Systems architecture

About: Systems architecture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 17612 publications have been published within this topic receiving 283719 citations. The topic is also known as: system architecture.

An architecture for post-development configuration management in a wide-area network

Abstract: Few tools exist to address the post-development activities of configuring, releasing, installing, updating, reconfiguring, and even de-installing a software system. Certainly there is no unified approach for all of these activities, and none that can take full advantage of a wide-area network. The Software Dock represents an architecture for supporting post-development activities in such a setting. It is designed as a system of loosely-coupled, cooperating, distributed components that are bound together by a wide-area messaging and event system. In this paper we describe the Software Dock architecture and discuss the use of a prototype in deploying a complex system.

STAR-MPI: self tuned adaptive routines for MPI collective operations

Abstract: Message Passing Interface (MPI) collective communication routines are widely used in parallel applications. In order for a collective communication routine to achieve high performance for different applications on different platforms, it must be adaptable to both the system architecture and the application workload. Current MPI implementations do not support such software adaptability and are not able to achieve high performance on many platforms. In this paper, we present STAR-MPI (Self Tuned Adaptive Routines for MPI collective operations), a set of MPI collective communication routines that are capable of adapting to system architecture and application workload. For each operation, STAR-MPI maintains a set of communication algorithms that can potentially be efficient at different situations. As an application executes, a STAR-MPI routine applies the Automatic Empirical Optimization of Software (AEOS) technique at run time to dynamically select the best performing algorithm for the application on the platform. We describe the techniques used in STAR-MPI, analyze STAR-MPI overheads, and evaluate the performance of STAR-MPI with applications and benchmarks. The results of our study indicate that STAR-MPI is robust and efficient. It is able to and efficient algorithms with reasonable overheads, and it out-performs traditional MPI implementations to a large degree in many cases.

On the development of a technology intelligence tool for identifying technology opportunity

Abstract: Technology intelligence tools have come to be regarded as vital components in planning for technology development and formulating technology strategies However, most such tools currently focus on providing graphical frameworks and databases to support the process of technology analysis Techpioneer, the proposed tool in this paper, aims to offer decisive information in order to identify technology opportunities To this end, the system uses textual information from technological document databases and applies morphology analysis to derive promising alternatives and conjoint analysis to evaluate their priority In addition, the method used in developing a technology dictionary is presented, employing clustering and network analysis This system also has the ability to communicate with experts in order to estimate the value of existing patents, which is inevitable for the priority-setting of alternatives, construct a morphological matrix and so on This paper presents the system architecture and functions of this tool and moreover, illustrates the prototype implementation and case study of the same

Experimental cooperative control of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract: Recent years have seen rapidly growing interest in the development of networks of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as aerial sensor networks for the purpose of coordinated monitoring, surveillance, and rapid emergency response. This has triggered a great deal of research in higher levels of planning and control, including collaborative sensing and exploration, synchronized motion planning, and formation or cooperative control. In this paper, we describe our recently developed experimental testbed at the University of Pennsylvania, which consists of multiple, fixed-wing UAVs. We describe the system architecture, software and hardware components, and overall system integration. We then derive high-fidelity models that are validated with hardware-in-the-loop simulations and actual experiments. Our models are hybrid, capturing not only the physical dynamics of the aircraft, but also the mode switching logic that supervises lower level controllers. We conclude with a description of cooperative control experiments involving two fixed-wing UAVs.

A proposal for model-based safety analysis

Abstract: System safety analysis techniques are well established and are used extensively during the design of safety-critical systems. Despite this, most of the techniques are highly subjective and dependent on the skill of the practitioner. Since these analyses are usually based on an informal system model, it is unlikely that they will be complete, consistent, and error free. In fact, the lack of precise models of the system architecture and its failure modes often forces the safety analysts to devote much of their effort to finding undocumented details of the system behavior and embedding this information in the safety artifacts such as the fault trees. In this paper we propose an approach, Model-Based Safety Analysis, in which the system and safety engineers use the same system models created during a model-based development process. By extending the system model with a fault model as well as relevant portions of the physical system to be controlled, automated support can be provided for much of the safety analysis. We believe that by using a common model for both system and safety engineering and automating parts of the safety analysis, we can both reduce the cost and improve the quality of the safety analysis. Here we present our vision of model-based safety analysis and discuss the advantages and challenges in making this approach practical.