KLUEDO | D. Software

Architectures and Methods for Large Scale Participatory Sensing and Data Modeling in Smart City Environments (2017)

Tobias Franke

The proliferation of sensors in everyday devices – especially in smartphones – has led to crowd sensing becoming an important technique in many urban applications ranging from noise pollution mapping or road condition monitoring to tracking the spreading of diseases. However, in order to establish integrated crowd sensing environments on a large scale, some open issues need to be tackled first. On a high level, this thesis concentrates on dealing with two of those key issues: (1) efficiently collecting and processing large amounts of sensor data from smartphones in a scalable manner and (2) extracting abstract data models from those collected data sets thereby enabling the development of complex smart city services based on the extracted knowledge. Going more into detail, the first main contribution of this thesis is the development of methods and architectures to facilitate simple and efficient deployments, scalability and adaptability of crowd sensing applications in a broad range of scenarios while at the same time enabling the integration of incentivation mechanisms for the participating general public. During an evaluation within a complex, large-scale environment it is shown that real-world deployments of the proposed data recording architecture are in fact feasible. The second major contribution of this thesis is the development of a novel methodology for using the recorded data to extract abstract data models which are representing the inherent core characteristics of the source data correctly. Finally – and in order to bring together the results of the thesis – it is demonstrated how the proposed architecture and the modeling method can be used to implement a complex smart city service by employing a data driven development approach.

Symbolic Simulation of Mixed-Signal Systems with Extended Affine Arithmetic (2016)

Carna Radojicic

Mixed-signal systems combine analog circuits with digital hardware and software systems. A particular challenge is the sensitivity of analog parts to even small deviations in parameters, or inputs. Parameters of circuits and systems such as process, voltage, and temperature are never accurate; we hence model them as uncertain values (‘uncertainties’). Uncertain parameters and inputs can modify the dynamic behavior and lead to properties of the system that are not in specified ranges. For verification of mixed- signal systems, the analysis of the impact of uncertainties on the dynamical behavior plays a central role. Verification of mixed-signal systems is usually done by numerical simulation. A single numerical simulation run allows designers to verify single parameter values out of often ranges of uncertain values. Multi-run simulation techniques such as Monte Carlo Simulation, Corner Case simulation, and enhanced techniques such as Importance Sampling or Design-of-Experiments allow to verify ranges – at the cost of a high number of simulation runs, and with the risk of not finding potential errors. Formal and symbolic approaches are an interesting alternative. Such methods allow a comprehensive verification. However, formal methods do not scale well with heterogeneity and complexity. Also, formal methods do not support existing and established modeling languages. This fact complicates its integration in industrial design flows. In previous work on verification of Mixed-Signal systems, Affine Arithmetic is used for symbolic simulation. This allows combining the high coverage of formal methods with the ease-of use and applicability of simulation. Affine Arithmetic computes the propagation of uncertainties through mostly linear analog circuits and DSP methods in an accurate way. However, Affine Arithmetic is currently only able to compute with contiguous regions, but does not permit the representation of and computation with discrete behavior, e.g. introduced by software. This is a serious limitation: in mixed-signal systems, uncertainties in the analog part are often compensated by embedded software; hence, verification of system properties must consider both analog circuits and embedded software. The objective of this work is to provide an extension to Affine Arithmetic that allows symbolic computation also for digital hardware and software systems, and to demonstrate its applicability and scalability. Compared with related work and state of the art, this thesis provides the following achievements: 1. The thesis introduces extended Affine Arithmetic Forms (XAAF) for the representation of branch and merge operations. 2. The thesis describes arithmetic and relational operations on XAAF, and reduces over-approximation by using an LP solver. 3. The thesis shows and discusses ways to integrate this XAAF into existing modeling languages, in particular SystemC. This way, breaks in the design flow can be avoided. The applicability and scalability of the approach is demonstrated by symbolic simulation of a Delta-Sigma Modulator and a PLL circuit of an IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver system.

Verification & Performance Measurement for Transport Protocol Parallel Routing of an AUTOSAR Gateway System (2016)

Hassan Mohammad

A wide range of methods and techniques have been developed over the years to manage the increasing complexity of automotive Electrical/Electronic systems. Standardization is an example of such complexity managing techniques that aims to minimize the costs, avoid compatibility problems and improve the efficiency of development processes. A well-known and -practiced standard in automotive industry is AUTOSAR (Automotive Open System Architecture). AUTOSAR is a common standard among OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer), suppliers and other involved companies. It was developed originally with the goal of simplifying the overall development and integration process of Electrical/Electronic artifacts from different functional domains, such as hardware, software, and vehicle communication. However, the AUTOSAR standard, in its current status, is not able to manage the problems in some areas of the system development. Validation and optimization process of system configuration handled in this thesis are examples of such areas, in which the AUTOSAR standard offers so far no mature solutions. Generally, systems developed on the basis of AUTOSAR must be configured in a way that all defined requirements are met. In most cases, the number of configuration parameters and their possible settings in AUTOSAR systems are large, especially if the developed system is complex with modules from various knowledge domains. The verification process here can consume a lot of resources to test all possible combinations of configuration settings, and ideally find the optimal configuration variant, since the number of test cases can be very high. This problem is referred to in literature as the combinatorial explosion problem. Combinatorial testing is an active and promising area of functional testing that offers ideas to solve the combinatorial explosion problem. Thereby, the focus is to cover the interaction errors by selecting a sample of system input parameters or configuration settings for test case generation. However, the industrial acceptance of combinatorial testing is still weak because of the deficiency of real industrial examples. This thesis is tempted to fill this gap between the industry and the academy in the area of combinatorial testing to emphasizes the effectiveness of combinatorial testing in verifying complex configurable systems. The particular intention of the thesis is to provide a new applicable approach to combinatorial testing to fight the combinatorial explosion problem emerged during the verification and performance measurement of transport protocol parallel routing of an AUTOSAR gateway. The proposed approach has been validated and evaluated by means of two real industrial examples of AUTOSAR gateways with multiple communication buses and two different degrees of complexity to illustrate its applicability.

Towards A Non-tracking Web (2016)

Istemi Ekin Akkus

Today, many publishers (e.g., websites, mobile application developers) commonly use third-party analytics services and social widgets. Unfortunately, this scheme allows these third parties to track individual users across the web, creating privacy concerns and leading to reactions to prevent tracking via blocking, legislation and standards. While improving user privacy, these efforts do not consider the functionality third-party tracking enables publishers to use: to obtain aggregate statistics about their users and increase their exposure to other users via online social networks. Simply preventing third-party tracking without replacing the functionality it provides cannot be a viable solution; leaving publishers without essential services will hurt the sustainability of the entire ecosystem. In this thesis, we present alternative approaches to bridge this gap between privacy for users and functionality for publishers and other entities. We first propose a general and interaction-based third-party cookie policy that prevents third-party tracking via cookies, yet enables social networking features for users when wanted, and does not interfere with non-tracking services for analytics and advertisements. We then present a system that enables publishers to obtain rich web analytics information (e.g., user demographics, other sites visited) without tracking the users across the web. While this system requires no new organizational players and is practical to deploy, it necessitates the publishers to pre-define answer values for the queries, which may not be feasible for many analytics scenarios (e.g., search phrases used, free-text photo labels). Our second system complements the first system by enabling publishers to discover previously unknown string values to be used as potential answers in a privacy-preserving fashion and with low computation overhead for clients as well as servers. These systems suggest that it is possible to provide non-tracking services with (at least) the same functionality as today’s tracking services.

Multi-Edge Graph Visualizations for Fostering Software Comprehension (2016)

Ala Abuthawabeh

Typically software engineers implement their software according to the design of the software structure. Relations between classes and interfaces such as method-call relations and inheritance relations are essential parts of a software structure. Accordingly, analyzing several types of relations will benefit the static analysis process of the software structure. The tasks of this analysis include but not limited to: understanding of (legacy) software, checking guidelines, improving product lines, finding structure, or re-engineering of existing software. Graphs with multi-type edges are possible representation for these relations considering them as edges, while nodes represent classes and interfaces of software. Then, this multiple type edges graph can be mapped to visualizations. However, the visualizations should deal with the multiplicity of relations types and scalability, and they should enable the software engineers to recognize visual patterns at the same time. To advance the usage of visualizations for analyzing the static structure of software systems, I tracked difierent development phases of the interactive multi-matrix visualization (IMMV) showing an extended user study at the end. Visual structures were determined and classified systematically using IMMV compared to PNLV in the extended user study as four categories: High degree, Within-package edges, Cross-package edges, No edges. In addition to these structures that were found in these handy tools, other structures that look interesting for software engineers such as cycles and hierarchical structures need additional visualizations to display them and to investigate them. Therefore, an extended approach for graph layout was presented that improves the quality of the decomposition and the drawing of directed graphs according to their topology based on rigorous definitions. The extension involves describing and analyzing the algorithms for decomposition and drawing in detail giving polynomial time complexity and space complexity. Finally, I handled visualizing graphs with multi-type edges using small-multiples, where each tile is dedicated to one edge-type utilizing the topological graph layout to highlight non-trivial cycles, trees, and DAGs for showing and analyzing the static structure of software. Finally, I applied this approach to four software systems to show its usefulness.

Large Display Interaction Using Mobile Devices (2015)

Jens Bauer

Large displays become more and more popular, due to dropping prices. Their size and high resolution leverages collaboration and they are capable of dis- playing even large datasets in one view. This becomes even more interesting as the number of big data applications increases. The increased screen size and other properties of large displays pose new challenges to the Human- Computer-Interaction with these screens. This includes issues such as limited scalability to the number of users, diversity of input devices in general, leading to increased learning efforts for users, and more. Using smart phones and tablets as interaction devices for large displays can solve many of these issues. Since they are almost ubiquitous today, users can bring their own device. This approach scales well with the number of users. These mobile devices are easy and intuitive to use and allow for new interaction metaphors, as they feature a wide array of input and output capabilities, such as touch screens, cameras, accelerometers, microphones, speakers, Near-Field Communication, WiFi, etc. This thesis will present a concept to solve the issues posed by large displays. We will show proofs-of-concept, with specialized approaches showing the via- bility of the concept. A generalized, eyes-free technique using smart phones or tablets to interact with any kind of large display, regardless of hardware or software then overcomes the limitations of the specialized approaches. This is implemented in a large display application that is designed to run under a multitude of environments, including both 2D and 3D display setups. A special visualization method is used to combine 2D and 3D data in a single visualization. Additionally the thesis will present several approaches to solve common is- sues with large display interaction, such as target sizes on large display getting too small, expensive tracking hardware, and eyes-free interaction through vir- tual buttons. These methods provide alternatives and context for the main contribution.

Interactive Visual Analysis of Software Structures (2015)

Taimur Khan

Maintaining complex software systems tends to be a costly activity where software engineers spend a significant amount of time trying to understand the system's structure and behavior. As early as the 1980s, operation and maintenance costs were already twice as expensive as the initial development costs incurred. Since then these costs have steadily increased. The focus of this thesis is to reduce these costs through novel interactive exploratory visualization concepts and to apply these modern techniques in the context of services offered by software quality analysis. Costs associated with the understanding of software are governed by specific features of the system in terms of different domains, including re-engineering, maintenance, and evolution. These features are reflected in software measurements or inner qualities such as extensibility, reusability, modifiability, testability, compatability, or adatability. The presence or absence of these qualities determines how easily a software system can conform or be customized to meet new requirements. Consequently, the need arises to monitor and evaluate the qualitative state of a software system in terms of these qualities. Using metrics-based analysis, production costs and quality defects of the software can be recorded objectively and analyzed. In practice, there exist a number of free and commercial tools that analyze the inner quality of a software system through the use of software metrics. However, most of these tools focus on software data mining and metrics (computational analysis) and only a few support visual analytical reasoning. Typically, computational analysis tools generate data and software visualization tools facilitate the exploration and explanation of this data through static or interactive visual representations. Tools that combine these two approaches focus only on well-known metrics and lack the ability to examine user defined metrics. Further, they are often confined to simple visualization methods and metaphors, including charts, histograms, scatter plots, and node-link diagrams. The goal of this thesis is to develop methodologies that combine computational analysis methods together with sophisticated visualization methods and metaphors through an interactive visual analysis approach. This approach promotes an iterative knowledge discovery process through multiple views of the data where analysts select features of interest in one of the views and inspect data items of the select subset in all of the views. On the one hand, we introduce a novel approach for the visual analysis of software measurement data that captures complete facts of the system, employs a flow-based visual paradigm for the specification of software measurement queries, and presents measurement results through integrated software visualizations. This approach facilitates the on-demand computation of desired features and supports interactive knowledge discovery - the analyst can gain more insight into the data through activities that involve: building a mental model of the system; exploring expected and unexpected features and relations; and generating, verifying, or rejecting hypothesis with visual tools. On the other hand, we have also extended existing tools with additional views of the data for the presentation and interactive exploration of system artifacts and their inter-relations. Contributions of this thesis have been integrated into two different prototype tools. First evaluations of these tools show that they can indeed improve the understanding of large and complex software systems.

SAHARA - A Structured Approach for Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessments (2015)

Sören Kemmann

In this thesis, an approach is presented that turns the currently unstructured process of automotive hazard analysis and risk assessments (HRA), which relies on creativity techniques, into a structured, model-based approach that makes the HRA results less dependent on experts' experience, more consistent, and gives them higher quality. The challenge can be subdivided into two steps. The first step is to improve the HRA as it is performed in current practice. The second step is to go beyond the current practice and consider not only single service failures as relevant hazards, but also multiple service failures. For the first step, the most important aspect is to formalize the operational situation of the system and to determine its likelihood. Current approaches use natural-language textual descriptions, which makes it hard to ensure consistency and increase efficiency through reuse. Furthermore, due to ambiguity in natural language, it is difficult to ensure consistent likelihood estimates for situations. The main aspect of the second step is that considering multiple service failures as hazards implies that one needs to analyze an exponential number of hazards. Due to the fact that hazard assessments are currently done purely manually, considering multiple service failures is not possible. The only way to approach this challenge is to formalize the HRA and make extensive use of automation support. In SAHARA we handle these challenges by first introducing a model-based representation of an HRA with GOBI. Based on this, we formalized the representation of operational situations and their likelihood assessment in OASIS and HEAT, respectively. We show that more consistent situation assessments are possible and that situations (including their likelihood) can be efficiently reused. The second aspect, coping with multiple service failures, is addressed in ARID. We show that using our tool-supported HRA approach, 100% coverage of all possible hazards (including multiple service failures) can be achieved by relying on very limited manual effort. We furthermore show that not considering multiple service failures results in insufficient safety goals.

Virtual Reality Methods for Research in the Geosciences (2014)

Rolf Westerteiger

In the presented work, I evaluate if and how Virtual Reality (VR) technologies can be used to support researchers working in the geosciences by providing immersive, collaborative visualization systems as well as virtual tools for data analysis. Technical challenges encountered in the development of theses systems are identified and solutions for these are provided. To enable geologists to explore large digital terrain models (DTMs) in an immersive, explorative fashion within a VR environment, a suitable terrain rendering algorithm is required. For realistic perception of planetary curvature at large viewer altitudes, spherical rendering of the surface is necessary. Furthermore, rendering must sustain interactive frame rates of about 30 frames per second to avoid sensory confusion of the user. At the same time, the data structures used for visualization should also be suitable for efficiently computing spatial properties such as height profiles or volumes in order to implement virtual analysis tools. To address these requirements, I have developed a novel terrain rendering algorithm based on tiled quadtree hierarchies using the HEALPix parametrization of a sphere. For evaluation purposes, the system is applied to a 500 GiB dataset representing the surface of Mars. Considering the current development of inexpensive remote surveillance equipment such as quadcopters, it seems inevitable that these devices will play a major role in future disaster management applications. Virtual reality installations in disaster management headquarters which provide an immersive visualization of near-live, three-dimensional situational data could then be a valuable asset for rapid, collaborative decision making. Most terrain visualization algorithms, however, require a computationally expensive pre-processing step to construct a terrain database. To address this problem, I present an on-the-fly pre-processing system for cartographic data. The system consists of a frontend for rendering and interaction as well as a distributed processing backend executing on a small cluster which produces tiled data in the format required by the frontend on demand. The backend employs a CUDA based algorithm on graphics cards to perform efficient conversion from cartographic standard projections to the HEALPix-based grid used by the frontend. Measurement of spatial properties is an important step in quantifying geological phenomena. When performing these tasks in a VR environment, a suitable input device and abstraction for the interaction (a “virtual tool”) must be provided. This tool should enable the user to precisely select the location of the measurement even under a perspective projection. Furthermore, the measurement process should be accurate to the resolution of the data available and should not have a large impact on the frame rate in order to not violate interactivity requirements. I have implemented virtual tools based on the HEALPix data structure for measurement of height profiles as well as volumes. For interaction, a ray-based picking metaphor was employed, using a virtual selection ray extending from the user’s hand holding a VR interaction device. To provide maximum accuracy, the algorithms access the quad-tree terrain database at the highest available resolution level while at the same time maintaining interactivity in rendering. Geological faults are cracks in the earth’s crust along which a differential movement of rock volumes can be observed. Quantifying the direction and magnitude of such translations is an essential requirement in understanding earth’s geological history. For this purpose, geologists traditionally use maps in top-down projection which are cut (e.g. using image editing software) along the suspected fault trace. The two resulting pieces of the map are then translated in parallel against each other until surface features which have been cut by the fault motion come back into alignment. The amount of translation applied is then used as a hypothesis for the magnitude of the fault action. In the scope of this work it is shown, however, that performing this study in a top-down perspective can lead to the acceptance of faulty reconstructions, since the three-dimensional structure of topography is not considered. To address this problem, I present a novel terrain deformation algorithm which allows the user to trace a fault line directly within a 3D terrain visualization system and interactively deform the terrain model while inspecting the resulting reconstruction from arbitrary perspectives. I demonstrate that the application of 3D visualization allows for a more informed interpretation of fault reconstruction hypotheses. The algorithm is implemented on graphics cards and performs real-time geometric deformation of the terrain model, guaranteeing interactivity with respect to all parameters. Paleoceanography is the study of the prehistoric evolution of the ocean. One of the key data sources used in this research are coring experiments which provide point samples of layered sediment depositions at the ocean floor. The samples obtained in these experiments document the time-varying sediment concentrations within the ocean water at the point of measurement. The task of recovering the ocean flow patterns based on these deposition records is a challenging inverse numerical problem, however. To support domain scientists working on this problem, I have developed a VR visualization tool to aid in the verification of model parameters by providing simultaneous visualization of experimental data from coring as well as the resulting predicted flow field obtained from numerical simulation. Earth is visualized as a globe in the VR environment with coring data being presented using a billboard rendering technique while the time-variant flow field is indicated using Line-Integral-Convolution (LIC). To study individual sediment transport pathways and their correlation with the depositional record, interactive particle injection and real-time advection is supported.

Modellgetriebene Entwicklung von Kommunikationsprotokollen für drahtlos vernetzte Regelungssysteme (2013)

Marc Krämer

Funkvernetzte Sensorsysteme sind heutzutage allgegenwärtig. Sie werden sowohl in Rauchmeldern, in Raumtemperaturüberwachungen und Sicherheitssystemen eingesetzt. Das Sensorsystem soll seine Aufgabe zuverlässig und über viele Jahre ohne Batteriewechsel erfüllen. Durch die Vernetzung der Sensorsysteme und ihre immer komplexer werdenden Aufgaben wird die Programmierung in einer maschinennahen Sprache immer aufwändiger. Die modellgetriebene Entwicklung erhöht die Wartbarkeit und reduziert die Entwicklungszeit wodurch im Allgemeinen die Produktqualität steigt. In Folge der höheren Komplexität, der Abstraktion von der konkreten Hardwareplattform und den immer kürzere Produktentwicklungszeiten bleibt oft keine Zeit für Energieoptimierung, wodurch die Batterielaufzeit geringer ausfällt, als dies möglich wäre. In dieser Arbeit werden verschiedene Ansätze vorgestellt, die es ermöglichen, bereits während der Modellierung den Stromverbrauch zu berücksichtigen und diesen zu optimieren. Am Beispiel des inversen Pendels, einem sehr instabilen Regelungssystem, wird dazu mit Hilfe der modellgetriebenen Entwicklung eine funkvernetzte, verteilte Regelung spezifiziert. Der aus der Spezifikation erzeugte Kode wird direkt auf den Sensorknoten ausgeführt und muß dazu performant und zuverlässig sein, um die Echtzeitanforderungen des Regelungssystems zu erfüllen, aber gleichzeitig so wenig Energie wie möglich zu verbrauchen. m die Zuverlässigkeit der verteilten Regelung zu gewährleisten ist eine deterministische kollisionsfreie Datenübertragung über das drahtlose Kommunikationsmedium erforderlich. Die Synchronisation ist eine weitere Voraussetzung zur Ermittlung eines konsistenten Systemzustands.

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