Some tools for detecting similarity, such as Sherlock, compare textual documents of any nature, but have limitations to compare source code files. The presence or absence of blank spaces between structure elements, variable names, among other actions interfere with the similarity index found. This paper evidences that the preprocessing of the source code improves Sherlock performance. The results are based on experiments conducted with 66 source code previously plagiarized, and a base formed by 2160 codes created by students of engineering courses in programming classes. In this last set, the situation of similarity was not previously known, so a method was created to calculate precision and recall, in a relative way, based on a set of reference tools, as a kind of oracle. Our approach, called Sherlock N-overlap obtained, in most of the cases tested, similarity indexes superior to other complex tools such as MOSS, JPlag and SIM.

This paper proposes a framework, called Ubiquitous Laboratory for Practical Activities (u-LabPA), which allows students to bring in data from laboratory practices and access them retrospectively in the form of simulations or virtual environments. Simulations were conducted using Petri nets to analyze the system behavior and its application in a physical Laboratory.

An effective decision-making about using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources in cloud computing projects is still a challenge to managers. We need to optimize resources use in cloud services, to obtain financial success in cloud projects. In this work, we propose a Petri net framework to model possible cost savings using public clouds spot instances pricing scheme. The results from initial simulations indicate that spot instances can be a very interesting option for savings in autoscaling process.

Newest processes of CMOS manufacturing allow integrating billions of transistors in a single chip. This huge integration enables to perform complex circuits, which require an energy efficient communication architecture with high scalability and parallelism degree, such as a Network-on-Chip (NoC). However, these technologies are very close to physical limitations implying the susceptibility increase of faults on manufacture and at runtime. Therefore, it is essential to provide a method for efficient fault recovery, enabling the NoC operation even in the presence of faults on routers or links, and still ensure deadlock-free routing even for irregular topologies. A preprocessing approach of the most probable fault scenarios enables to anticipate the computation of deadlock-free routings, reducing the time necessary to interrupt the system operation in a fault event. This work describes a preprocessing technique of fault scenarios based on forecasting fault tendency, which employs a fault threshold circuit and a high-level software that identifies the most relevant fault scenarios. We propose methods for dissimilarity analysis of scenarios based on measurements of cross-correlation of link fault matrices. At runtime, the preprocessing technique employs analytic metrics of average distance routing and links load for fast search of sound fault scenarios. Finally, we use RTL simulation with synthetic traffic to prove the quality of our approach.

Wireless Sensor Networks and Radio Frequency Identification are two technologies that are being used together to monitor and identify objects and people. Their application may cover from a supermarket storage section to a forest monitoring process, having to face a diversity of problems within the scope of Computer Science and Engineering. The present work proposes the use of these technologies in the scope of Education - more specifically in the area of laboratory practice, using a formal modeling technique called Coloured Petri Networks for creating the initial models that would form the architecture of the proposed solution.

A circularly polarized microstrip metallic patch antenna made reusing and recycling materials from construction debris is proposed, designed, fabricated and validated in this paper. Such device is used in RFID systems operating at the 902–928MHz UHF band allocated for International Telecommunication Union, ITU, Region 2, that includes North and South America. The antenna is composed of two stacked patches, a T junction based on microstrip lines and a ground plane, being those arranged in simple and low cost structure. Experimental and simulation results of this microwave device are presented and discussed.

This paper addresses quality of service aspects of Web services (WS) orchestrations created using the business process execution language for Web services (BPEL4WS). BPEL4WS is a promising language describing the WS orchestrations in form of business processes, but it lacks of a sound formal semantic, which hinders the formal analysis and verification of business processes specified in it. Formal methods, like Petri nets (PN), may provide a means to analyse BPEL4WS processes, evaluating its performance, detecting weaknesses and errors in the process model already at design-time. A framework for transformation of BPEL4WS into generalized stochastic Petri nets (GSPN) is proposed to analyse the performance and throughput of WS, based on the execution of orchestrated processes.