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The Arctic region is undergoing significant changes in maritime accessibility. This study investigates observed ship trajectories from 2013 to 2020 to demonstrate the recent trends of Arctic traffic. A notable surge in maritime activities has been observed, particularly during summer months, driven by economic interests and the increasing popularity of existing routes. Unique patterns in the northern Barents Sea have been observed where ships favour different routes based on seasonal ice conditions. Another contribution from this work is the validation of the Arctic Traffic Accessibility Model (ATAM) using the observed ship traffic data. Results show that the ATAM model underestimates the accessibility and vessel travel speed. This is largely due to outdated model parameters. The predefined ice multipliers and calculation of ice numerals used in the ATAM may not accurately reflect real-world conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arctic region is undergoing significant changes in maritime accessibility. This study investigates observed ship trajectories from 2013 to 2020 to demonstrate the recent trends of Arctic traffic. A notable surge in maritime activities has been observed, particularly during summer months, driven by economic interests and the increasing popularity of existing routes. Unique patterns in the northern Barents Sea have been observed where ships favour different routes based on seasonal ice conditions. Another contribution from this work is the validation of the Arctic Traffic Accessibility Model (ATAM) using the observed ship traffic data. Results show that the ATAM model underestimates the accessibility and vessel travel speed. This is largely due to outdated model parameters. The predefined ice multipliers and calculation of ice numerals used in the ATAM may not accurately reflect real-world conditions.

—Hospital information system, as an integrated system consists of complex, diverse, and heterogeneous information systems, which supports all clinical, administrative, and financial activities of patients; therefore, it faces interoperability problems, which is a critical feature of data sharing and integration. In this regard, a reference architecture will be presented for the integration of different systems in the hospital which comprises system, information and software architecture. This architecture emphasizes interoperability with eight layers of user interface and application, services, data collection and storage, integration, external application systems, communication and information infrastructure, management, and security/privacy, based on service orientation. It will be evaluated by ATAM method, based on ten scenarios. It shows the presented architecture will satisfy all functional and non-functional requirements such as interoperability between different information systems, reduction of information redundancy and development cost and time, scalability and accessibility.

Tourist destinations thrive on sustainable development. Electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, representing energy-efficient advancements in aviation that are pivotal to advanced air mobility (AAM), have garnered attention. Yet, the discourse on eVTOLs' role in tourism remains scant. This study, drawing from 450 samples in the Mogan Mountain Scenic Area, introduces the AAM-tourism acceptance model (ATAM). It integrates the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and technology acceptance model (TAM) theoretical frameworks, incorporating environmental consciousness, perceived safety, hedonic motivation, and personal innovativeness, assessing their influence on tourists' eVTOL usage intention through a structural equation model (SEM). The results reveal that environmental consciousness significantly impacts hedonic motivation and perceived usefulness, driving eVTOL adoption. Furthermore, personal innovativeness influences intention through hedonic motivation and perceived behavioral control. Therefore, environmental consciousness and hedonic motivation align deeply with eVTOL attributes, both significantly positively influencing intention to use. Thus, the study validates eVTOL's viability in tourism and its potential for sectoral expansion. Moreover, it offers insights into how psychological factors shape eVTOL adoption, guiding the promotion of eVTOL sightseeing services and informing research on AAM acceptance across various domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processing of data gathered from new communication devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT)-based technology, has grown dramatically in the past decade. Resource management plays a vital role in cloud/fog-based platforms' efficiency. Alternatively, a deadline-based workflow scheduling mechanism is an approach to resource management that increases cloud/fog computing efficiency. However, most proposed methods may overload some resources and underload others. Consequently, adopting a proper load-balancing approach has a major impact on optimizing Quality of Service (QoS) and improving customer satisfaction. This paper presents a 4-layer software architecture for analyzing workflows and dynamic resources in cloud/fog/IoT environments to address such a problem. This approach also considers workload and presence prediction of IoT nodes as dynamic resources. Moreover, the 4 + 1 architectural view models represent architecture layers, components, and significant interactions. Architecture components are ultimately proposed to meet quality attributes such as availability, reliability, performance, and scalability. The proposed architecture evaluation is according to the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) as a scenario-based technique. Compared with previous works, various scenarios, and more quality attributes are discussed within this evaluation, in addition to analyzing and predicting workload and the presence prediction of dynamic resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hospital information system, as an integrated system consists of complex, diverse, and heterogeneous information systems, which supports all clinical, administrative, and financial activities of patients; therefore, it faces interoperability problems, which is a critical feature of data sharing and integration. In this regard, a reference architecture will be presented for the integration of different systems in the hospital which comprises system, information and software architecture. This architecture emphasizes interoperability with eight layers of user interface and application, services, data collection and storage, integration, external application systems, communication and information infrastructure, management, and security/privacy, based on service orientation. It will be evaluated by ATAM method, based on ten scenarios. It shows the presented architecture will satisfy all functional and non-functional requirements such as interoperability between different information systems, reduction of information redundancy and development cost and time, scalability and accessibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the significant development of the Internet of Things (IoT) in recent years as well as the growing need for data around the world, cloud computing alone is not able to manage this volume of data. Accordingly, fog computing has just now become a popular paradigm for further data analysis in close proximity to devices generating and processing data instantly, in order to solve various problems of existing cloud-only based systems. With regard to the complexity and the wide variety of types of computational resources such as cloud servers and fog nodes, workflow scheduling is thus one of the most important challenges in fog computing environments. To address such a problem, this paper presents software architecture for scheduling multiple workflows in cloud-fog environments simultaneously. Within this scheduling, workflow clustering and priority of workflows are also taken into account. As well, architecture layers, components, as well as their major interactions are represented using 4 + 1 architectural view models. The architecture components are ultimately proposed to meet quality attributes such as availability, reliability, recoverability, interoperability, and performance. The proposed architecture evaluation is based on the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) is a scenario-based technique. Compared with previous works, various scenarios and more quality attributes are discussed within this evaluation in addition to clustering and prioritizing workflows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, computation within self-assembly models is hard to conceal because the self-assembly process generates a crystalline assembly whose computational history is inherently part of the structure itself. With no way to remove information from the computation, this computational model offers a unique problem: how can computational input and computation be hidden while still computing and reporting the final output? Designing such systems is inherently motivated by privacy concerns in biomedical computing and applications in cryptography. In this paper we propose the problem of performing "covert computation" within tile self-assembly that seeks to design self-assembly systems that "conceal" both the input and computational history of performed computations. We achieve these results within the growth-only restricted abstract Tile Assembly Model (aTAM) with positive and negative interactions. We show that general-case covert computation is possible by implementing a set of basic covert logic gates capable of simulating any circuit (functionally complete). To further motivate the study of covert computation, we apply our new framework to resolve an outstanding complexity question; we use our covert circuitry to show that the unique assembly verification problem within the growth-only aTAM with negative interactions is coNP-complete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are for sharing resources among member organisations. NRENs play an important role in e-learning activities as they enable cross-organisational communication. Heterogeneous infrastructures used for e-learning are a challenge for system design, data integrity, and interoperability. This paper proposes an NREN e-learning reference architecture and affiliated NREN e-learning design patterns that consider communication, reliable access, a collaboration and interoperability between e-learning infrastructures. Research exists about different architectures including traditional e-learning systems, service-oriented cloud computing such as the service-oriented architecture (SOA) adaptations for education systems, e-learning systems and a service-oriented cloud computing architecture (SOCCA). However, no research has been carried out for NREN e-learning architectures. For deeper insight, we investigate in this paper an e-learning architecture based on the Afghanistan Research and Education Network (AfgREN). The reference e-learning architecture based on AfgREN provides guidance for the rapid development of different e-learning services and learning-analytical infrastructure for Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce the robust random number generation problem where the goal is to design an abstract tile assembly system (aTAM system) whose terminal assemblies can be split into n partitions such that a resulting assembly of the system lies within each partition with probability 1/ n , regardless of the relative concentration assignment of the tile types in the system. First, we show this is possible for n = 2 (a robust fair coin flip ) within the aTAM, and that such systems guarantee a worst case O ( 1 ) space usage. We accompany our primary construction with variants that show trade-offs in space complexity, initial seed size, temperature, tile complexity, bias, and extensibility, and also prove some negative results. As an application, we combine our coin-flip system with a result of Chandran, Gopalkrishnan, and Reif to show that for any positive integer n , there exists a O ( log ⁡ n ) tile system that assembles a constant-width linear assembly of expected length n for any concentration assignment. We then extend our robust fair coin flip result to solve the problem of robust random number generation in the aTAM for all n . Two variants of robust random bit generation solutions are presented: an unbounded space solution and a bounded space solution which incurs a small bias. Further, we consider the harder scenario where tile concentrations change arbitrarily at each assembly step and show that while this is not possible in the aTAM, the problem can be solved by exotic tile assembly models from the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a new property of tile self-assembly systems that we call size-separability. A system is size-separable if every terminal assembly is a constant factor larger than any intermediate assembly. Size-separability is motivated by the practical problem of filtering completed assemblies from a variety of incomplete 'garbage' assemblies using gel electrophoresis or other mass-based filtering techniques. Here we prove that any system without cooperative bonding assembling a unique mismatch-free terminal assembly can be used to construct a size-separable system uniquely assembling the same shape. The proof achieves optimal scale factor, temperature, and tile types (within a factor of 2) for the size-separable system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data mining and big data computing are the emerging domains in the current era of predictions for societal applications. Millions of people are interested in sharing their views through tweets. Healthcare predictions are one of the attractive researches in big data social mining. Healthcare predictions are derived by implementing topic models by the ailments data. An ailment refers to either illness or sign of a particular health problem. Millions of tweets are collected based on conditions and assessed with ailment topic aspect models. The existing topic model, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Latent Semantic Indexing, Probabilistic LSI (PLSI), limits the healthcare results assessment concerning any one of the ailments aspects. Recent ailments topic aspect model (ATAM) overcome the problems of these topic models and delivers the healthcare assessment results concerning the fundamental aspects of ailments data except side-effects analysis of treatments. The scalability performance of ATAM is degraded in showing healthcare results over the massive amounts of health data. A high-performance computing model of ATAM has been developed in the distributed environment to address scalability. Its intelligent model is designed in the cloud and multi-node Hadoop environment to deliver high-performance social computing results for healthcare. Experiments are conducted on many comparative studies is demonstrated between the existing and proposed high-performance models using the massive amount of health-related tweets concerning the ailments aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work by Demaine et al. (Nat Comput 6937:100-114, ) developed a strong connection between smallest context-free grammars and staged self-assembly systems for one-dimensional strings and assemblies. We extend this work to two-dimensional polyominoes and assemblies, comparing staged self-assembly systems to a natural generalization of context-free grammars we call polyomino context-free grammars (PCFGs). We achieve nearly optimal bounds on the largest ratios of the smallest PCFG and staged self-assembly system for a given polyomino with $$n$$ cells. For the ratio of PCFGs over assembly systems, we show that the smallest PCFG can be an $$\varOmega (n/\log ^3{n})$$ -factor larger than the smallest staged assembly system, even when restricted to square polyominoes. For the ratio of assembly systems over PCFGs, we show that the smallest staged assembly system is never more than a $$O(\log {n})$$ -factor larger than the smallest PCFG and is sometimes an $$\varOmega (\log {n}/\log \log {n})$$ -factor larger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise architecture (EA) management has become a widely discussed approach in both industry and academia due to the inefficiency of current IT architectures to cope with rapid changes in business environments. On the other hand Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is widely accepted as a state of the art approach to the design and implementation of enterprise software. However software design and development according to SOA paradigm is a complex task, often integrating various platforms, technologies, products and design patterns. Hence, it arises a problem of early evaluation of a software architecture to detect design flaws that might compromise expected system qualities. Decisions related to software architecture have a great impact on the business value of a software product under development and influence the software company competitiveness. Usually, a software architecture is developed by a company team, whose experience is limited to narrow set of solutions and technologies. This is a motivation for developing a methodology for the assessment of architectural solution that can be performed in more independent way. Such assessment requires extensive knowledge gathering information on various types of architectural decisions, their relations and influences on quality attributes. In this paper SOAROAD (SOA Related Ontology of Architectural Decisions) is described, which was developed to support the evaluation of architectures of information systems based on SOA approach. The main goal of the ontology is to provide constructs for documenting architecture. However, it is designed to support future reasoning about architecture quality and fulfilling the non functional system requirements such as scalability, ease of maintenance, reuse of software components etc. The last important reason is building a common knowledge base. When building the ontology Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) was adopted which was chosen as a reference methodology of architecture evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Although a good architecture is not sufficient to guarantee the success of a software product, undoubtedly it is essential to support the product quality. Evaluating software architecture provides early insight into product capabilities and limitations. The earlier in the life cycle the problems are detected, the cheaper it is to fix them. In this paper, at first, a review on well-known scenario-based methods to evaluate software architectures is presented, and their advantages and limitations are discussed. Then, a method named SHADD with different characteristics is introduced to detect architectural defects. Using a scenario-based approach, the proposed method finds out the critical aspects and potential problems threatening the system from the stakeholder’s point of view. Scenarios are then used as a basis for the process of architectural defects detection. SHADD and its elements are specified in a systematic form and an illustration of its application on the architecture of a real system is also presented. The results show that SHADD can be used to detect those architectural defects which may be uncovered during the application of conventional evaluation methods. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: While developing divertor remote handling maintenance systems at the Divertor Test Platform 2 facility, some risks and sensitivity points related to the Cassette Multifunctional Mover control system software were discovered and evaluated. The control system architecture has to simultaneously fulfill the demanding ITER remote handling requirements and to face new requirements being uncovered during the trials. Especially evolving non-functional requirements such as reliability and safety have an effect on the control system architecture as it is getting more mature. An evaluation of the implications from architectural decisions is necessary before implementation efforts, as an architecture left to develop without evaluation may lead to a dead end and therefore soaring development costs. After studying existing architecture analysis methods an analysis method was developed to gain confidence to carry out the proposed changes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]