The book provides a platform for dealing with the flaws and failings of the soft computing paradigm through different manifestations. The different chapters highlight the necessity of the hybrid soft computing methodology in general with emphasis on several application perspectives in particular. Typical examples include (a) Study of Economic Load Dispatch by Various Hybrid Optimization Techniques, (b) An Application of Color Magnetic Resonance Brain Image Segmentation by Para Optimus LG Activation Function, (c) Hybrid Rough-PSO Approach in Remote Sensing Imagery Analysis, (d) A Study and Analysis of Hybrid Intelligent Techniques for Breast Cancer Detection using Breast Thermograms, and (e) Hybridization of 2D-3D Images for Human Face Recognition. The elaborate findings of the chapters enhance the exhibition of the hybrid soft computing paradigm in the field of intelligent computing.

For over a decade, software process improvement (SPI) has been promoted as an approach to improve systematically the way software is developed and managed. Mostly this research and the relevant experience reports have been focussed on large software companies.

Conradi and his co-authors have collected the main results from four Norwegian industrial research and development projects on SPI carried out between 1996 and 2005, which, in contrast to other treatments, concentrated on small- and medium-sized companies, typically characterized by fast-changing environments and processes. The presentation is organized in five sections: general principles and methods of SPI, knowledge management for SPI, process modelling and electronic process guides, estimation methods, and object-oriented and component-based systems. A spectrum of empirical methods has been used, e.g. case studies, large-scale experiments, surveys and interviews, and action research.

The book mainly targets researchers and graduate students in (empirical) software engineering, and software professionals working in development or quality assurance.

GPS Tracking with Java EE Components: Challenges of Connected Cars highlights how the self-driving car is actually changing the automotive industry, from programing embedded software to hosting services and data crunching, in real time, with really big data. The book analyzes how the challenges of the Self Driving Car (SDC) exceed the limits of a classical GPS Tracking System (GTS.) It provides a guidebook on setting up a tracking system by customizing its components. It also provides an overview of the prototyping and modeling process, and how the reader can modify this process for his or her own software. Every component is introduced in detail and includes a number of design decisions for development. The book introduces Java EE (JEE) Modules, and shows how they can be combined to a customizable GTS, and used as seed components to enrich existing systems with live tracking. The book also explores how to merge tracking and mapping to guide SDCs, and focuses on client server programming to provide useful information. It also discusses the challenges involved with the live coordination of moving cars. This book is designed to aid GTS developers and engineers in the automotive industry. It can also help Java Developers, not only interested in GPS Tracking, but in modern software design from many individual modules. Source code and sample applications will be available on the book's website.

Object-oriented design methods are commonplace in computing systems development, but are often dismissed as 'boxes & arrows'. If systems developers are to gain full advantage from such methods, they should be able to achieve designs that are not merely the subject of heated argument, but can be improved by careful, rigorous & machine-supported analysis.

This book describes an object-oriented design approach that combines the benefits of abstract modelling with the analytic power of formal methods, to give designs that can be rigorously validated & assured with automated support.

Aimed at software architects, designers & developers as well as computer scientists, no prior knowledge of formal methods is assumed. The elements of functional modelling are introduced using numerous examples & exercises, industrial case studies & experience reports. Industry-strength tools support the text. Go to www.vdmbook.com to download free-of-charge VDMTools Lite, which gives the possibility to try out examples from the book

This book describes a cross-domain architecture and design tools for networked complex systems where application subsystems of different criticality coexist and interact on networked multi-core chips. The architecture leverages multi-core platforms for a hierarchical system perspective of mixed-criticality applications. This system perspective is realized by virtualization to establish security, safety and real-time performance. The impact further includes a reduction of time-to-market, decreased development, deployment and maintenance cost, and the exploitation of the economies of scale through cross-domain components and tools. Describes an end-to-end architecture for hypervisor-level, chip-level, and cluster level. Offers a solution for different types of resources including processors, on-chip communication, off-chip communication, and I/O. Provides a cross-domain approach with examples for wind-power, health-care, and avionics. Introduces hierarchical adaptation strategies for mixed-criticality systems Provides modular verification and certification methods for the seamless integration of mixed-criticality systems. Covers platform technologies, along with a methodology for the development process. Presents an experimental evaluation of technological results in cooperation with industrial partners. The information in this book will be extremely useful to industry leaders who design and manufacture products with distributed embedded systems in mixed-criticality use-cases. It will also benefit suppliers of embedded components or development tools used in this area. As an educational tool, this material can be used to teach students and working professionals in areas including embedded systems, computer networks, system architecture, dependability, real-time systems, and avionics, wind-power and health-care systems.

Templates are used to generate all kinds of text, including computer code. The last decade, the use of templates gained a lot of popularity due to the increase of dynamic web applications. Templates are a tool for programmers, and implementations of template engines are most times based on practical experience rather than based on a theoretical background.

This book reveals the mathematical background of templates and shows interesting findings for improving the practical use of templates.

First, a framework to determine the necessary computational power for the template metalanguage is presented. The template metalanguage does not need to be Turing-complete to be useful. A non-Turing-complete metalanguage enforces separation of concerns between the view and model.

Second, syntactical correctness of all languages of the templates and generated code is ensured. This includes the syntactical correctness of the template metalanguage and the output language. Third, case studies show that the achieved goals are applicable in practice. It is even shown that syntactical correctness helps to prevent cross-site scripting attacks in web applications.

The target audience of this book is twofold. The first group exists of researcher interested in the mathematical background of templates. The second group exists of users of templates. This includes designers of template engines on one side and programmers and web designers using templates on the other side"

Addressing various aspects of object-oriented software techniques with respect to their impact on testing, this text argues that the testing of object-oriented software is not restricted to a single phase of software development. The book concentrates heavily on the testing of classes and of components or sub-systems, and a major part is devoted to this subject. C++ is used throughout this book that is intended for software practitioners, managers, researchers, students, or anyone interested in object-oriented technology and its impacts throughout the software engineering life-cycle.

Process calculi are among the most successful models of concurrent systems. Various behavior equivalences between processes are central notions in CCS (calculus of communicating systems) and other process calculi. In the real applications, specification and implementation are described as two processes, and correctness of programs is treated as a certain behavior equivalence between them. The purpose of this book is to establish a theory of approximate correctness and infinite evolution of concurrent programs by employing some notions and tools from point-set topology. This book is restricted to CCS for simplicity, but the main idea also applies to some other process calculi. The concept of bisimulation limits, useful for the understanding and analysis of infinite evolution of processes, is introduced. In addition, the notions of near bisimulations and bisimulation indexes, suitable in describing approximate correctness of concurrent programs, are proposed. The book will be of particular interest to researchers in the fields of theoretical computer science, especially theory of concurrency and hybrid systems, and graduate students in related disciplines. It will also be valuable to practical system designers developing concurrent and/or real-time systems.

Providing a wide variety of technologies for ensuring the safety and dependability of cyber-physical systems (CPS), this book offers a comprehensive introduction to the architecture-centric modeling, analysis, and verification of CPS. In particular, it focuses on model driven engineering methods including architecture description languages, virtual prototyping, and formal analysis methods. CPS are based on a new design paradigm intended to enable emerging software-intensive systems. Embedded computers and networks monitor and control the physical processes, usually with the help of feedback loops where physical processes affect computations and vice versa. The principal challenges in system design lie in this constant interaction of software, hardware and physics. Developing reliable CPS has become a critical issue for the industry and society, because many applications such as transportation, power distribution, medical equipment and tele-medicine are dependent on CPS. Safety and security requirements must be ensured by means of powerful validation tools. Satisfying such requirements, including quality of service, implies having formally proven the required properties of the system before it is deployed. The book is concerned with internationally standardized modeling languages such as AADL, SysML, and MARTE. As the effectiveness of the technologies is demonstrated with industrial sample cases from the automotive and aerospace sectors, links between the methods presented and industrial problems are clearly understandable. Each chapter is self-contained, addressing specific scientific or engineering problems, and identifying further issues. In closing, it includes perspectives on future directions in CPS design from an architecture analysis viewpoint.

This text helps the reader generate clear, effective documentation that is tailored to the information requirements of the end-user. Written for technical writers and their managers, quality assurance experts, and software engineers, the book describes a user-centered information design method (UCID) that should help ensure documentation conveys significant information for the user. The UCID shows how to: integrate the four major information components of a software system - user interface labels, messages, online and printed documentation; make sure these elements work together to improve usability; deploy iterative design and prototyping procedures that minimize flaws and save time and money; and guide technical writers effectively.

This book reviews existing operational software failure analysis techniques and proposes near-miss analysis as a novel, and new technique for investigating and preventing software failures. The authors provide details on how near-miss analysis techniques focus on the time-window before the software failure actually unfolds, so as to detect the high-risk conditions that can lead to a major failure. They detail how by alerting system users of an upcoming software failure, the detection of near misses provides an opportunity to collect at runtime failure-related data that is complete and relevant. They present a near-miss management systems (NMS) for detecting upcoming software failures, which can contribute significantly to the improvement of the accuracy of the software failure analysis. A prototype of the NMS is implemented and is discussed in the book. The authors give a practical hands-on approach towards doing software failure investigations by means of near-miss analysis that is of use to industry and academia

Over the past two decades, software engineering has come a long way from object-based to object-oriented to component-based design and development. Invasive software composition is a new technique that unifies and extends recent software engineering concepts like generic programming, aspect-oriented development, architecture systems, or subject-oriented development. To improve reuse, this new method regards software components as grayboxes and integrates them during composition. Building on a minimal set of program transformations, composition operator libraries can be developed that parameterize, extend, connect, mediate, and aspect-weave components. The book is centered around the JAVA language and the freely available demonstrator library COMPOST. It provides a wealth of materials for researchers, students, and professional software architects alike.

The growing demand for high quality, safety, and security of software systems can only be met by rigorous application of formal methods during software design. Tools for formal methods in general, however, do not provide a sufficient level of automatic processing. This book methodically investigates the potential of first-order logic automated theorem provers for applications in software engineering.Illustrated by complete case studies on verification of communication and security protocols and logic-based component reuse, the book characterizes proof tasks to allow an assessment of the provers capabilities. Necessary techniques and extensions, e.g., for handling inductive and modal proof tasks, or for controlling the prover, are covered in detail. The book demonstrates that state-of-the-art automated theorem provers are capable of automatically handling important tasks during the development of high-quality software and it provides many helpful techniques for increasing practical usability of the automated theorem prover for successful applications.

The core idea of this book is that object- oriented technology is a generic technology whose various technical aspects can be presented in a unified and consistent framework. This applies to both practical and formal aspects of object-oriented technology. Course tested in a variety of object-oriented courses, numerous examples, figures and exercises are presented in each chapter. The approach in this book is based on typed technologies, and the core notions fit mainstream object-oriented languages such as Java and C#. The book promotes object-oriented constraints (assertions), their specification and verification. Object-oriented constraints apply to specification and verification of object-oriented programs, specification of the object-oriented platform, more advanced concurrent models, database integrity constraints and object-oriented transactions, their specification and verification.

Aligning an organization's goals and strategies requires specifying their rationales and connections so that the links are explicit and allow for analytic reasoning about what is successful and where improvement is necessary. This book provides guidance on how to achieve this alignment, how to monitor the success of goals and strategies and use measurement to recognize potential failures, and how to close alignment gaps. It uses the GQM+Strategies approach, which provides concepts and actionable steps for creating the link between goals and strategies across an organization and allows for measurement-based decision-making. After outlining the general motivation for organizational alignment through measurement, the GQM+Strategies approach is described concisely, with a focus on the basic model that is created and the process for creating and using this model. The recommended steps of all six phases of the process are then described in detail with the help of a comprehensive application example. Finally, the industrial challenges addressed by the method and cases of its application in industry are presented, and the relations to other approaches, such as Balanced Scorecard, are described. The book concludes with supplementary material, such as checklists and guidelines, to support the application of the method. This book is aimed at organization leaders, managers, decision makers, and other professionals interested in aligning their organization's goals and strategies and establishing an efficient strategic measurement program. It is also interesting for academic researchers looking for mechanisms to integrate their research results into organizational environments.

Advice involves recommendations on what to think; through thought, on what to choose; and via choices, on how to act. Advice is information that moves by communication, from advisors to the recipient of advice. Ivan Jureta offers a general way to analyze advice. The analysis applies regardless of what the advice is about and from whom it comes or to whom it needs to be given, and it concentrates on the production and consumption of advice independent of the field of application. It is made up of two intertwined parts, a conceptual analysis and an analysis of the rationale of advice. He premises that giving advice is a design problem and he treats advice as an artifact designed and used to influence decisions. What is unusual is the theoretical backdrop against which the author's discussions are set: ontology engineering, conceptual analysis, and artificial intelligence. While classical decision theory would be expected to play a key role, this is not the case here for one principal reason: the difficulty of having relevant numerical, quantitative estimates of probability and utility in most practical situations. Instead conceptual models and mathematical logic are the author's tools of choice. The book is primarily intended for graduate students and researchers of management science. They are offered a general method of analysis that applies to giving and receiving advice when the decision problems are not well structured, and when there is imprecise, unclear, incomplete, or conflicting qualitative information.

Basics of Software Engineering Experimentation is a practical guide to experimentation in a field which has long been underpinned by suppositions, assumptions, speculations and beliefs. It demonstrates to software engineers how Experimental Design and Analysis can be used to validate their beliefs and ideas. The book does not assume its readers have an in-depth knowledge of mathematics, specifying the conceptual essence of the techniques to use in the design and analysis of experiments and keeping the mathematical calculations clear and simple. Basics of Software Engineering Experimentation is practically oriented and is specially written for software engineers, all the examples being based on real and fictitious software engineering experiments.

Problem solving is an essential part of every scientific discipline. It has two components: (1) problem identification and formulation, and (2) solution of the formulated problem. One can solve a problem on its own using ad hoc techniques or follow those techniques that have produced efficient solutions to similar problems. This requires the understanding of various algorithm design techniques, how and when to use them to formulate solutions and the context appropriate for each of them. This book advocates the study of algorithm design techniques by presenting most of the useful algorithm design techniques and illustrating them through numerous examples.

Many approaches have been proposed to enhance software productivity and reliability. These approaches typically fall into three categories: the engineering approach, the formal approach, and the knowledge-based approach. The optimal gain in software productivity cannot be obtained if one relies on only one of these approaches. Thus, the integration of different approaches has also become a major area of research. No approach can be said to be perfect if it fails to satisfy the following two criteria. Firstly, a good approach should support the full life cycle of software development. Secondly, a good approach should support the development of large-scale software for real use in many application domains. Such an approach can be referred to as a five-in-one approach. The authors of this book have, for the past eight years, conducted research in knowledge-based software engineering, of which the final goal is to develop a paradigm for software engineering which not only integrates the three approaches mentioned above, but also fulfils the two criteria on which the five-in-one approach is based. Domain Modeling- Based Software Engineering: A Formal Approach explores the results of this research. Domain Modeling-Based Software Engineering: A Formal Approach will be useful to researchers of knowledge-based software engineering, students and instructors of computer science, and software engineers who are working on large-scale projects of software development and want to use knowledge-based development methods in their work.

This work introduces the benefits of object-oriented programming and discusses how the technology can be used to improve productivity in building software systems in the manufacturing domain. It addresses a wide range of issues from languages, design principles, research examples through to industrial applications and management issues. In essence, the main objective of the book is to interpret and apply object-oriented concepts in the context of designing manufacturing systems applications. The main audience for this book consists of professionals, engineers and managers, who deal with manufacturing systems, as well as students and educators looking for new directions in building software systems to solve problems in this area. The book should also be of special interest to engineering and computer professionals who have heard the term "object-oriented" and want to learn more about it and its importance, especially in designing software for manufacturing systems. This book should be of interest to: software and manufacturing engineers in industry; software consultants; technical managers; graduate students and researchers in computer-integrated manufacturing.

The purpose of the 11th International Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications (SERA 2013) held on August 7 - 9, 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic was to bring together scientists, engineers, computer users, and students to share their experiences and exchange new ideas and research results about all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered along the way and the solutions adopted to solve them. The conference organizers selected 17 outstanding papers from those papers accepted for presentation at the conference in order to publish them in this volume. The papers were chosen based on review scores submitted by members of the program committee, and further rigorous rounds of review.

The present economic and social environment has given rise to new situations within which companies must operate. As a first example, the globalization of the economy and the need for performance has led companies to outsource and then to operate inside networks of enterprises such as supply chains or virtual enterprises. A second instance is related to environmental issues. The statement about the impact of ind- trial activities on the environment has led companies to revise processes, to save - ergy, to optimize transportation.... A last example relates to knowledge. Knowledge is considered today to be one of the main assets of a company. How to capitalize, to manage, to reuse it for the benefit of the company is an important current issue. The three examples above have no direct links. However, each of them constitutes a challenge that companies have to face today. This book brings together the opinions of several leading researchers from all around the world. Together they try to develop new approaches and find answers to those challenges. Through the individual ch- ters of this book, the authors present their understanding of the different challenges, the concepts on which they are working, the approaches they are developing and the tools they propose. The book is composed of six parts; each one focuses on a specific theme and is subdivided into subtopics.

The methodology described in this book is the result of many years of research experience in the field of synthesizable VHDL design targeting FPGA based platforms. VHDL was first conceived as a documentation language for ASIC designs. Afterwards, the language was used for the behavioral simulation of ASICs, and also as a design input for synthesis tools. VHDL is a rich language, but just a small subset of it can be used to write synthesizable code, from which a physical circuit can be obtained. Usually VHDL books describe both, synthesis and simulation aspects of the language, but in this book the reader is conducted just through the features acceptable by synthesis tools. The book introduces the subjects in a gradual and concise way, providing just enough information for the reader to develop their synthesizable digital systems in VHDL. The examples in the book were planned targeting an FPGA platform widely used around the world.