical to societal issues. Thus, the articles presented offer a fresh view of this history with new categories and interrelated themes, comparing and contrasting software with artefacts in other disciplines, so as to ascertain in what ways software is similar to and different from other technologies.This volume is based on the international conference "Mapping the History of Computing: Software Issues", held in April 2000 at the Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum in Paderborn, Germany.

As miniaturisation deepens, and nanotechnology and its machines become more prevalent in the real world, the need to consider using quantum mechanical concepts to perform various tasks in computation increases. Such tasks include: the teleporting of information, breaking heretofore "unbreakable" codes, communicating with messages that betray eavesdropping, and the generation of random numbers. This is the first book to apply quantum physics to the basic operations of a computer, representing the ideal vehicle for explaining the complexities of quantum mechanics to students, researchers and computer engineers, alike, as they prepare to design and create the computing and information delivery systems for the future. Both authors have solid backgrounds in the subject matter at the theoretical and more practical level. While serving as a text for senior/grad level students in computer science/physics/engineering, this book has its primary use as an up-to-date reference work in the emerging interdisciplinary field of quantum computing - the only prerequisite being knowledge of calculus and familiarity with the concept of the Turing machine.

Looking back at the years that have passed since the realization of the very first electronic, multi-purpose computers, one observes a tremendous growth in hardware and software performance. Today, researchers and engi neers have access to computing power and software that can solve numerical problems which are not fully understood in terms of existing mathemati cal theory. Thus, computational sciences must in many respects be viewed as experimental disciplines. As a consequence, there is a demand for high quality, flexible software that allows, and even encourages, experimentation with alternative numerical strategies and mathematical models. Extensibil ity is then a key issue; the software must provide an efficient environment for incorporation of new methods and models that will be required in fu ture problem scenarios. The development of such kind of flexible software is a challenging and expensive task. One way to achieve these goals is to in vest much work in the design and implementation of generic software tools which can be used in a wide range of application fields. In order to provide a forum where researchers could present and discuss their contributions to the described development, an International Work shop on Modern Software Tools for Scientific Computing was arranged in Oslo, Norway, September 16-18, 1996. This workshop, informally referred to as Sci Tools '96, was a collaboration between SINTEF Applied Mathe matics and the Departments of Informatics and Mathematics at the Uni versity of Oslo."