Academic literature on the topic 'Component based architecture'

Commercially available military-themed virtual simulations have been developed and sold for entertainment since the beginning of the personal computing era. There exists an intense interest by various branches of the military to leverage the technological advances of the personal computing and video game industries to provide low cost military training. By nature of the content of the commercial military-themed virtual simulations, a large overlap has grown between the interests, resources, standards, and technology of the computer entertainment industry and military training branches. This research attempts to identify these commonalities with the purpose of systematically designing and evaluating a common component-based software architecture that could be used to implement a framework for developing content for both commercial and military virtual simulation software applications.<br>Ph.D.<br>Other<br>Engineering and Computer Science<br>Modeling and Simulation

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004.<br>Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-60).<br>This work presents an approach to diagnosis to meet the challenging demands of modern engineering systems. The proposed approach is an architecture that is both hierarchical and hybrid. The hierarchical dimension of the proposed architecture serves to mitigate the complexity challenges of contemporary engineering systems. The hybrid facet of the architecture tackles the increasing heterogeneity of modern engineering systems. The architecture is presented and realized using a bus representation where various modeling and diagnosis approaches can coexist. The proposed architecture is realized in a simulation environment, the Specification Toolkit and Requirements Methodology (SpecTRM). This research also provides important background information concerning approaches to diagnosis. Approaches to diagnosis are presented, analyzed, and summarized according to their strengths and domains of applicability. Important characteristics that must be considered when developing a diagnostics infrastructure are also presented alongside design guidelines and design implications. Finally, the research presents important topics for further research.<br>by Martin Ouimet.<br>S.M.

The present dynamic manufacturing environment has been characterized by a greater variety of products, shorter life-cycles of products and rapid introduction of new technologies, etc. Recently, a new manufacturing paradigm, i.e. Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS), has emerged to address such challenging issues. RMSs are able to adapt themselves to new business conditions timely and economically with a modular design of hardware/software system. Although a lot of research has been conducted in areas related to RMS, very few studies on system-level control for RMS have been reported in literature. However, the rigidity of current manufacturing systems is mainly from their monolithic design of control systems. Some new developments in Information Technology (IT) bring new opportunities to overcome the inflexibility that shadowed control systems for years. Component-based software development gains its popularity in 1990â s. However, some well-known drawbacks, such as complexity and poor real-time features counteract its advantages in developing reconfigurable control system. New emerging Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services, which are based on non-proprietary format, can eliminate the interoperability problems that traditional software technologies are incompetent to accomplish. Another new development in IT that affects the manufacturing sector is the advent of agent technology. The characteristics of agent-based systems include autonomous, cooperative, extendible nature that can be advantageous in different shop floor activities. This dissertation presents an innovative control architecture, entitled Component-based Intelligent Control Architecture (CICA), designed for system-level control of RMS. Software components and open-standard integration technologies together are able to provide a reconfigurable software structure, whereas agent-based paradigm can add the reconfigurability into the control logic of CICA. Since an agent-based system cannot guarantee the best global performance, agents in the reference architecture are used to be exception handlers. Some widely neglected problems associated with agent-based system such as communication load and local interest conflicts are also studied. The experimental results reveal the advantage of new agent-based decision making system over the existing methodologies. The proposed control system provides the reconfigurability that lacks in current manufacturing control systems. The CICA control architecture is promising to bring the flexibility in manufacturing systems based on experimental tests performed.<br>Ph. D.

Architectural sustainability is ambiguous. The contemporary understanding of sustainability is often debated on the basis of environmental and humanitarian focus. This focus often brings ambiguity when the concept of sustainability is promoted as an end product and not as a perpetual process. For ecologically harmonious and sustainable human survival, sustainable methods and processes are believed to encourage reworking the course of human development.The Component-based design approach is a promising and appropriate method for achieving sustainability. The method involves systems thinking and illustrates characteristics like flexibility, resilience, adaptability and generative system. The focus of design should be in making relationships among these various components and processes, rather than emphasis on end product. This creative project illustrates these conceptual processes using computational logic to create a project for graphics and multimedia presentation.<br>Department of Architecture

Complex modern software is often built using existing application frameworks and middleware frameworks. These frameworks provide useful common services, while simultaneously imposing architectural rules and constraints. Existing software architecture evaluation methods do not explicitly consider the implications of these frameworks for software architecture. This research extends scenario-based architecture evaluation methods by incorporating framework-related information into different evaluation activities. I propose four techniques which target four different activities within a scenario-based architecture evaluation method. 1) Scenario development: A new technique was designed aiming to extract general scenarios and tactics from framework-related architectural patterns. The technique is intended to complement the current scenario development process. The feasibility of the technique was validated through a case study. Significant improvements of scenario quality were observed in a controlled experiment conducted by another colleague. 2) Architecture representation: A new metrics-driven technique was created to reconstruct software architecture in a just-in-time fashion. This technique was validated in a case study. This approach has significantly improved the efficiency of architecture representation in a complex environment. 3) Attribute specific analysis (performance only): A model-driven approach to performance measurement was applied by decoupling framework-specific information from performance testing requirements. This technique was validated on two platforms (J2EE and Web Services) through a number of case studies. This technique leads to the benchmark producing more representative measures of the eventual application. It reduces the complexity behind the load testing suite and framework-specific performance data collecting utilities. 4) Trade-off and sensitivity analysis: A new technique was designed seeking to improve the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) for trade-off and sensitivity analysis during a framework selection process. This approach was validated in a case study using data from a commercial project. The approach can identify 1) trade-offs implied by an architecture alternative, along with the magnitude of these trade-offs. 2) the most critical decisions in the overall decision process 3) the sensitivity of the final decision and its capability for handling quality attribute priority changes.

Web-based simulation (WBS) systems offer tradeoffs between user interactivity and hardware requirements striking to seek a balance between the differing concerns. Server-based systems offer little interactivity or concurrent visualization capabilities, while client-based systems have increased hardware requirements asking the user to provide high-end workstations. Concurrent visualization of simulation output proves execution intensive, or unusable in some situations. Creating an execution efficient and user friendly WBS system greatly improves user experience while gaining all of the benefits inherent in a web-based system such as high accessibility and ease of maintenance. In order to provide a usable concurrent visualization WBS this thesis developed the Web-Based Queuing System Simulation System (WebQS3). WebQS3 splits the responsibilities of simulation execution and simulation visualization into a client-server environment; the client is responsible for the visualization display and server is responsible for simulation execution. The system differs from many previous WBS systems in that the client-side application is developed using web-standard technologies such as HTTP, XML, SVG, and ECMAScript instead relying on Java Applets and associated technologies. Using web-standards as the foundation of the client agent opens the visualization and model construction functionality to any user that accesses the application using a web browser while also making the application more scalable in terms of user load. Implementing the client with web-standards also included the development of an asynchronous client-server communication protocol as opposed to traditional synchronous communication protocols used by Java WBS systems. The asynchronous protocol demonstrates similar or better execution performance than similar synchronous communication protocols in most quality characteristics. By creating a WBS system using web-standards implemented in most modern web browsers any user may visit the WebQS3 site and have simulation tools available for use. Providing simulation services on the web makes eases the creation of simulation models my making the tools to readily available while facilitating information sharing and collaboration over the web. The WebQS3 system serves as a model to drive research in WBS systems away from proprietary Java technologies to web standards for front-end visualization technologies.<br>Master of Science

The importance of architecture in reuse-driven development is widely recognized. Architecture provides a framework for establishing a match between available components and the system context. It is a key part of the system documentation; enforces the integrity of component composition and provides a basis for managing change. However, one of the most difficult problems in component-based system development (CBD) is ensuring that the software architecture provides an acceptable match with its intended application, business and evolutionary context. Unlike custom development where architectural design relies solely on a detailed requirements specification and where deficiencies in application context can be corrected by ‘tweaking’ the source code, in component-based system development the typical unit of development is often a black-box component whose source code is inaccessible to the developer. Getting the architecture right is therefore key to ensuring quality in a component-based system. Architecture analysis in CBD provides the developer with a means to expose interface mismatches, assess configurations with respect to specific structural and behavioural constraints and to verify the adequacy of compositions with respect to quality constraints. However, support for key component-based system design issues is still patchy in most architecture analysis approaches. My solution has been to develop, Component-based Software Architecture analysis FramEwork (CSAFE), a scenario-driven architecture analysis approach that combines and extends the strengths of current approaches using pluggable analysis. CSAFE is process- pluggable and recognises that negotiation (trade-off analysis) is central to black-box software development. However, while CSAFE is primarily intended to support black-box development, we recognise that there may be aspects of the system for which a black-box solution is not feasible. CSAFE supports custom development in such situations by treating abstract components as placeholders for custom development. CSAFE is supported by an extensible toolset.