Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Computer science. Systems software. Programming languages (Electronic computers)'

Thesis (MSc)--University of Stellenbosch, 2004.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Embedded computer systems form part of larger systems such as aircraft or chemical processing facilities. Although testing and debugging of such systems are difficult, reliability is often essential. Development of embedded software can be simplified by an environment that limits opportunities for making errors and provides facilities for detection of errors. We implemented a language and compiler that can serve as basis for such an experimental environment. Both are designed to make verification of implementations feasible. Correctness and safety were given highest priority, but without sacrificing efficiency wherever possible. The language is concurrent and includes measures for protecting the address spaces of concurrently running processes. This eliminates the need for expensive run-time memory protection and will benefit resource-strapped embedded systems. The target hardware is assumed to provide no special support for concurrency. The language is designed to be small, simple and intuitive, and to promote compile-time detection of errors. Facilities for abstraction, such as modules and abstract data types support implementation and testing of bigger systems. We have opted for model checking as verification technique, so our implementation language is similar in design to a modelling language for a widely used model checker. Because of this, the implementation code can be used as input for a model checker. However, since the compiler can still contain errors, there might be discrepancies between the implementation code written in our language and the executable code produced by the compiler. Therefore we are attempting to make verification of executable code feasible. To achieve this, our compiler generates code in a special format, comprising a transition system of uninterruptible actions. The actions limit the scheduling points present in processes and reduce the different interleavings of process code possible in a concurrent system. Requirements that conventional hardware places on this form of code are discussed, as well as how the format influences efficiency and responsiveness.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Ingebedde rekenaarstelsels maak deel uit van groter stelsels soos vliegtuie of chemiese prosesseerfasiliteite. Hoewel toetsing en ontfouting van sulke stelsels moeilik is, is betroubaarheid dikwels onontbeerlik. Ontwikkeling van ingebedde sagteware kan makliker gemaak word met 'n ontwikkelingsomgewing wat geleenthede vir foutmaak beperk en fasiliteite vir foutbespeuring verskaf. Ons het 'n programmeertaal en vertaler geïmplementeer wat as basis kan dien vir so 'n eksperimentele omgewing. Beide is ontwerp om verifikasie van implementasies haalbaar te maak. Korrektheid en veiligheid het die hoogste prioriteit geniet, maar sonder om effektiwiteit prys te gee, waar moontlik. Die taal is gelyklopend en bevat maatreëls om die adresruimtes van gelyklopende prosesse te beskerm. Dit maak duur looptyd-geheuebeskerming onnodig, tot voordeel van ingebedde stelsels met 'n tekort aan hulpbronne. Daar word aangeneem dat die teikenhardeware geen spesiale ondersteuning vir gelyklopendheid bevat nie. Die programmeertaal is ontwerp om klein, eenvoudig en intuïtief te wees, en om vertaaltyd-opsporing van foute te bevorder. Fasiliteite vir abstraksie, byvoorbeeld modules en abstrakte datatipes, ondersteun implementering en toetsing van groter stelsels. Ons het modeltoetsing as verifikasietegniek gekies, dus is die ontwerp van ons programmeertaal soortgelyk aan dié van 'n modelleertaal vir 'n modeltoetser wat algemeen gebruik word. As gevolg hiervan kan die implementasiekode as toevoer vir 'n modeltoetser gebruik word. Omdat die vertaler egter steeds foute kan bevat, mag daar teenstrydighede bestaan tussen die implementasie geskryf in ons implementasietaal, en die uitvoerbare masjienkode wat deur die vertaler gelewer word. Daarom poog ons om verifikasie van die uitvoerbare masjienkode haalbaar te maak. Om hierdie doelwit te bereik, is ons vertaler ontwerp om 'n spesiale formaat masjienkode te genereer bestaande uit 'n oorgangstelsel wat ononderbreekbare (atomiese) aksies bevat. Die aksies beperk die skeduleerpunte in prosesse en verminder sodoende die aantal interpaginasies van proseskode wat moontlik is in 'n gelyklopende stelsel. Die vereistes wat konvensionele hardeware aan dié spesifieke formaat kode stel, word bespreek, asook hoe die formaat effektiwiteit en reageerbaarheid van die stelsel beïnvloed.

Thesis (MSc)--University of Stellenbosch, 2007.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Computer aided veri cation techniques, such as model checking, can be used to improve the reliability of software. Model checking is an algorithmic approach to illustrate the correctness of temporal logic speci cations in the formal description of hardware and software systems. In contrast to traditional testing tools, model checking relies on an exhaustive search of all the possible con gurations that these systems may exhibit. Traditionally model checking is applied to abstract or high level designs of software. However, often interpreting or translating these abstract designs to implementations introduce subtle errors. In recent years one trend in model checking has been to apply the model checking algorithm directly to the implementations instead. This thesis is concerned with building an e cient model checker for a small concurrent langauge developed at the University of Stellenbosch. This special purpose langauge, LF, is aimed at developement of small embedded systems. The design of the language was carefully considered to promote safe programming practices. Furthermore, the language and its runtime support system was designed to allow directly model checking LF programs. To achieve this, the model checker extends the existing runtime support infrastructure to generate the state space of an executing LF program.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Rekenaar gebaseerde program toetsing, soos modeltoetsing, kan gebruik word om die betroubaarheid van sagteware te verbeter. Model toetsing is 'n algoritmiese benadering om die korrektheid van temporale logika spesi kasies in die beskrywing van harde- of sagteware te bewys. Anders as met tradisionlee program toetsing, benodig modeltoetsing 'n volledige ondersoek van al die moontlike toestande waarin so 'n beskrywing homself kan bevind. Model toetsing word meestal op abstrakte modelle van sagteware of die ontwerp toegepas. Indien die ontwerp of model aan al die spesi kasies voldoen word die abstrakte model gewoontlik vertaal na 'n implementasie. Die vertalings proses word gewoontlik met die hand gedoen en laat ruimte om nuwe foute, en selfs foute wat uitgeskakel in die model of ontwerp is te veroorsaak. Deesdae, is 'n gewilde benadering tot modeltoetsing om di e tegnieke direk op die implementasie toe te pas, en sodoende die ekstra moeite van model konstruksie en vertaling uit te skakel. Hierdie tesis handel oor die ontwerp, implementasie en toetsing van 'n e ektiewe modeltoetser vir 'n klein gelyklopende taal, LF, wat by die Universiteit van Stellenbosch ontwikkel is. Die enkeldoelige taal, LF, is gemik op die veilige ontwikkeling van ingebedde sagteware. Die taal is ontwerp om veilige programmerings praktyke aan te moedig. Verder is die taal en die onderliggende bedryfstelsel so ontwerp om 'n model toetser te akkomodeer. Om die LF programme direk te kan toets, is die model toetser 'n integrale deel van die bedryfstelsel sodat dit die program kan aandryf om alle moontlike toestande te besoek.

In an orthogonally persistent programming system, data is treated in a manner independent of its persistence. This gives simpler semantics, allows the programmer to ignore details of long-term data storage and enables type checking protection mechanisms to operate over the entire lifetime of the data. The ultimate goal of persistent programming language research is to reduce the costs of producing software. The work presented in this thesis seeks to improve programmer productivity in the following ways: • by reducing the amount of code that has to be written to construct an application; • by increasing the reliability of the code written; and • by improving the programmer’s understanding of the persistent environment in which applications are constructed. Two programming techniques that may be used to pursue these goals in a persistent environment are type-safe linguistic reflection and hyper-programming. The first provides a mechanism by which the programmer can write generators that, when executed, produce new program representations. This allows the specification of programs that are highly generic yet depend in non-trivial ways on the types of the data on which they operate. Genericity promotes software reuse which in turn reduces the amount of new code that has to be written. Hyper-programming allows a source program to contain links to data items in the persistent store. This improves program reliability by allowing certain program checking to be performed earlier than is otherwise possible. It also reduces the amount of code written by permitting direct links to data in the place of textual descriptions. Both techniques contribute to the understanding of the persistent environment through supporting the implementation of store browsing tools and allowing source representations to be associated with all executable programs in the persistent store. This thesis describes in detail the structure of type-safe linguistic reflection and hyper-programming, their benefits in the persistent context, and a suite of programming tools that support reflective programming and hyper-programming. These tools may be used in conjunction to allow reflection over hyper-program representations. The implementation of the tools is described.

The conciseness conjecture is a longstanding notion in computer science that programming languages with more built-in operators, that is more expressive languages with larger semantics, produce smaller programs on average. Chaitin defines the related concept of an elegant program such that there is no smaller program in some language which, when run, produces the same output. This thesis investigates the conciseness conjecture in an empirical manner. Influenced by the concept of elegant programs, we investigate several models of computation, and implement a set of functions in each programming model. The programming models are Turing Machines, λ-Calculus, SKI, RASP, RASP2, and RASP3. The information content of the programs and models are measured as characters. They are compared to investigate hypotheses relating to how the mean program size changes as the size of the semantics change, and how the relationship of mean program sizes between two models compares to that between the sizes of their semantics. We show that the amount of information present in models of the same paradigm, or model family, is a good indication of relative expressivity and average program size. Models that contain more information in their semantics have smaller average programs for the set of tested functions. In contrast, the relative expressiveness of models from differing paradigms, is not indicated by their relative information contents. RASP and Turing Machines have been implemented as Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) circuits to investigate hardware analogues of the hypotheses above. Namely that the amount of information in the semantics for a model directly influences the size of the corresponding circuit, and that the relationship of mean circuit sizes between models is comparable to the relationship of mean program sizes. We show that the number of components in the circuits that realise the semantics and programs of the models correlates with the information required to implement the semantics and program of a model. However, the number of components to implement a program in a circuit for one model does not relate to the number of components implementing the same program in another model. This is in contrast to the more abstract implementations of the programs. Information is a computational resource and therefore follows the rules of Blum’s axioms. These axioms and the speedup theorem are used to obtain an alternate proof of the undecidability of elegance. This work is a step towards unifying the formal notion of expressiveness with the notion of algorithmic information theory and exposes a number of interesting research directions. A start has been made on integrating the results of the thesis with the formal framework for the expressiveness of programming languages.

Computing and software intensive systems are now an inextricable part of modern work, life and entertainment fabric. This consequently has increased our reliance on their dependable operation. While much is known regarding software engineering practices of dependable software systems; the extreme scale, complexity and dynamics of modern software has pushed conventional software engineering tools and techniques to their acceptable limits. Consequently, over the last decade, this has accelerated research into non-conventional methods, many of which are inspired by social and/or biological systems model. Exemplar of which are the DARPA-funded Se1f-Regenerative-Systems (SRS) programme, and Autonomic Computing, where a closed-loop feedback control model is essential to delivering the advocated cognitive immunity and self-management capabilities. While much research work has been conducted on vanous aspects of SRS and autonomy, they are typically based on the assumptions that the structural model (organisation) of managed elements is static and exhaustive monitoring and feedback is computationally scalable. In addition, existing federated approaches to distributed computation and control, such as Multi-Agent-Systems fail to satisfactorily address how global control may be enacted upon the whole system and how an individual component may take on specified monitoring duties - although methods of interaction between federated individuals is well understood. Equally, organic-inspired computing looks to deal with event scale and complexity largely from a mining perspective, with observation concerns deferred to a suitably selective abstraction known as the "observation model". However, computing and mathematical science research, along with other fields has developed problem-specific approaches to help manage complexity; abstraction-based approaches can simplify structural organisation allowing the underlying meaning to be better understood. Statistical and graph-based approaches can both provide identifying features along with selectively reducing the size of a modelled structure by selecting specific areas that conform to certain topological criteria. This research studies the engineering concerns relating to observation of large-scale networks of autonomic systems. It examines methods that can be used to manage scale and generalises and formalises them within a software engineering approach; guiding the development of an automated adaptive observation subsystem - the Global Observer Model. This approach uses a model-based representation of the observed system, represented by appropriately attached modelled elements; adapters between the underlying system and the observation subsystem. The concepts of Signature and Technique definitions describe large-scale or complex system characteristics and target selection techniques respectively. Collections of these objects are then utilised throughout the framework along with decision and deployment logic (collectively referred to as the Observer Behaviour Definition - an ECA-like observational control) to provide a runtime-adaptable observation overlay. The evaluation of this research is provided by demonstrations of the observation framework; firstly in experimental form for assessment of the Signature and Technique approach, and then by application to the Email Exploration Tool (EET), a forensic investigation utility.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010.
Committee Chair: Yannis Smaragdakis; Committee Member: Oege de Moor; Committee Member: Richard LeBlanc; Committee Member: Santosh Pande; Committee Member: Spencer Rugaber. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

Thesis (MSc)--University of Stellenbosch, 2001.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Computer-aided verification techniques, such as model checking, are often considered essential to produce highly reliable software systems. Modern model checkers generally require models to be written in eSP-like notations. Unfortunately, such systems are usually implemented using conventional imperative programming languages. Translating the one paradigm into the other is a difficult and error prone process. If one were to program in a process-oriented language from the outset, the chasm between implementation and model could be bridged more readily. This would lead to more accurate models and ultimately more reliable software. This thesis covers the definition of a process-oriented language targeted specifically towards embedded systems and the implementation of a suitable compiler and run-time system. The language, LF, is for the most part an extension of the language Joyce, which was defined by Brinch Hansen. Both LF and Joyce have features which I believe make them easier to use than other esp based languages such as occam. An example of this is a selective communication primitive which allows for both input and output guards which is not supported in occam. The efficiency of the implementation is important. The language was therefore designed to be expressive, but constructs which are expensive to implement were avoided. Security, however, was the overriding consideration in the design of the language and runtime system. The compiler produces native code. Most other esp derived languages are either interpreted or execute as tasks on host operating systems. Arguably this is because most implementations of esp and derivations thereof are for academic purposes only. LF is intended to be an implementation language. The performance of the implementation is evaluated in terms of practical metries such as the time needed to complete communication operations and the average time needed to service an interrupt.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Rekenaar ondersteunde verifikasietegnieke soos programmodellering, is onontbeerlik in die ontwikkeling van hoogs betroubare programmatuur. In die algemeen, aanvaar programme wat modelle toets eSP-agtige notasie as toevoer. Die meeste programme word egter in meer konvensionele imperatiewe programmeertale ontwikkel. Die vertaling vanuit die een paradigma na die ander is 'n moelike proses, wat baie ruimte laat vir foute. Indien daar uit die staanspoor in 'n proses gebaseerde taal geprogrammeer word, sou die verwydering tussen model en program makliker oorbrug kon word. Dit lei tot akkurater modelle en uiteindelik tot betroubaarder programmatuur. Die tesis ondersoek die definisie van 'n proses gebaseerde taal, wat gemik is op ingebedde programmatuur. Verder word die implementasie van 'n toepaslike vertaler en looptyd omgewing ook bespreek. Die taal, LF, is grotendeels gebaseer op Joyce, wat deur Brinch Hansen ontwikkel is. Joyce en op sy beurt LF, is verbeterings op ander esp verwante tale soos occam. 'n Voorbeeld hiervan is 'n selektiewe kommunikasieprimitief wat die gebruik van beide toevoer- en afvoerwagte ondersteun. Omdat 'n effektiewe implementasie nagestreef word, is die taalontwerp om so nadruklik moontlik te wees, sonder om strukture in te sluit wat oneffektief is om te implementeer. Sekuriteit was egter die oorheersende oorweging in die ontwerp van die taal en looptyd omgewing. Die vertaler lewer masjienkode, terwyl die meeste ander implementasies van eSP-agtige tale geinterpreteer word of ondersteun word as prosesse op 'n geskikte bedryfstelsel- die meeste eSP-agtige tale word slegs vir akademiese doeleindes aangewend. LF is by uitstek ontwerp as implementasie taal. Die evaluasie van die stelsel se werkverrigting is gedoen aan die hand van praktiese maatstawwe soos die tyd wat benodig word vir kommunikasie, sowel as die gemiddelde tyd benodig vir die hantering van onderbrekings.

Since programs are written in many languages and design documents are not maintained (if they ever existed), there is a need to extract the design and other information that the programs represent. To do this without writing a separate program for each language, a common representation of the symbol table and parse tree would be required.The purpose of the parse tree and symbol table will not be to generate object code but to provide a platform for analysis tools. In this way the tool designer develops only one version instead of separate versions for each language. The generic symbol table and generic parse tree may not be as detailed as those same structures in a specific compiler but the parse tree must include all structures for imperative languages.
Department of Computer Science

The availability of modern commodity multicore processors and multiprocessor computer systems has resulted in the widespread adoption of parallel computers in a variety of environments, ranging from the home to workstation and server environments in particular. Unfortunately, parallel programming is harder and requires more expertise than the traditional sequential programming model. The variety of tools and parallel programming models available to the programmer further complicates the issue. The primary goal of this research was to identify and describe a selection of parallel programming tools and techniques to aid novice parallel programmers in the process of developing efficient parallel C/C++ programs for the Linux platform. This was achieved by highlighting and describing the key concepts and hardware factors that affect parallel programming, providing a brief survey of commonly available software development tools and parallel programming models and libraries, and presenting structured approaches to software performance tuning and parallel programming. Finally, the performance of several parallel programming models and libraries was investigated, along with the programming effort required to implement solutions using the respective models. A quantitative research methodology was applied to the investigation of the performance and programming effort associated with the selected parallel programming models and libraries, which included automatic parallelisation by the compiler, Boost Threads, Cilk Plus, OpenMP, POSIX threads (Pthreads), and Threading Building Blocks (TBB). Additionally, the performance of the GNU C/C++ and Intel C/C++ compilers was examined. The results revealed that the choice of parallel programming model or library is dependent on the type of problem being solved and that there is no overall best choice for all classes of problem. However, the results also indicate that parallel programming models with higher levels of abstraction require less programming effort and provide similar performance compared to explicit threading models. The principle conclusion was that the problem analysis and parallel design are an important factor in the selection of the parallel programming model and tools, but that models with higher levels of abstractions, such as OpenMP and Threading Building Blocks, are favoured.

This thesis presents Lighthouse, an experimental branch of the Haskell-based House operating system which integrates Li et al.'s Lightweight Concurrency framework. First and foremost, it improves House's viability as a "real operating system" by providing a new extensible scheduler framework which makes it easy to experiment with different scheduling policies. In particular, Lighthouse extends Concurrent Haskell with thread priority and implements a priority-based scheduler which significantly improves system responsiveness when compared with GHC's normal round-robin scheduler. Even while doing this, it improves on House's claim of being "written in Haskell" by moving a whole subsystem out of the complex C-based runtime system and into Haskell itself. In addition, Lighthouse also includes an alternate, simpler implementation of Lightweight Concurrency which takes advantage of House's unique setting (running directly on uniprocessor x86 hardware). This experience sheds light on areas that need further attention before the system can truly be viable---primarily interactions between blackholing and interrupt handling. In particular, this thesis uncovers a potential case of self-deadlock and suggests potential solutions. Finally, this work offers further insight into the viability of using high-level languages such as Haskell for systems programming. Although laziness and blackholing present unique problems, many parts of the system are still much easier to express in Haskell than traditional languages such as C.

Expert systems are very useful and probably the most fruitful products of applied artificial intelligence. Expert systems, however, are very· expensive to develop. Powerful construction tools are indispensable to construct, modify and maintain a practical expert system. GUESS/l is a domain-independent expert systems shell that captures and enhances the strengths of its predecessors while at the same time overcoming.their limitations. GUESS/l gives a strong emphasis on human engineering, language generality, diversity of data representation and control structures, programming and run-time environment, database construction facilities and security, and many other aspects that are related to the ease of development and maintenance of expert systems.
Master of Science

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm to localize and modularize the concerns that tend to be tangled and scattered across traditional programming modules, like functions or classes. Such concerns are known as crosscutting concerns and aspect-oriented languages propose to encapsulate them in modules called aspects. Because each crosscutting concern implemented in an aspect is separated from the other concerns, AOP improves reusability, readability, and maintainability of code.

While it improves separation of concerns, AOP suffers from well-known composition issues. Aspects developed in isolation may indeed interact with each other in ways that were not expected by the programmers and therefore lead to a program that does not meet its requirements. Without appropriate tools, undesired aspect interactions must be identified by reading code in order to gain global knowledge of the program and understand where and how aspects interact. Then, if the aspect language does not offer the needed support, these interactions must be resolved by invasively changing the code of the conflicting aspects to make them work together. Neither one of these solutions are acceptable since global knowledge as well as invasive and composition-specific modifications are exactly what separation of concerns seeks to avoid.

In this dissertation we show that the existing approaches to compose aspects are not entirely satisfying either with respect to separation of concerns. These approaches either rely on global knowledge and invasive modifications, which is problematic, or lack genericity and/or expressivity, which means that code reading/code modification may still be required for the aspect interactions they cannot handle.

To properly detect and resolve aspect interactions we propose a novel approach that is based on AOP itself. Since aspect composition is a concern that, by definition, crosscuts the aspects, it indeed makes sense to expect that a technique to improve the separation of crosscutting concerns such as AOP is well-suited for the task. The resulting mechanism is based on reflection principles and is called reflective AOP.

The main difference between "regular" AOP and reflective AOP lies in the parts of the system they address. While traditional AOP aims at modularizing the concerns that crosscut the base system, reflective AOP offers the possibility to handle the concerns that crosscut the aspects themselves. This is achieved by incorporating new kinds of joinpoints, pointcuts and advice into the aspect language. These new elements, which form what we call a meta joinpoint model, are dedicated to the aspect level and enable programmers to reason about and act upon the semantics of aspects at runtime. As validated on numerous examples of aspect composition, having a well-designed and principled meta joinpoint model makes it possible to deal with both the detection and the resolution of composition issues in a way that preserves the separation of concerns principle. These examples are illustrated using Phase, our prototype reflective AOP language.
Doctorat en Sciences
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Atuais paradigmas correntes de programação de software, mais precisamente o Paradigma Imperativo (PI) e o Paradigma Declarativo (PD), apresentam deficiências que afetam o desempenho das aplicações e a obtenção de “desacoplamento” (ou acoplamento mínimo) entre elementos de software. Com o objetivo de amenizar essas deficiências, foi desenvolvido o Paradigma Orientado a Notificações (PON). O PON se inspira nos conceitos do PI (e.g. objetos) e do PD (e.g. base de fatos e regras), mas altera a essência da execução ou inferência lógica-causal. Basicamente, o PON usa objetos para tratar de fatos e regras na forma de composições de outros objetos menores que, entretanto, apresentam características comportamentais de certa autonomia, independência, reatividade e colaboração por meio de notificações pontuais para fins de inferência. Isto dito, salienta-se que a materialização dos conceitos do PON se deu por meio de um arquétipo ou Framework elaborado em linguagem de programação C++. Tal materialização do PON vem sendo utilizada como uma alternativa para o desenvolvimento de aplicações sob o domínio desse paradigma e possibilitou, de fato, a criação de aplicações para ambientes computacionais usuais baseados na chamada arquitetura Von Neumann. Apesar destas contribuições para com a sua materialização, o desenvolvimento de aplicações no PON ainda não apresentava resultados satisfatórios em termos de desempenho tal qual deveria a luz do seu cálculo assintótico, nem a facilidade de programação que seria uma das suas características principais. Nesse âmbito, o presente trabalho propõe como evolução para o estado da técnica do PON a criação de uma linguagem e compilador para o paradigma. Sendo assim, este trabalho apresenta a definição da linguagem criada com a utilização de exemplos práticos guiados pelo desenvolvimento de aplicações. Subsequentemente são apresentados detalhes do compilador bem como sua estrutura. Para demonstrar a evolução do estado da técnica do paradigma, no tocante a desempenho (e.g. tempo de processamento) e facilidade de programação foram realizados estudos comparativos com a utilização da linguagem e compilador. Os estudos comparativos foram guiados com a elaboração de dois softwares denominados aplicação Mira ao Alvo e aplicação de Vendas. Essas aplicações foram desenvolvidas com base na linguagem PON e foram realizados experimentos simulando sequências de execução com o intuito de avaliar o tempo de processamento para o resultado gerado pelo compilador PON. Ainda, tais experimentos possibilitaram a avaliação de maneira subjetiva da linguagem de programação PON no tocante a facilidade de programação. Deste modo, foi possível observar com tais estudos comparativos que os resultados apresentados pelo compilador PON foram satisfatórios quando comparados aos resultados obtidos pelo Framework e por aplicações equivalentes desenvolvidas baseadas no Paradigma Orientado a Objetos (POO).
The current software development paradigms, specifically the Imperative Paradigm (IP) and the Declarative Paradigm (DP), have weaknesses that affect the applications performance and decoupling (or minimal coupling) between the software modules. In order to provide a solution regarding these weaknesses, the Notification Oriented Paradigm (NOP) was developed. NOP is inspired by the concepts of the IP (e.g. objects) and DP (e.g. base of facts and Rules). Basically, NOP uses objects to deal with facts and Rules as compositions of other, smaller, objects. These objects have the following behavioral characteristics: autonomy, independence, responsiveness and collaboration through notifications. Thus, it’s highlighted that the realization of these concepts was firstly instantiated through a Framework developed in C++. Such NOP materialization has been used as an alternative for Application development in the domain of this paradigm and made possible, in fact, the creation of applications for typical computing environments based on Von Neumann architecture. The development of the C++ materialization of NOP has not presented satisfactory results in terms of performance as it should when taking into account its asymptotic calculation and programming facility. In this context, this work presents an evolution of NOP by creating a specific programming language, and its respective compiler, for this paradigm. Therefore, this work presents the language definition and the details of the development of its compiler. To evaluate the evolution regarding to performance (e.g. processing time) and programming facility, some comparative studies using the NOP language and compiler are presented. These comparative studies were performed by developing two software applications called Target and Sales Application. These applications have been developed based on NOP language, and the experiments were performed simulating sequences of execution in order to evaluate the processing time for the generated results by NOP compiler. Still, these experiments allowed the evaluation of NOP programming language, in a subjective way, regarding to ease programming. Thus, with such comparative studies, it was possible to observe that the results presented by the compiler NOP were satisfactory when compared to the results achieved via Framework and for equivalent applications developed based on the Oriented Object Paradigm (OOP).

Owing to advancements in component re-use technology, component-based software development (CBSD) has come a long way in developing complex commercial software systems while reducing software development time and cost. However, assembling distributed resource-constrained and safety-critical systems using current assembly techniques is a challenge. Within complex systems when there are numerous ways to assemble the components unless the software architecture clearly defines how the components should be composed, determining the correct assembly that satisfies the system assembly constraints is difficult. Component technologies like CORBA and .NET do a very good job of integrating components, but they do not automate component assembly; it is the system developer's responsibility to ensure thatthe components are assembled correctly. In this thesis, we first define a component-based system assembly (CBSA) technique called "Constrained Component Assembly Technique" (CCAT), which is useful when the system has complex assembly constraints and the system architecture specifies component composition as assembly constraints. The technique poses the question: Does there exist a way of assembling the components that satisfies all the connection, performance, reliability, and safety constraints of the system, while optimizing the objective constraint? To implement CCAT, we present a powerful framework called "CoBaSA". The CoBaSA framework includes an expressive language for declaratively describing component functional and extra-functional properties, component interfaces, system-level and component-level connection, performance, reliability, safety, and optimization constraints. To perform CBSA, we first write a program (in the CoBaSA language) describing the CBSA specifications and constraints, and then an interpreter translates the CBSA program into a satisfiability and optimization problem. Solving the generated satisfiability and optimization problem is equivalent to answering the question posed by CCAT. If a satisfiable solution is found, we deduce that the system can be assembled without violating any constraints. Since CCAT and CoBaSA provide a mechanism for assembling systems that have complex assembly constraints, they can be utilized in several industries like the avionics industry. We demonstrate the merits of CoBaSA by assembling an actual avionic system that could be used on-board a Boeing aircraft. The empirical evaluation shows that our approach is promising and can scale to handle complex industrial problems.

LBIC is a technique for scanning the local quantum efficiency of solar cells. This kind of measurements needs a highly specialized, and time critical controlling software. In 1996 the client, professor Markus Rinio, constructed an LBIC system, and wrote the controlling software as a Turbo-Pascal 7.0 application, running under the MS-DOS 6.22 operating system. By now (2018) both the software and several hardware components are in dire need to be modernized. This thesis thoroughly describes several important aspects of this work, and the considerations needed for a successful result. This includes both very foundational choices about the software architecture, the choice of suitable operating system, the threading model, and the adaptation to new hardware with vastly different behavior. The project also included a new hardware module for position reports and instrument triggering, as well as several adaptations to transform the DOS-based LBIC software into a pleasant modern GUI application.

Este trabalho trata do tema de Paradigma Orientado a Notificações (PON) e sua adequação para prover suporte a conceitos fuzzy. O PON se inspira em elementos dos paradigmas imperativo e declarativo, buscando resolver inconvenientes de ambos. Ao decompor uma aplicação em uma rede de entidades computacionais menores que são executadas apenas quando necessário, o PON elimina a necessidade de realizar computações desnecessárias e alcança melhor desacoplamento lógico-causal facilitando o reaproveitamento e distribuição. Ademais, o PON permite expressar o seu conhecimento lógico-causal em alto nível, por meio de regras no formato SE-ENTÃO. Os sistemas fuzzy, por sua vez, realizam inferências em bases de conhecimento lógico-causal (regras SE-ENTÃO) que lidam com problemas que envolvem imprecisão. Uma vez que o PON utiliza regras SE-ENTÃO de uma forma alternativa, reduzindo avaliações redundantes e acoplamento, este trabalho foi realizado para identificar, propor e avaliar as mudanças necessárias a serem realizadas sobre o PON para que este possa ser utilizado no desenvolvimento de sistemas fuzzy. Após a realização da proposta, foram criadas materializações na forma de um framework em linguagem C++, e uma linguagem de programação própria (LingPONFuzzy) com suporte a inferência fuzzy. A partir delas foram criados casos de estudo e realizados diversos testes para validar a solução proposta. Os resultados dos testes mostram uma redução significativa no número de regras avaliadas em relação a um sistema fuzzy desenvolvido utilizando ferramentas convencionais (frameworks), o que poderia representar uma melhoria no desempenho das aplicações.
This work proposes to adjust the Notification Oriented Paradigm (NOP) so that it provides support to fuzzy concepts. NOP is inspired by elements of imperative and declarative paradigms, seeking to solve some of the drawbacks of both. By decomposing an application into a network of smaller computational entities that are executed only when necessary, NOP eliminates the need to perform unnecessary computations and helps to achieve better logical-causal uncoupling, facilitating code reuse and application distribution over multiple processors or machines. In addition, NOP allows to express the logical-causal knowledge at a high level of abstraction, through rules in IF-THEN format. Fuzzy systems, in turn, perform logical inferences on causal knowledge bases (IF-THEN rules) that can deal with problems involving uncertainty. Since PON uses IF-THEN rules in an alternative way, reducing redundant evaluations and providing better decoupling, this research has been carried out to identify, propose and evaluate the necessary changes to be made on NOP allowing to be used in the development of fuzzy systems. After that, two fully usable materializations were created: a C++ framework, and a complete programming language (LingPONFuzzy) that provide support to fuzzy inference systems. From there study cases have been created and several tests cases were conducted, in order to validate the proposed solution. The test results have shown a significant reduction in the number of rules evaluated in comparison to a fuzzy system developed using conventional tools (frameworks), which could represent an improvement in performance of the applications.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
The contribution of this thesis focuses on addressing the challenges of improving and integrating the UniFrame Discovery Service (URDS) and Multi-level Matching (MLM) concepts. The objective was to find enhancements for both URDS and MLM and address the need of a comprehensive discovery service which goes beyond simple attribute based matching. It presents a detailed discussion on developing an enhanced version of URDS with MLM (proURDS). After implementing proURDS, the thesis includes details of experiments with different deployments of URDS components and different configurations of MLM. The experiments and analysis were carried out using proURDS produced MLM contracts. The proURDS referred to a public dataset called QWS dataset. This dataset includes actual information of software components (i.e., web services), which were harvested from the Internet. The proURDS implements the different matching operations as independent operators at each level of matching (i.e., General, Syntactic, Semantic, Synchronization, and QoS). Finally, a case study was carried out with the deployed proURDS. The case study addresses real world component discovery requirements from the earth science domain. It uses the contracts collected from public portals which provide geographical and weather related data.