Software Components

We present a foundational theory of software system re-liability based on components. The theory describes how component developers can design and test their components to produce measurements that are later used by system de-signers to calculate composite system reliability — ...

The textual analysis has become most important task due to the rapid increase of the number of texts that have been continuously generated in several forms such as posts and chats in social media, emails, articles, and news. The management of these texts requires efficient and
effective methods, which can handle the linguistic issues that come from the complexity of natural languages. In recent years, the exploitation of semantic features from the lexical sources has been widely investigated by researchers to deal with the issues of “synonymy and ambiguity” in the tasks involved in the Social Media like document clustering. The main challenges of exploiting the lexical knowledge sources such as 1WordNet 3.1 in these tasks are how to integrate
the various types of semantic relations for capturing additional semantic evidence, and how to settle the high dimensionality of current semantic representing approaches. In this paper, the proposed weighting of features for a new semantic feature-based method as which combined
four things as which is “Synonymy, Hypernym, non-taxonomy, and Glosses”. Therefore, this research proposes a new knowledge-based semantic representation approach for text mining, which can handle the linguistic issues as well as the high dimensionality issue. Thus, the
proposed approach consists of two main components: a feature-based method for incorporating the relations in the lexical sources, and a topic-based reduction method to overcome the high dimensionality issue. The proposed method approach will evaluated using WordNet 3.1 in the text clustering and text classification.

The modeling and analysis of construction processes is gaining recognition in the construction industry. Recent developments such as Java-based simulation are giving a unique opportunity for improvements in the modeling and analysis of construction processes. Component-based architecture such as JavaBeans can be used to develop modular simulation environments supporting high reusability of software components. This paper describes a prototype component-based architecture for construction simulation. It highlights the work performed by the authors in using JavaBeans for the simulation of construction processes.

The goal of result-verification is to prove that one execution run of a program satisjes its speciJcation. Compared with iniplenzentation-verification, result-verification has a larger scope for applications in practice, gives more opportunities for automation and, based on the execution record not the implementation, is particularly suitable for complex systems. This paper proposes a technical framework to apply this technique in practice. We show how to write formal result-based specifications, how to generate LI verifier program to check a given speciJcation and to carry out resultverification according to the generated program. The execution result is written as a text j l e , the verifier is written in AWK (special-purpose language for text processing) and verijcation is done automatically by the AWK interpreter; given the verifier and the execution result as inputs.

The present study was carried out to compare the physicochemical characteristics of eggs of guinea fowl, turkeys and domestic chickens outdoor reared in traditional farms in Baghdad, Iraq. A total of 166 fresh eggs; 32 eggs from guinea fowls (Numida meleagris), 44 eggs from turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) and 90 eggs from domestic chickens; were collected. Egg weight, percentage of egg components, chemical composition (protein, lipids, and ash), and lipid profile were determined. Results revealed the significant differences in egg weight among studied birds. The average egg weights for guinea fowl, turkey, and indigenous chicken were 48.51 ± 0.72, 52.15 ± 0.74 and 61.24 ± 0.22 g, respectively. No significant differences were found in egg components and the chemical composition of the edible portions of the eggs among studied birds. However, the lipid profile of egg yolk indicated that egg cholesterol and LDL levels were significantly higher in guinea fowl and turkey compared with those in indigenous chickens, whereas native chicken has high values of HDL compared to guinea fowl and turkey. There were no significant differences in the triglyceride level in egg yolks among the studied fowls. In conclusion, although egg weight was significantly different among studied birds, eggs of guinea fowl, turkeys, and domestic chickens were similar in nutritional components.

The over-increasing demand in the use of software in business, industry, administration, education and research as well as in games have made software engineering and development more complex and large. This calls for the need for higher-level abstraction of software systems in order to develop real-world systems that meets the new challenges facing software engineering development process. This paper presents component-based software engineering (CBSE) as a solution to the complexities and challenges facing software usability and applicability. This technology CBSE addresses the development of systems as an assembly of components, the development of components as reusable entities and the maintenance and upgrading of systems by customizing and replacing such components (parts). The author assesses the challenges of this upcoming technology and discusses its solutions, merits and implications for the software engineering and development process.

Heuristic algorithms are put to the test in games. Because they incorporate an unexpected opponent, two-person games are more challenging than a basic puzzle. In a two-player game, you must presume that your opponent has the same information as you and can use it just as well. As a result, you must presume that your opponent will make the best available move at each level of the game. The minimax method is built on this foundation. The players in minimax are referred to as MAX (the player) and MIN (the player) (the opponent). Both aim to get the most out of their actions. The player, MAX, is attempting to maximise her score. And MIN is the opponent attempting to reduce MAX's score to the bare minimum. It is impossible to stretch the graph to its leaf nodes in most games.The number of layers in the state space is increased to n. The heuristic evaluation function assigns a value to each leaf node in this subgraph. The values are then passed back to the root node. The heuristic value of the best state that can be attained from that node is represented by the value propagated back. The process of alpha-beta pruning is used to reduce the amount of computation and searching required during minimax. Minimax is a two-pass search, with the first pass assigning heuristic values to nodes at the lowest depth and the second pass propagating those values up the tree. The depth-first approach is used in alpha-beta search. A MAX node's initial or temporary value is called an alpha value.Because MAX nodes receive the highest value from their descendants, an alpha value can never fall; it can only rise. A beta value is a value linked with a MIN node that is initial or transitory. A beta value can never increase; it can only go down because MIN nodes are assigned the lowest value among their progeny. Assume alpha = 6 for a MAX node. Then any branches originating from a MIN descendant with a beta value less than or equal to 6 won't be included in the search. So, if you know that the MAX node has an alpha of 6 and that one of its MIN children has a beta of less than or equal to 6, you don't need to look any farther down the MIN node. This is called Alpha Beta Pruning.

Robbery is a danger encountered several times. Modern electronics yields itself for robbery; also it shows ways to avoid it. We have, therefore, in this project, attempted to develop an integrated system that combines the features of a Embedded controller, GSM and IoT devices to be useful in detecting, monitoring and protecting through internet. The ultra modern micro electronics has made opportunities for the development of such security system with the advent of sensors for sensing the presence of a person. We use PIR sensor unit to detect the presence of any Person. Our system consists of three sections detecting, monitoring and protecting. Here detecting system consists of PIR sensor to indicate the motion of the human being. Smoke sensor to detect the smoke. Temperature sensor to sense the temperature variations. Vibration sensor to sense vibration level. Door breakage detector to detect the breaking of door to rob. Second section is monitoring, when the intruder enters into the monitoring area this sensor detect the intruder and immediately send the indication to the user through mail to reveal the message and also send the alert SMS to the user for notification. By this user can able to understand something has happened in his place and he can proceed for further action. Last section is protective section, it consists of spray control system which is controlled through internet to make the opponent unconscious for certain interval. Hence the electronic system which provides these three sections helps to prevent the properties from robbery and other unnecessary problem and also provides solution to the user to live a secured life.

The quality and the correctness of software has a great concern in computer systems. Formal verification tools can used to provide a confidence that a software design is free from certain errors. This paper surveys tools that accomplish automatic software verification to detect programming errors or prove their absence. The two tools considered are tools that based on Hoare logic namely, the KeY-Hoare and Hoare Advanced Homework Assistant (HAHA). A detailed example on these tools is provided, underlining their differences when applied to practical problems.

Component-based development (CBD) is an important emerging topic in software engineering, promising long-sought-after benefits like increased reuse, reduced time to market, and, hence, reduced software production cost. The cornerstone of a CBD technology is its underlying software component model, which defines components and their composition mechanisms. Current models use objects or architectural units as components. These are not ideal for component reuse or systematic composition. In this paper, we survey and analyze current component models and classify them into a taxonomy based on commonly accepted desiderata for CBD. For each category in the taxonomy, we describe its key characteristics and evaluate them with respect to these desiderata.

As semiconductor manufacturing enters advanced nanometer design paradigm, aging and device wear-out related degradation is becoming a major concern. Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) is one of the main sources of device lifetime degradation. The severity of such degradation depends on the operation history of a chip in the field, including such characteristics as temperature and workloads. In this paper, we propose a system level reliability management scheme where a chip dynamically adjusts its own operating frequency and supply voltage over time as the device ages. Major benefits of the proposed approach are (i) increased performance due to reduced frequency guard banding in the factory and (ii) continuous field adjustments that take environmental operating conditions such as actual room temperature and the power supply tolerance into account. The greatest challenge in implementing such a scheme is to perform calibration without a tester. Much of this work is performed by a hypervisor like software with very little hardware assistance. This keeps both the hardware overhead and the system complexity low. This paper describes the entire system architecture including hardware and software components. Our simulation data indicates that under aggressive wear-out conditions, scheduling interval of days or weeks is sufficient to reconfigure and keep the system operational, thus the run time overhead for such adjustments is of no consequence at all.

The modeling and analysis of construction processes is gaining recognition in the construction industry. Recent developments such as Java-based simulation are giving a unique opportunity for improvements in the modeling and analysis of construction processes. Component-based architecture such as JavaBeans can be used to develop modular simulation environments supporting high reusability of software components. This paper describes a prototype component-based architecture for construction simulation. It highlights the work performed by the authors in using JavaBeans for the simulation of construction processes.

Human computer interaction (HCI) is concerned with the practice of usability, which is a measure that evaluates the simplicity of using a system, software, or interface design for performing particular tasks. Evaluation is a process by which designers gather information about a systems usability to improve its user interfaces features. This research presents a study of a usability evaluation of EduGate, an online academic portal of King Saud University. In this research the heuristic evaluation method was chosen to evaluate the usability of the EduGate. Our results show that, the EduGate suffers from certain usability problem and some recommendations were proposed to enhance the usability of the EduGate. A questionnaire was then used to collect the feedback of real users (i.e. students) on the value of these recommendations. The participants supported 80% of the proposed recommendations to improve the usability of the EduGate.

The basic idea behind building Reusable software components is to design interchangeable parts from other industries to the software field of construction. A reuse library or component reuse repository organizes stores and manages reusable components. The biggest advantage of the building reusable software components is that it reduces the time and energy in developing any software. Frameworks provides a standard working system through which user 's main focus is on developing desired modules instead of developing lower level details. By using this facility the software developers can spend more time in developing the requirement of software, rather than preparing the tools of application development. Framework is set of reusable software program that forms the basis for an application. Frameworks help the programmers to build the application quickly .At its best code reuse is accomplished through the sharing of common classes and/or collections of functions, frameworks and procedures. This paper describes how to build the code level reusable components and how to design code level components. Finally providing coding guidelines, standards and best practices used for creating reusable code level components and guidelines and best practices for making configurable and easy to use.

—When choosing components for software intensive systems decisions are made on multiple levels. On the highest level, the component's origin or source is chosen (e.g. In-house versus Components Off-The-Shelf), which answers the question where to get a component from. In this study we investigate how practitioners choose among the component sourcing options. The case survey method has been used to elicit and synthesize the cases. The case survey method combines the advantages of surveys (capturing a larger set of cases) and case studies (capturing rich information about each case). Overall, 22 decision cases have been obtained. Decisions were prepared in a group of people, while the actual decision was individually made by managers or decision makers. Cost, performance, and system reliability stand out as the most common criteria. More than two decision criteria are frequently considered, which has to be taken into account when supporting sourcing decisions. The final decision was perceived negatively in nine cases and positively in seven cases, while in the remaining cases it was perceived as neither positive nor negative. There exists a mismatch between industrial processes and the solution proposed with respect to number of considered criteria and methods utilized for decision making.

Background: Often, claims in Component-Based Development (CBD) are only supported by qualitative expert opinion, rather than by quantitative data. This contrasts with the normal practice in other sciences, where a sound experimental validation of claims is standard practice. Experimental Software Engineering (ESE) aims to bridge this gap. Unfortunately, it is common to find experimental validation efforts that are hard to replicate and compare, to build up the body of knowledge in CBD.
Objectives: In this dissertation our goals are (i) to contribute to evolution of ESE, in what concerns the replicability and comparability of experimental work, and (ii) to apply our proposals to CBD, thus contributing to its deeper and sounder understanding.
Techniques: We propose a process model for ESE, aligned with current experimental best practices, and combine this model with a measurement technique called Ontology-Driven Measurement (ODM). ODM is aimed at improving the state of practice in metrics definition and collection, by making metrics definitions formal and executable, without sacrificing their usability. ODM uses standard technologies that can be well adapted to current integrated development environments.
Results: Our contributions include the definition and preliminary validation of a process model for ESE and the proposal of ODM for supporting metrics definition and collection in the context of CBD. We use both the process model and ODM to perform
a series experimental works in CBD, including the cross-validation of a component metrics set for JavaBeans, a case study on the influence of practitioners expertise in a sub-process of component development (component code inspections), and an observational study on reusability patterns of pluggable components (Eclipse plug-ins). These experimental works implied proposing, adapting, or selecting adequate ontologies, as well as the formal definition of metrics upon each of those ontologies.
Limitations: Although our experimental work covers a variety of component models and, orthogonally, both process and product, the plethora of opportunities for using our quantitative approach to CBD is far from exhausted.
Conclusions: The main contribution of this dissertation is the illustration, through practical examples, of how we can combine our experimental process model with ODM to support the experimental validation of claims in the context of CBD, in a repeatable and comparable way. In addition, the techniques proposed in this dissertation are generic and can be applied to other software development paradigms.

The online of things (IOT) is transforming the agriculture enabling the farmers with the huge various of techniques. IOT technology helps in assortment data regarding conditions like weather, moisture, temperature and fertility of soil, Crop on-line looking at permits detection of weed, level of water, tormentor detection, animal intrusion in to the rostrum, crop growth, agriculture. Wireless device networks unit of measure used for looking at the farm conditions and small managemental unit of measure accustomed management and automatize the farm processes. to seem at remotely the conditions at intervals the type of image and video, wireless cameras unit of measure used.

The foundation for any software system is its architecture. Software architecture is a view of the system that includes the system's major components, the behaviour of those components as visible to the rest of the system, and the ways in which the components interact and coordinate to achieve the overall system's goal. Every efficient software system arises as a result of sound architectural basement. This requires the use of good architecture engineering practices and methods. This paper recognizes software architecture practice as a discipline pervading all phases of software development and also presents an enhanced model for software engineering process which provides an avenue for speedy, efficient and timely delivery of software products to their intended users. The integration of software architecture into the phases of software development process in a generic software life cycle is also contained in this research report. This is to enable software engineers and system analysts to use effective software architecture practices and to employ appropriate methodology during the software engineering process. Solution Bad solution Figure 3. Enhanced model.

In this paper we introduce an approach based on software components to coordinate the behavior of virtual environments from the collaboration point-ofview, in which human or virtual participants interact by means of interdependent tasks. The coordination components communicate with tasks, controlling their execution and ensuring that interdependencies are not violated. By the use of coordination components, we not only separate the coordination model from the implementation of virtual environments, but also open the possibility to create a library of reusable components. The library implements the last part of a threesome coordination infrastructure for virtual environments, which is based on an abstract model, its mathematical counterpart, and its executable elements (the components).

To assure dependable onboard evolution, we have developed a methodology called guarded software upgrading (GSU). In this paper, we focus on a low-cost approach to error containment and recovery for GSU. To ensure low development cost, we exploit inherent system resource redundancies as the fault tolerance means. In order to mitigate the effect of residual software faults at low performance cost, we take a crucial step in devising error containment and recovery methods by introducing the "confidencedriven" notion. This notion complements the message-driven (or "communication-induced") approach employed by a number of existing checkpointing protocols for tolerating hardware faults. In particular, we discriminate between the individual software components with respect to our confidence in their reliability, and keep track of changes of our confidence (due to knowledge about potential process state contamination) in particular processes. This, in turn, enables the individual processes in the spaceborne distributed system to make decisions locally, at run-time, on whether to establish a checkpoint upon message passing and whether to roll back or roll forward during error recovery. The resulting message-driven confidence-driven approach enables cost-effective checkpointing and cascading-rollback free recovery.

... Acknowledgment The authors would like to thank the TOPPERS compo-nent working group for their helpful comments and sugges-tions. References [1] OMG, CORBA Component Model 4.0. https://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/compo-nents.htm. ...

With growing, Car parking increases with the number of car users. With the increased use of smartphones and their applications, users prefer mobile phone-based solutions. This paper proposes the Smart Parking Management System (SPMS) that depends on Arduino parts, Android applications, and based on IoT. This gave the client the ability to check available parking spaces and reserve a parking spot. IR sensors are utilized to know if a car park space is allowed. Its area data are transmitted using the WI-FI module to the server and are recovered by the mobile application which offers many options attractively and with no cost to users and lets the user check reservation details. With IoT technology, the smart parking system can be connected wirelessly to easily track available locations.

10th International Conference on Embedded Systems and Applications (EMSA 2021) will provide an excellent international forum for sharing knowledge and results in theory, methodology and applications of Embedded Systems. The goal of this Conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern Embedded Systems concepts and establishing new collaborations in these areas.

This paper presents the architecture of the RAGE repository, a unique and dedicated infrastructure that provides access to a wide variety of advanced technology components for applied game development. The RAGE project, which is the principal Horizon2020 research and innovation project in applied gaming, will develop software components (RAGE software assets) that are reusable across a variety of game engines, game platforms and programming languages. The RAGE repository provides storage space for these assets and associated artefacts and is designed as an asset life-cycle management system for defining, publishing, updating, searching and packaging for distribution of the assets. The repository will be embedded in a social platform for asset developers and other stakeholders. A dedicated Asset Repository Manager provides the main functionality of the repository and its integration with other systems. Additional Tools supporting the Asset Manager are also presented and discussed. When the RAGE repository is fully operational, applied game developers will be able to enhance the quality of their games through the application of selected advanced game software assets. By making available the RAGE repository system and software assets the RAGE project's aim is to stimulate the development and uptake of the Applied Games Industry In Europe.

ABSTRACT The Unmanned Airship Vehicle (UAV) has a massive ability for low altitude and low speed exploration and surveillance applications. In order to develop a blimp based on a small size, light weight, high level functionality and communications, the navigation system and autonomous embedded blimp system are presented in this paper. The low-weight components of a Gumstix computer-on-module running embedded Linux system were described. The interface between onboard Linux operating system and device drivers makes the blimp more applicable and increase the efficiency of exploration to meet the actual needs. The main challenges of designing such a low weight blimp in regard to autonomous operation are the efficient interaction between the software and hardware components and also the efficient of the controller algorithm to improve the behaviors of the blimp. Therefore, the architecture of the fuzzy control is introduced and employed. The experiments results show the system ensures the stability and reliability to accomplish actual missions.

This paper describes a vision in which future systems consisting of novel hardware and software components are designed and implemented by a single type of professional engineer. That professional has more in common with today's programmer than a hardware designer, although both of these existing bodies of professionals have a strong contribution to make to understanding, defining and bringing about this transformation in product creation.

Heuristic algorithms are put to the test in games. Because they incorporate an unexpected opponent, two-person games are more challenging than a basic puzzle. In a two-player game, you must presume that your opponent has the same information as you and can use it just as well. As a result, you must presume that your opponent will make the best available move at each level of the game. The minimax method is built on this foundation. The players in minimax are referred to as MAX (the player) and MIN (the player) (the opponent). Both aim to get the most out of their actions. The player, MAX, is attempting to maximise her score. And MIN is the opponent attempting to reduce MAX's score to the bare minimum. It is impossible to stretch the graph to its leaf nodes in most games.The number of layers in the state space is increased to n. The heuristic evaluation function assigns a value to each leaf node in this subgraph. The values are then passed back to the root node. The heuristic value of the best state that can be attained from that node is represented by the value propagated back. The process of alpha-beta pruning is used to reduce the amount of computation and searching required during minimax. Minimax is a two-pass search, with the first pass assigning heuristic values to nodes at the lowest depth and the second pass propagating those values up the tree. The depth-first approach is used in alpha-beta search. A MAX node's initial or temporary value is called an alpha value.Because MAX nodes receive the highest value from their descendants, an alpha value can never fall; it can only rise. A beta value is a value linked with a MIN node that is initial or transitory. A beta value can never increase; it can only go down because MIN nodes are assigned the lowest value among their progeny. Assume alpha = 6 for a MAX node. Then any branches originating from a MIN descendant with a beta value less than or equal to 6 won't be included in the search. So, if you know that the MAX node has an alpha of 6 and that one of its MIN children has a beta of less than or equal to 6, you don't need to look any farther down the MIN node. This is called Alpha Beta Pruning.

ABSTRACT This paper targets the problem of efficient software component deployment in distributed networked services. We approach the problem from a model-based service development aspect and propose a solution based on novel methods applied in network management. The swarm intelligence-based deployment logic we have developed uses service models that are defined in UML 2.0. These service models are embellished to contain the non-functional requirements against the implementation of the service that are necessary to solve the component deployment problem and to obtain a deployment mapping. The result of the heuristic optimisation procedure is mappings between the components and the resources provided by the execution environment the service is deployed into. In this work, the deployment is viewed from the perspective of the service provider and our algorithm possesses significant potential in providing adaptation support for services in various changing environments.

The Application Design and Development Framework that has been applied to the Interpersonal Communication Aids area and is described here, aims to study and develop a new, stable platform for fast and low-cost implementation by various manufacturers, of flexible and improved computer-aided communication aids. This is achieved by adopting specific formulations, setting strict standards and developing a robust architecture and related software development tools. Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems or Interpersonal Communication Aids address users with Special Needs. Interpersonal Communication Aids involved in this work are computer-based and usually are complex systems that often have voice output and focus on the needs of a particular user. After an initial assessment of each user's communication needs, and taking into account the state of his neurological functions, his movement abilities, as well as his linguistic abilities, a rehabilitation program is usually prepared, often involving the use of equipment. This equipment is not widespread in our country and the foreign market systems have two main disadvantages: they have a high cost, and do not support the Greek language. These devices must offer great flexibility and adaptability because they usually have to modify their features to meet the increased communication needs of the user, which usually also change before the rehabilitation program is completed. For those who cannot use the keyboard, there are alternative methods such as foot, head, or even eyelid movement through special devices and switches. The path of information between human and computer, which by nature is of low rate, is slowed even further by the disability of the user. This is perhaps the most important technical problem in developing human-computer interaction, effective enough, in order to allow the user to take part in a discussion. A flexible application development framework offers great potential to researchers/developers/programmers to experiment without having to do unnecessary effort, only working with the part of the application they are studying (for example, the user interface). A modular communication aid should be able to adequately address users with motion, speech and perception problems. When a special solution is created, the individual's personal needs must be addressed, while the communication aid used should match the mental capacity of the person using it. It is therefore impossible to use specific simple rules in this process. It is often necessary to use a test and error method and so the technology used must allow rapid changes. Additionally, assistive technology users often criticize the lack of compatibility and integration of various devices. Using a combination of devices leads to great difficulty in daily use. The design and development of existing communications aids suffers from the lack of a general technical solution that will help develop user-friendly and operationally flexible systems based on general criteria and tools. The ideal technological solution would be the one that could focus on the particular user, using her/his special abilities to the maximum and at the same time having only the specific characteristics that she/he needs. The modular approach is best to follow for a whole set of reasons. The most important is that users can in most cases only buy the functions they need. This could be translated at a lower cost because it is easier to develop many small pieces of software and hardware with limited capabilities. Also, the difficulty and cost of adaptation is less because only user-related parameters need to be understood and regulated. Since users do not have access to features that are not known to them, they are less likely to get confused by them. A reliable modular design could cover the user's needs as they change over time. Unfortunately, modular systems are not easy to implement. This is because developers do not always know how different parts can be combined or even may not know the existence of all available components in the market. So, the different components should be recorded and divided into categories with common goals and functionality. Each component or part of a device needs a reasonable balance between flexibility and standard features. We call the frame that we describe as "ODYSSEUS" so that we can easily refer to it. ODYSSEUS aspires to provide solutions to the major communication problems related to: the lack of variety in Communication Aids in the market, especially Greek, the high price of such products, the large customization needs, the changing demands of the users, the fast changes in software and hardware technology, lack of code reuse and components, market fragmentation, lack of compatibility between the various components when they come from different manufacturers, the inability of manufacturers’ cooperation and lack of devices to support the Greek language.

The last decade marked the first real attempt to turn software development into engineering through the concepts of Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, with the goal of creating high-quality parts that could be joined together to form a functioning system. One of the most critical processes in CBSD is the selection of a set of software components from in-house or external repositories that fulfil some architectural and user-defined requirements. However, there is a lack of quality models and metrics that can help evaluate the quality characteristics of software components during this selection process. This paper presents a set of measures to assess the Usability of software components, and describes the method followed to obtain and validate them. Such a method can be re-used as a pattern for defining and validating measures for further quality characteristics.

This paper introduces a calculus of state-based software components modelled as concrete coalgebras for some Set endofunctors, with specified initial conditions. The calculus is parametrized by a notion of behaviour, introduced as a strong (usually commutative) monad. The proposed component model and calculus are illustrated through the characterisation of a particular class of components, classified as separable, which includes the ones arising in the so-called model oriented approach to systems' design.

In this paper, we outline the development of a crime forecasting tool for law enforcement applications. This tool implements a spatial Discrete Choice Model (DCM) that takes into account the attributes of locations and the preferences of criminals in selecting target locations. Other steps required for development were the acquisition of data and the selection of suitable software components. Once these design decisions were made the components were integrated with the Web-Based Crime Analysis Toolkit to make the tool available to crime analysts throughout Virginia.

ABSTRACT A popular and growing current trend in high-technology product development is to outsource the development of pieces and parts of a product and then to integrate them into the final product. This can be done on a build to order basis in a manufacturing plant (for example, computer equipment) or through combining various software components into a final release. This trend offers many advantages, yet brings up many new problems that have yet to be acknowledged or effectively addressed from an engineering management perspective. In this research work, issues of concern in joint product developments are identified. The problems and complexities of joint development projects' management and dilemmas of engineering managers are discussed. The authors offer some suggestions to resolutions to the identified issues based on their empirical investigation.

B ecause we can process only a tiny fraction of information available on the Web, we must turn to machines for help in processing and analyzing its contents. With current technology, machines cannot understand and interpret the meaning of the information in natural-language form, which is how most Web information is represented today. We need a Semantic Web to express information in a precise, machine-interpretable form, so software agents processing the same set of data share an understanding of what the terms describing the data mean. Consequently, we've recently seen an explosion in the number of Semantic Web languages developed. Because researchers and developers haven't yet reached a consensus on which language is the most suitable, which features each language must have, or which syntax is the most appropriate, we are likely to see even more languages emerge. We need to develop tools that will let us experiment with these new languages so we can compare their expressiveness and features, change language specifications, and select a suitable language for a specific task.

M any robots excel at precise positioning and trajectory tracking using software control, and most successful robotic applications use this ability-examples include computer numeric control (CNC) machining, robotic welding, painting, and pick-and-place circuit board assembly. The mechanical design of these robots focuses on rigid transmissions and minimizing compliance in the structure so that the software controller can accurately track a desired position as a function of time, regardless of any disturbance forces. However, there is a class of tasks for which rigid actuation is not ideal: physical interaction with the world, especially interaction that involves an impact or kinetic energy transfer. Animals tend to excel at these tasks and far outperform the best robots. Examples include walking, running, catching a ball, gripping a piece of fruit firmly but without causing damage, and many types of assembly tasks.

Background: Often, claims in Component-Based Development (CBD) are only supported by qualitative expert opinion, rather than by quantitative data. This contrasts with the normal practice in other sciences, where a sound experimental validation of claims is standard practice. Experimental Software Engineering (ESE) aims to bridge this gap. Unfortunately, it is common to find experimental validation efforts that are hard to replicate and compare, to build up the body of knowledge in CBD.