This book presents the latest research findings and state-of-the-art solutions on optimization techniques and provides new research direction and developments. Both the theoretical and practical aspects of the book will be much beneficial to experts and students in optimization and operation research community. It selects high quality papers from The International Conference on Optimization: Techniques and Applications (ICOTA2013). The conference is an official conference series of POP (The Pacific Optimization Research Activity Group; there are over 500 active members). These state-of-the-art works in this book authored by recognized experts will make contributions to the development of optimization with its applications.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A practical step-by-step approach for improving the software development process within a company, using the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model (CMM). The text explains common misconceptions associated with Software Business Improvement and CMM, using real-world examples. The book includes a reference table of key software metrics, which: help the reader evaluate measurements in relation to the functioning of his/her organisation; direct the software development to achieve higher levels of CMM in a timely manner; link measurement techniques to specific KPAs in a practical manner; and improve software process definition and improvement techniques with CMM as a guideline.

This book focuses on the development and implementation of cloud-based, complex software that allows parallelism, fast processing, and real-time connectivity. Software engineering (SE) is the design, development, testing, and implementation of software applications, and this discipline is as well developed as the practice is well established whereas the Cloud Software Engineering (CSE) is the design, development, testing, and continuous delivery of service-oriented software systems and applications (Software as a Service Paradigm). However, with the emergence of the highly attractive cloud computing (CC) paradigm, the tools and techniques for SE are changing. CC provides the latest software development environments and the necessary platforms relatively easily and inexpensively. It also allows the provision of software applications equally easily and on a pay-as-you-go basis. Business requirements for the use of software are also changing and there is a need for applications in big data analytics, parallel computing, AI, natural language processing, and biometrics, etc. These require huge amounts of computing power and sophisticated data management mechanisms, as well as device connectivity for Internet of Things (IoT) environments. In terms of hardware, software, communication, and storage, CC is highly attractive for developing complex software that is rapidly becoming essential for all sectors of life, including commerce, health, education, and transportation. The book fills a gap in the SE literature by providing scientific contributions from researchers and practitioners, focusing on frameworks, methodologies, applications, benefits and inherent challenges/barriers to engineering software using the CC paradigm.

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

The book provides the reader with a clear understanding of what software reuse is, where the problems are, what benefits to expect, the activities, and different forms of software reuse. The reader is also given an overview of what sofware components are, different kinds of components and compositions, a taxonomy thereof, and examples of successful component reuse. An introduction to software engineering and software process models is also provided. Consequences and influences of systematic reuse of software components are depicted, and activities like domain engineering, component engineering and application engineering are described. The importance of documentation is taken into consideration as well.

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.

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.

This text provides a very simple, initial introduction to the complete scientific computing pipeline: models, discretization, algorithms, programming, verification, and visualization. The pedagogical strategy is to use one case study - an ordinary differential equation describing exponential decay processes - to illustrate fundamental concepts in mathematics and computer science. The book is easy to read and only requires a command of one-variable calculus and some very basic knowledge about computer programming. Contrary to similar texts on numerical methods and programming, this text has a much stronger focus on implementation and teaches testing and software engineering in particular.

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 author introduces the reader to the creation and implementation of space-related models by applying a learning-by-doing and problem-oriented approach. The required procedural skills are rarely taught at universities and many scientists and engineers struggle to transfer a model into a computer program. The purpose of this book is to fill this gap. It moves from simple to more complex applications, covering various important topics in the sequence: dynamic matrix processing, 2D and 3D graphics, databases, Java applets and parallel computing. A file (SMOP.zip) with all examples can be downloaded free of charge from the Internet at http: //de.geocities.com/bsttc2/book.

Since the early 1990s, genetic programming (GP) a discipline whose goal is to enable the automatic generation of computer programs has emerged as one of the most promising paradigms for fast, productive software development. GP combines biological metaphors gleaned from Darwin's theory of evolution with computer-science approaches drawn from the field of machine learning to create programs that are capable of adapting or recreating themselves for open-ended tasks.
This unique introduction to GP provides a detailed overview of the subject and its antecedents, with extensive references to the published and online literature. In addition to explaining the fundamental theory and important algorithms, the text includes practical discussions covering a wealth of potential applications and real-world implementation techniques. Software professionals needing to understand and apply GP concepts will find this book an invaluable practical and theoretical guide."

This book introduces all the relevant information required to understand and put Model Driven Architecture (MDA) into industrial practice. It clearly explains which conceptual primitives should be present in a system specification, how to use UML to properly represent this subset of basic conceptual constructs, how to identify just those diagrams and modeling constructs that are actually required to create a meaningful conceptual schema, and how to accomplish the transformation process between the problem space and the solution space. The approach is fully supported by commercially available tools.

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 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.