Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software Driven Networks (SDN) aggregate resources across multiple domains. This puts requirements on understanding the overall alarm status across these domains and dependencies between them. Current practice of low-quality alarm documentation and confusion around fundamental concepts like alarm states, alarm-types and the underlying protocols like syslog and SNMP traps makes it hard to create one unified alarm interface as part of the SDN API.If alarm interfaces for the various components were expressed in a more formal manner including dependencies and propagation between the alarms the NFV/SDN interface could automatically present an integrated alarm API as well as a synthesized alarm state across the virtualized functions.We present a novel approach to alarm interfaces by providing a formal alarm model together with a domain-specific language that allows us to specify both the alarm models and the constraints placed on the alarm models in a consistent manner. This means that we can verify the consistency of an alarm interfaces and automatically generate interfaces, multi-domain correlation and aggregated states.

Formats for describing timing behaviors range from fixed menus of standard patterns, to fully open-ended behavioral definitions; of which some may be supported by formal semantic underpinnings, while others are better characterized as primarily informal notations. Timing descriptions that allow flexible extension within a fully formalized framework constitute a particularly interesting area in this respect. We present a small logic for expressing timing constraints in such an open-ended fashion, sprung out of our work with timing constraint semantics in the TIMMO-2-USE project [15]. The result is a non-modal, first-order logic over reals and sets of reals, which references the constrained objects solely in terms of event occurrences. Both finite and infinite behaviors may be expressed, and a core feature of the logic is the ability to restrict any constraint to just the finite ranges when a certain system mode is active. Full syntactic and semantic definitions of our formula language are given, and as an indicator of its expressiveness, we show how to express all constraint forms currently defined by TIMMO-2-USE and AUTOSAR. A separate section deals with the support for mode-dependencies that have been proposed for both frameworks, and we demonstrate by an example how our generic mode-restriction mechanism formalizes the details of such an extension.

Network Service Providers are struggling to re- duce cost and still improve customer satisfaction. We have looked at three underlying challenges to achieve these goals; an overwhelming flow of low-quality alarms, understanding the structure and quality of the delivered services, and automation of service configuration. This thesis proposes solutions in these areas based on domain-specific languages, data-mining and self- learning. Most of the solutions have been validated based on data from a large service provider.We look at how domain-models can be used to capture explicit knowledge for alarms and services. In addition, we apply data- mining and self-learning techniques to capture tacit knowledge. The validation shows that models improve the quality of alarm and service models, and automatically render functions like root cause correlation, service and SLA status, as well as service configuration automation.The data-mining and self-learning solutions show that we can learn from available decisions made by experts and automatically assign alarm priorities.

The development and integration of an alarm interface between network elements and a network management system is a costly process, largely because of the informal way in which alarm interfaces are expressed and communicated. Low-quality alarm documentation and confusion around fundamental concepts like alarm states and alarm types are typical consequences of current practices. If alarm interfaces were expressed in a more formal manner, costs could be reduced and more advanced analysis and automation would be enabled. We present a novel approach to alarm interfaces by providing a formal alarm model together with a domain-specific language that allows us to specify both the alarm models and the constraints placed on the alarm models in a consistent manner. This means that we can verify the consistency of an alarm interface and automatically generate artifacts such as alarm correlation rules or alarm documentation based only on the model

Many embedded systems must satisfy timing requirements, which describe how these systems should behave with respect to timing. Such requirements must be dealt with throughout the system development process: from their initial specification, expressed at an abstract level, through the increasingly concrete layers, to the final implementation level. There is a growing awareness that this process needs support from languages, tools, and methodologies

Designing software for embedded systems is complicated by such factors as the tight integration between software and hardware, scarceness of available resources, and hard real-time requirements. In our earlier work we proposed a component-based approach based on modeling both hardware and software using reactive objects and time-constrained reactions, which should allow us to overcome these difficulties. We also presented a software design methodology for embedded real-time systems.Here we describe a system developed using this methodology and discuss its advantages. The system is a personal alarm device that should be worn at the waist of a person and that should detect his or her fall and send an alarm signal. The implementation of the system was verified using a Simulink-based simulator. The simulation demonstrated that, even though calculation of acceleration was simplified to allow for an efficient execution on a resource-constrained platform, fall detection remained satisfactory.The case study demonstrates the advantages of the proposed software design methodology, including the fact that functional and timing properties of a system model can be preserved during implementation process by means of a seamless transition between a model and an implementation.

This paper presents and demonstrates a paradigm to implement automotive systems based on their specifications in a manner that is platform independent. The advantage is to have the same software used in simulation as on different types of micro-controller in a vehicle as well as to ease the integration of different systems. The paradigm is to model the system’s components as reactive objects and to use the Timber kernel to schedule their (re)actions. The demonstration is done by developing an anti-lock braking system within the simulation software CarSim and Simulink, which is then evaluated on a braking maneuver over a surface with different coefficient of adhesion from side to side (split mu).

Supercompilation algorithms can perform great optimizations but sometimes suffer from the problem of code explosion. This results in huge binaries which might hurt the performance on a modern processor. We present a supercompilation algorithm that is fast enough to speculatively supercompile expressions and discard the result if it turned out bad. This allows us to supercompile large parts of the imaginary and spectral parts of nofib in a matter of seconds while keeping the binary size increase below 5%.

Live heap space analyses have so far been concerned with the standard sequential programming model. However, that model is not very well suited for embedded real-time systems, where fragments of code execute concurrently and in orders determined by periodic and sporadic events. Schedulability analysis has shown that the programming model of real-time systems is not fundamentally in conflict with static predictability, but in contrast to accumulative properties like time, live heap space usage exhibits a very state-dependent behavior that renders direct application of schedulability analysis techniques unsuitable.

In this paper we propose an analysis of live heap space upper bounds for real-time systems based on an accurate prediction of task execution orders. The key component of our analysis is the construction of a non-deterministic finite state machine capturing all task executions that are legal under given timing assumptions. By adding heap usage information inferred for each sequential task, our analysis finds an upper bound on the inter-task heap demands as the solution to an integer linear programming problem. Values so obtained are suitable inputs to other analyses depending on the size of a system’s persistent state, such as running time prediction for a concurrent tracing garbage collector.

Previous deforestation and supercompilation algorithms may introduce accidental termination when applied to call-by-value programs. This hides looping bugs from the programmer, and changes the behavior of a program depending on whether it is optimized or not. We present a supercompilation algorithm for a higher-order call-by-value language and prove that the algorithm both terminates and preserves termination properties. This algorithm utilizes strictness information to decide whether to substitute or not and compares favorably with previous call-by-name transformations.