Health care systems have started using advanced technologies, such as Sensor Networks and Internet of Things (IoT), to make health care solutions affordable and easier to access.However, elderly patients who are unconvinced about its dependability hesitate to use the immense facilities provided by the advanced technology.A remedy to this problem is to make the health care system dependable and patient-centric so that patients can be convinced to trust the system.Towards achieving this goal, this paper defines a multi-faceted design, explains how the dependability properties can be integrated in it, and briefly illustrate it in a design pattern for sensors that can be used for an elderly home monitoring system.

A global study of the elderly health care needs and their vulnerabilities, combined with an increasing social pressure to offer them quality health care in total privacy and security have shifted the medical health care paradigm from doctor-centered health care to patient-centric health care. In this paradigm health care is deliverable directly to patients living in remote areas and elderly homes by integrating sensors, medical devices with mobile and the internet technologies. In order to provide health care services in a humane manner, it is essential to protect the privacy, safety, dignity, and security of the elderly in all contexts. Towards this goal, this paper puts forth a conceptual four-layered health care architecture and describes verifiable behavioral models of the architectural elements to promote security and privacy for safe patient-centric care.

A Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a network of hybrid systems, combinations of physical entities and software systems that control them. In contrast with an embedded system, a CPS is a large distributed network of many systems that asynchronously interact among themselves as well as directly with the physical world. Consequently, services provided by a CPS must be guaranteed to be dependable in different environmental contexts. Since CPS sites are heterogeneous, both in their hardware and software usage, and autonomous they might use different standards to enforce local dependability. It will be interesting to investigate a global homogeneous framework that automatically and unobtrusively monitors, and enforces dependability for CPS network as a whole. We propose an agent based autonomic architecture that provides global dependable functioning of CPS.

SUMMARY This paper introduces a new process for a rigorous component‐centered development of trustworthy systems. The rationale for our perspective of the process is two‐fold. The activities prescribed in a conventional software engineering development process are neither suitable nor sufficient for developing component‐based systems. Component‐based development methods that are currently practised do not support the explicit specification of trustworthiness properties, and are not based on rigorous principles. Hence they are not suitable for developing trustworthy systems. Trustworthiness is regarded as a composite nonfunctional property comprising the four attributes safety, security, availability, and reliability. They must be rigorously defined for components and systems composed from them. It is essential that the process enforces a direct evidence of trustworthiness in the systems that are developed following the process. Consequently, the development process, in addition to being reuse‐oriented, component‐oriented, and rigorous in all phases of the system lifecycle, should maintain the chain of evidence that the trustworthiness properties are preserved in every activity of every phase of system development. The proposed process includes several parallel interrelated tracks including component development, component assessment, component reuse, and component‐based system development and prescribes specific activities and tools for ensuring trustworthiness in all activities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper emphasizes the role of contextual information and legal rules in publishing services, formulating contracts, discovering services, and their impact on ranking and adaptability. We use Configured Service concept, which is a package that bundles together service functionality, service contract, and service provision context. Service providers only publish Configured Services in a service registry. Service requesters query the registry to discover available services that can match their requirements. Often there is a semantic gap between the service query and the services in the registry. To deal with this, we discuss three query types. The discovery processes, employing different matching processes that are appropriate for the query types, will rank the services in order to enable the requester choose the most relevant service(s). Ranking is also essential when the number of matching's is large. We identify the different situations that call for rediscovery and re-ranking of service queries. We include a brief account of formalism, within which all these activities are precisely described.

A Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a network of hybrid systems, combinations of physical entities and software systems that control them. A CPS offers a set of diverse services under stringent real-time and physical resource constraints. In contrast with embedded systems, a CPS interacts directly with the physical world. Consequently, services in a CPS must be guaranteed with high dependability assurance. In literature the terms dependability and trustworthiness are used interchangeably to denote a compound property, emerging from safety, security, reliability, and availability features that govern the behavior of system components, their services, and their compositions. In this paper we introduce a service-oriented view of CPS and investigate accountability and dependability within context- awareness capabilities of CPS.

Agent-based software engineering combines the strengths of agent theory with the practical software engineering methods for developing large intelligent systems. Designing and implementing agent-based systems are complicated tasks because the agent's BDI characteristics (beliefs, desires, intentions) when codified in the design/implementation as software characteristics may have acquired different connotations. Consequently testing the reliability of the implementation is equally hard. It is necessary to choose an agent's software abstraction that has a minimal deviation from the BDI agent concept, and use it as a formal basis to test an implementation. This paper proposes one such method for conformance testing of BDI properties in an agent-based system.

Real-time reactive systems are often safety-critical and hence must be thoroughly analyzed before they are deployed. We discuss methods for generating tests from object-oriented specifications of real-time reactive systems. Formal descriptions contain information on system entities, as mandated by requirements, as well as environmental entities, included in a domain model. These are exploited in the testing of an implementation, either for generating and sequencing tests, or as an oracle in evaluating test results. A tool has been developed based on the techniques and is being applied to several case studies developed in TROMLAB, a framework for a rigorous development of real-time reactive systems. The train-gate-controller (TGC) case study presented is one of them.

The paper describes an abstract object model for autonomous traffic control systems and proposes a verification approach based on its formal description. Traffic control systems are safety-critical realtime reactive systems, whose correct behavior must be verified before deploying them. Formalism integrated with visual descriptions provide a good approach to meeting the above requirement.

The paper discusses a formal approach for specifying time-dependent web applications, and proposes a Markov model for reliability prediction. Measures for predicting reliability are calculated from the formal architectural specification and system configuration descriptions.

Real-time reactive systems are complex systems to design and verify. Rigorous testing of real-time reactive systems complement the more difficult and expensive formal verification process. This paper discusses a rigorous method for block-box testing of real-time reactive systems, whose design specifications are given in the timed reactive object model (TROM) formalism.

Abstract This paper describes a rigorous method that investigates the suitability of formal specifications written in Object‐Z specification language for testing object‐oriented software implementation in a black‐box fashion. The insight gained in the formalization of a model, the inherent abstractions, and formally specified intended behaviours and exceptions lead to the generation of test templates that are free from any implementation bias. The method described in this paper is an extension of the one proposed by Stocks and Carrington. In particular, the focus of the paper is on generating test templates for composite operations in an Object‐Z specification. The method is illustrated using the specification for an electronic mail system. The specification and the test templates generated for the electronic mail system show several interesting properties of the application that require considerable attention during testing. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The paper discusses complexity categories associated with the phases of a process model that is followed in a rigorous development of real time reactive systems. We describe the complexity that is inherent in each phase and give measures to quantify it and methods to contain it. One of the goals of the work is to automate the measurement methods and integrate them into TROMLAB, a rigorous framework for the development of real time reactive systems.

This paper presents an overview of a process model and an object-oriented environment that supports the process model, for the development of complex real-time reactive systems described using the timed reactive object model. The environment includes an animation tool consisting of a graphical user interface, an interpreter and a simulator, as well as an axiom generator and a verification manager. Debugging, simulating the consequences of exercising a computational step, and verifying invariant properties of an evolving design at different stages of the design process are all permitted.

Article Free Access Share on Semantics of extended relational model for managing uncertain information Authors: V. S. Alagar Concordia University, Montreal, Canada Concordia University, Montreal, CanadaView Profile , F. Sadri University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NCView Profile , J. N. Said Concordia University, Montreal, Canada Concordia University, Montreal, CanadaView Profile Authors Info & Claims CIKM '95: Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Information and knowledge managementDecember 1995 Pages 234–240https://doi.org/10.1145/221270.221578Online:02 December 1995Publication History 2citation267DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations2Total Downloads267Last 12 Months5Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

The paper briefly illustrates an object-oriented-formal modeling of a real-time robotic assembly system. The approach provides a means to structure the system model into independent, modular, and reusable components, thereby making it to be beneficial for system design and maintenance. The underlying formal basis of the approach facilitates validation and formal verification of system requirements.

Abstract A functional formalism for describing and reasoning about the time dependent behaviour of reactive systems is presented. The model is event based and can describe the histories of events with finite duration. It is a generalisation of the model of Caspi and Halbwachs (1986). A set of tools with their operations are introduced in the formalism and structure theorems characterising the algebra of events are proved. The power of this extended model is illustrated through the formal specification and correctness proof for a problem chosen from robotics.

This paper presents an improved adaptive hybrid algorithm for multiplying dense multivariate polynomials that is both time and space efficient. The hybrid algorithm makes use of two families of univariate algorithms, one Karatsuba based and the other DFT based, which are applied recursively to solve the multivariate problem. The hybrid algorithm is adaptive in that particular univariate algorithms are selected at run time to minimize the time complexity; an order-of-magnitude speedup with respect to classical multiplication is achieved over the entire practical range except for very small problems. Empirical investigation shows that most of the theoretical superiority is maintained in actual implementation. The largest contribution to the space requirements of the total algorithm is determined by the univariate algorithm used for the outermost variable; except for quite small problems, selecting univariate algorithms to minimize run time almost always leads to situations where the space requirements of the total algorithm are extremely close to the space required merely to store the result.

Given k ≥ 2 circular disks D1, D2...Dkin a 2-dimensional region bounded by a finite set of polygonal obstacles, an algorithm to determine the existence of a collision free coordinated motion of the disks is given. The time complexity is shown to be O(nk} where n is the number of edges composing the walls. This algorithm is believed to be optimal.

Exact and approximate algorithms for detecting lines in a two-dimensional image space are discussed. For the case of uniformly distributed noise within an image space, transform methods and different notions of probability measures governing the parameters of the transforms are described. It is shown that different quantization schemes of the transformed space are desirable for different probabilistic assumptions. The quantization schemes are evaluated and compared. For one of the procedures that uses a generalized Duda-Hart procedure and a mixed quantization scheme, the time complexity to find all m-flats in n-space is shown to be bounded by O(ptm(n-m)2), where p is the number of points and t is a user parameter. For this procedure more true flats in a given orientation have been found and the number of spurious flats is small.

Previous article Full AccessCorrigendum: A Family of Algorithms for Powering Sparse PolynomialsDavid K. Probst and Vangalur S. AlagarDavid K. Probst and Vangalur S. Alagarhttps://doi.org/10.1137/0209033PDFBibTexSections ToolsAdd to favoritesExport CitationTrack CitationsEmail SectionsAbout"Corrigendum: A Family of Algorithms for Powering Sparse Polynomials." SIAM Journal on Computing, 9(2), p. 439 Previous article FiguresRelatedReferencesCited byDetails Volume 9, Issue 2| 1980SIAM Journal on Computing History Published online:13 July 2006 InformationCopyright © 1980 Society for Industrial and Applied MathematicsPDF Download Article & Publication DataArticle DOI:10.1137/0209033Article page range:pp. 439-439ISSN (print):0097-5397ISSN (online):1095-7111Publisher:Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

We discuss four new algorithms from a family of algorithms for computing integer powers of sparse polynomials. The four algorithms form a sequence of successively better algorithms; even the first member of the sequence shows an improvement in the leading term of the cost function in comparison with the best previously known binomial-expansion algorithm. To quote one result, if f is a 32-term sparse polynomial, computing $f * f^9 $ takes $8.75 \times 10^9 $ multiplications, while the best new algorithm computes $f^{10} $ from scratch using $1.125 \times 10^9 $ multiplications. The time and space analyses given support the conjecture that the best new algorithm is optimal for time and space within the family of sequential binomial-expansion algorithms for this problem. If the input polynomial has t terms, then the nth power may be computed by this algorithm with a time complexity of \[ \frac{{t^n }}{{n!}} + t^{n - 1} \left[ \frac{1}{{2(n - 2)!}} + \frac{1}{{2^{n - 2} (n - 1)!}}\right] + O(t^{n - 2} ),\quad n > 2 , \] and a space complexity of \[ \frac{{t^{n - 1} }}{{2^{2n - 4} (n - 1)!}} + O(t^{n - 2} ),\quad n > 2. \]