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The paper considers modernization of the agricultural sector with the aim of enhancing its efficiency and competitiveness through the implementation of digital technologies. Additionally, it analyzes the methods and software employed for the selection of technologies and technical tools. (Research purpose) The research aims to develop software modules for managing the production of crop products. This involves the selection of appropriate agricultural technologies and the optimal utilization of the machine and tractor fleet. The software designed is expected to take into account the farm agroclimatic and production conditions. (Materials and methods) The development of software components for a web-based software package aimed to facilitate the annual work planning in grain crop cultivation, is based on a method rooted in the evaluation of natural, climatic, and production conditions. (Results and discussion) The findings support the feasibility of developing software components for a web-based software package by selecting agricultural technologies and determining optimal utilization options for technical means. The research resulted in the development of a structural scheme for the software package designed as a web-based application, encompassing such software modules as «Selection of technologies» and «Selection of technical means». These modules share a unified interface and operate on a common database. The operation of software modules for selecting technologies was tested in the northern forest-steppe zone of the Novosibirsk region in 2022.The tests examined the cultivation technologies for wheat at a standard intensification level across four working areas with varying predecessors. (Conclusions) The developed software components will be subsequently integrated into the software package in the form of a web application. This application can serve as a support system for making informed managerial decisions in the realm of machine-based agricultural technologies. The software package facilitates the automation of technology selection, the creation of an annual work plan, and the computation of economic indicators.

The problem of testing in education is relevant for many countries. Testing solves three problems. The first task is to assess the quality of current training. The second task is to conduct a comparative analysis of learning outcomes. The third task is the management of the educational process in a particular educational institution and in the education sector. This determines the relevance of testing and the relevance of developing new methods for assessing test results. The article proposes a new method for assessing test results for different situations: “teacher– student”, computer test, virtual testing model, test on a mixed reality model and others. To solve the problem, a special quasi-sigmoidal function is introduced. It is analogous to the logistic function, but takes into account the peculiarities of real testing of students. The logistic function ranges from minus infinity to plus infinity. There are no negative assessments in education. The introduced function lies only in the positive range of the argument. It describes actual positive scores when testing students. The authors called this function the complexity function. With its help, the complexity of the subject is assessed according to the test results. To substantiate the method, the function of the logarithms of the odds, logistic regression and the resulting Rush method are investigated. The article notes two shortcomings of the Rush method. The testing principle has been defined for the new function, which is used to estimate complexity. The article introduces two new concepts: the test difficulty function and the integral test score. Integral assessment of testing is a smooth function and makes it possible to go from a stepwise dependence to a continuous one. The cumulative test score translates the point test results into a continuous function and creates a correlation between the scores. The results of an experiment with the participation of RTU MIREA students are presented. The experimental results are analyzed. The possibility of using the method in educational processes is shown. The method is an alternative to the Rush method.

Recently, there has been a significant increase in the number of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, software, and components. As a result, it is crucial to evaluate their quality. Quality models for AI have in fact been proposed, but there is a lack of Systematic Mapping Studies (SMS) for quality models in AI systems, software, and components. The goal of this paper is to understand, classify, and critically evaluate existing quality models for AI systems, software, and components. This study conducts an SMS to investigate quality models proposed by various authors in the past. The study only found quality models for AI systems and software. So far, the SMS has revealed no work on AI software component quality models. Finally, the limitations of the quality models and the implications for future research and development efforts are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern software development is based on a systems approach, in which a program or software complex is considered as a system of interacting software components. Models of software components are analogs of complex system subsystems. Therefore, a complex program is considered as a system of software components. The organization of the structure of software components affects the quality and result of the program. The organization of interaction between software components affects the efficiency of the program. An important factor in the system of software components is the life cycle, which determines the effectiveness and feasibility of using this program. Software differs from many complex systems and information systems in that it has the ability to increase its life cycle. Moreover, the need to increase the life cycle is characterized by two factors: external and internal. The internal factor arises due to the obsolescence of the program. In this case, it does not meet the new conditions, for example, a new operating system. The external factor arises from external influences in the form of interference or purposeful actions, such as computer viruses. The problem of creating the structure of software components of computing systems and information systems that ensure the duration of the life cycle in the presence of external influences is topical. The study of this problem contributes to the improvement of the technological base of computing systems and information systems that solve applied problems. The article presents a new life cycle model based on two models of growth and degradation. The article recommends a resource-based approach for life cycle assessment. As an analytical solution, it is proposed to use a logistic equation, which describes the mechanisms of the life cycle formation process quite well. The article discusses three types of resource in calculations: physical, technological and communicative. A general redundancy solution is proposed to create a network with the inclusion of a multigraph model.

The article defines large territorially distributed automated systems, which include systems that collect and process information from spatially spaced sensors on objects. Examples of such automated systems are military systems, such as a missile attack warning system, a space control system, strategic and non-strategic missile defense systems, and civil systems, such as the state automated Control system, the air traffic control system and other systems. The purpose of these systems is the continuous monitoring of the state of a set of certain objects, the environment of their functioning, the constant assessment of the parameters of objects, the identification of dangerous situations in the behavior of objects and the environment, as well as the development of measures to reduce the level of possible security threats and eliminate dangerous situations.The typical structure of large territorially distributed automated systems includes sources and consumers of information, telecommunication facilities, as well as a center for processing input data and preparing information for consumers. The sources of information are operators, technical means of observation and specialized measuring instruments. Telecommunication means of big territorially distributed automated systems are formed in two ways. The first option uses existing global data net-works. In the second variant, self-made data transmission networks are formed on the basis of specially created means of data transmission and the use of dedicated data channels. The center of input data processing and information preparation contains a complex of automation tools and personnel providing maintenance, repair and operation.The functions and the most significant hardware and software components of large territorially distributed automated systems are presented. The main indicators of quality of their functioning and stages of life cycle are characterized: development of requirements, creation of a prototype, certification, mass production, operation, modernization, the end of operation and utilization.

By adequately locating objects of interest, a computer vision-driven machine can avoid obstacles and collisions, set safe paths to move autonomously, and reconstruct the geometric properties of a scene. In this sense, three-dimensional information is required to perform these tasks properly. As digital images provide information about the scene, they are often used to estimate objects’ spatial position and depths concerning image acquisition machinery. Thus, disparity maps can be obtained, and the differences between similar features from two or more images can be used to encode depth information. Although the disparity map construction has been extensively surveyed, some concepts such as code reuse and compartmentalization need further investigation to optimize application development. Therefore, based on the major stages of disparity calculation, we present a framework to support disparity map construction. This study’s main contributions include a delimitation of elements that integrate stereo vision scope and the modeling of an architecture that integrates the main components of disparity calculation. The proposal is evaluated in different scenarios which demand sparse and dense disparity maps. The standard concepts shared between them are discussed and used to implement a multifaceted application, useful in evaluating stereo vision methods and providing disparity maps as inputs for three-dimensional reconstruction and point cloud elaboration. The code prepared by the authors is publicly available11 https://github.com/pixellab-ufg/disparity-computation-framework.

Software modularity and partial qualification capabilities are key enablers to produce cost efficient software in highly regulated domains. The modular concept (called spaceAPPS) described in this paper has been developed in the frame of the OPS-SAT project aiming at missions where flexibility is one of the success factors. spaceAPPS implements a novel software architecture for satellites inspired by the Apps concept of modern smartphones. In the European space domain the operation of a satellite is based on a set of 18 services. Accordingly, in spaceApps these services are mapped to individual Apps. This is not a one-to-one mapping which means that one App implements one or more services. During OPS-SAT ground testing it was demonstrated that functionality could be easily added through a new App or updated through replacing an existing App. Also during OPS-SAT ground testing it could be shown that a failing UserApp did not impact the basic apps to operate the satellite. Thus, it is possible to run applications of different criticality on the same platform. With operating systems supporting time and space separation the risk of failure propagation can be further reduced. The implementation of a partial validation approach, i. e. testing of third-party Apps in a representative environment and not running the validation on the target platform is feasible but was not demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there has been a significant increase in the number of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, software, and components. As a result, it is crucial to evaluate their quality. Quality models for AI have in fact been proposed, but there is a lack of Systematic Mapping Studies (SMS) for quality models in AI systems, software, and components. The goal of this paper is to understand, classify, and critically evaluate existing quality models for AI systems, software, and components. This study conducts an SMS to investigate quality models proposed by various authors in the past. The study only found quality models for AI systems and software. So far, the SMS has revealed no work on AI software component quality models. Finally, the limitations of the quality models and the implications for future research and development efforts are discussed.

Development of mobile applications has previously encountered, and still encounters, challenges related to the specificity of the mobile world. The usual rules of software engineering tend not to respond to certain mobile development issues. In this paper, we identify and address the challenges of mobile development. We propose a quality model and analysis adapted from ISO9126. Based on this model, we have developed a tool to analyze an applications source code and measure the achievement of quality criteria. We describe all the notions of quality and the check points in the mobile applications source code. This work was carried out in partnership with a mobile application development company, Keyneosoft, to test our tool on real-world applications. We also discuss the results obtained and feedback from Keyneosoft developers on our tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software development is a complex process that requires time investment and knowledge of technological tools for its elaboration, debugging and deployment. However, over the years, technological and methodological advances have been developed, which considerably reduce this complexity, making this activity a more intuitive, controllable and fast process. Reuse appears as an alternative to develop applications and systems more efficiently and quickly. The idea is to reuse elements and components instead of having to develop them from scratch. These units are known as reusable software components. The library or repository of reusable components is the heart of component-based software development, allowing these components to be catalogued, organised, discovered and reused. In this work, a reusable software component repository was developed and implemented to support the web application development processes and the training of students in the Systems Engineering program of the Universidad Francisco de Paula Santander (Cúcuta, Colombia) called Colossal, allowing students and professors to search, share and reuse the components available in the library and use them in their projects. In order to evaluate the component repository and verify that it fulfills its purpose, a quantitative descriptive study was carried out to evaluate the level of acceptance of the technological tool. As a result, it was obtained that the majority (94%) of students and professors responded positively and a high acceptance of the operation and use of the tool was evidenced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, the authors have developed an integrated evaluation hierarchy for automotive human–machine interaction (HMI) software/hardware interfaces and a corresponding set of integrated evaluation carriers and decision modes, to improve the interactive experience and usability of HMI interfaces, evaluation node management in R&D processes, and the integral quality of hardware and software components. In addition, a case study where the integrated evaluation was performed on rapidly prototyped electric automotive user interfaces was utilised to demonstrate the evaluation of integral conceptual themes and system frameworks based on rapid prototypes. It was shown that the evaluation of integrated software/hardware electric automotive interfaces via rapid prototyping aids the communication and organisation of design concepts, thus enhancing the design quality.

This paper investigates the usability of the RAGE component-based software architecture (RCSA). Thisarchitecture was designed to support serious game development by enabling cross-platform reuse of gamesoftware components. While the architecture has been technically validated elsewhere, this paper studies theperceived usefulness and ease of use of the architecture in practice. An extensive questionnaire based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was administered to 23 software and game developers that have been creating RCSA-compliant game components or integrating these in actual serious games. The results show that developers are generally positive about the usability of the architecture and that the architecture helps them to do a better job in less time. It turns out that developers effectively use all communication modes that are offered by thearchitecture, most frequently those based on the component´s APIs and the bridge pattern. Some issues were reported, but could be easily addressed. Most developers reported that they have well understood the effectiveness of the architecture and indicated to keep using the architecture in future projects. The outcomes of this study show that the architecture opens up new opportunities to the cross-platform reuse of advanced game functionalities in serious game projects, to reduce production efforts and to advance the domain of serious games at large.

Due to advancements in science and technology, software is constantly evolving. To adapt to newly demanded requirements in a piece of software, software components are modified or developed. Measuring software completeness has been a challenging task for software companies. The uncertain and imprecise intrinsic relationships within software components have been unaddressed by researchers during the validation process. In this study, we introduced a new fuzzy logic testing approach for measuring the completeness of software. We measured the fuzzy membership value for each software component by a fuzzy logic testing approach called the fuzzy test. For each software component, the system response was tested by identifying which software components in the system required changes. Based on the measured fuzzy membership values for each software component, software completeness was calculated. The introduced approach scales the software completeness between zero and one. A software component with a complete membership value indicates that the software component does not require any modification. A non-membership value specifies that the existing software component is no longer required in the system or that a new software component is required to replace it. The partial membership value specifies that the software component requires few new functionalities according to the new software requirements. Software with a partial membership value requires partial restructuring and design recovery of its components. Symmetric design of software components reduces the complexity in the restructuring of software during modification. In the study, we showed that by using the introduced approach, high-quality software that is faultless, reliable, easily maintained, efficient, and cost-effective can be developed.

A promising way to develop flexible software systems is to include models that are analyzed, modified and executed at runtime as an integrated part of the system. Building such model-integrating systems is a challenging task since the respective modeling languages have to be supported comprehensively at runtime, and these systems still need to be developable in a modular way by composing them from basic building blocks. Model-driven (MDD) and component-based development (CBD) are two established orthogonal approaches that can tackle the mentioned challenges. MDD is based on the use of models and modeling languages as first-class entities to systematically engineer software systems. CBD enables the engineering of modular systems by facilitating a divide-and-conquer approach with reuse. However, combining and aligning the individual principles from both approaches is an open research problem. In this article, we describe model-integrating development (MID), an engineering approach that enables the systematic development of component-based, model-integrating software. MID combines principles from MDD and CBD and is based on the central assumption that models and code shall be treated equally as first-class entities of software throughout its life cycle. In particular, MID leverages the added flexibility that comes with models at runtime, i.e., when models are an integral part of running software. The practicability of the proposed solution concept is rationalized based on a reference implementation that provides the basis for a thoroughly described and critically discussed feasibility study: a dynamic access control product line. The obtained benefits are presented in a distilled way, and future research challenges are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Cloud computing and its service models, such as Platform as a Service (PaaS), have changed the way that computing resources are allocated to Information and Communications Technology enterprises and users. Although multiple cloud providers support dynamic service provisioning, it is necessary to facilitate the management of the cloud infrastructure and applications in order to allow the continuous refinement of cloud models. Therefore, issues are raised regarding the cloud orchestration, including the flexible portability and interoperability of cloud applications among multiple cloud providers. Having said that, there is a need for a standardized design and management of the cloud use cases (during the creation of scenarios, application's deployment, and patching) to ensure efficient applications' migration between different providers. This paper proposes an artifact, GITS, a generic input template for CloudSim and other cloud simulators. GITS can be provided by PaaS offering to manage the creation, monitoring, administration, and patching of infrastructure and applications in the cloud. GITS defines the cloud schema that can be used with conforming cloud models and independent cloud providers; thus, portability and interoperability can be enabled in PaaS cloud models. GITS focuses on the architecture‐based modeling for cloud infrastructure and application not only in terms of computational resources but also in terms of high availability properties associated with infrastructure and applications. The main objective of the GITS template is to provide the cloud user with a modular, simple, readable, and reusable model that still supports the essential components and provide them with the ability to control the applications' execution, deployment, and other management needs in addition to the allocation environment. This paper describes GITS usage, specifically as an input template for CloudSim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract HPC Shelf is a proposal of a cloud computing platform for development, deployment and execution of component-based HPC applications with large-scale parallel processing requirements. Through components, it addresses the challenge of dealing with heterogeneous software and hardware resources in a large-scale HPC infrastructure comprising multiple parallel computing platforms. This paper introduces SAFe , a framework for deriving applications in HPC Shelf. It makes the role of a Scientific Workflow Management System (SWfMS) through which applications may deploy and monitor the execution of large-scale parallel computing systems built of components. Highlights • SAFe is a component-oriented framework for building applications on cloud of HPC services. • SAFe is a kind of Scientific Workflow Management System. • SAFe implements an architectural and orchestration languages subsets, called SAFeSWL, with its grammar written in XML. • We present examples of two applications that uses SAFeSWL. • We present a formal representation for SAFeSWL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper present the efficient development of propagation algorithms followed by the availability to easily employ certain commercial software systems, as well as the increase of the collaborative applications number have turned the Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) into attractive models for various fields researchers, as it has been used since the beginning of the 1990s. After two decades of studies, Bayesian Belief Networks were successful in developing models for fields like: artificial intelligence, medical diagnosis and computer networks analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software products in the market are changing due to changes in business processes, technology, or new requirements from the customers. Maintainability of legacy systems has always been an inspiring task for the software companies. In order to determine whether the software requires maintainability by reverse engineering or by forward engineering approach, a system assessment was done from diverse perspectives: quality, business value, type of errors, etc. In this research, the changes required in the existing software components of the legacy system were identified using a supervised learning approach. New interfaces for the software components were redesigned according to the new requirements and/or type of errors. Software maintainability was measured by applying a machine learning technique, i.e., Naïve Bayes classifier. The dataset was designed based on the observations such as component state, successful or error type in the component, line of code of error that exists in the component, component business value, and changes required for the component or not. The results generated by the Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) software confirm the effectiveness of the introduced methodology with an accuracy of 97.18%.

In the interconnected globe where service delivery is the success measure, cloud high availability (HA) is an indispensable area for enterprises. An HA-aware cloud system provides different approaches to handle the outages. This includes geo-redundancy, failover schemes, and HA-aware placement solutions. However, using real-cloud platforms to model HA-aware approaches is hindered by the configuration settings. To this end, simulation tools, such as CloudSim, can be used to evaluate HA solutions and a cloud resiliency against failures. CloudSim allows implementing of scheduling policies, but it does not support HA properties. This paper provides availability-aware CloudSim extension (ACE). ACE extends CloudSim with a graphical and textual modeling to ensure simplicity and reusability of cloud scenarios. ACE has added HA-aware modeling (HA metrics and failure/redundancy/interdependency models) and HA-aware scheduling (HA-aware placements, failover, repair, and load balancing policies) into CloudSim. With ACE, the creation of cloud scenarios is facilitated, and multiple HA-aware deployment solutions can be evaluated under different stochastic and deterministic events. ACE can assess the impact of different redundancy/failure models, and other performance policies to extract HA-aware lessons. In this paper, ACE is assessed on a cloud application to evaluate different redundancy/failure models and provide availability analysis of the HA-aware placement solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software systems continuously evolve to accommodate new features and interoperability relationships between artifacts point to increasingly relevant software change impacts. During maintenance, developers must ensure that related entities are updated to be consistent with these changes. Studies in the static change impact analysis domain have identified that a combination of source code and lexical information outperforms using each one when adopted independently. However, the extraction of lexical information and the measure of how loosely or closely related two software artifacts are, considering the semantic information embedded in their comments and identifiers has been carried out using somewhat complex information retrieval (IR) techniques. The interplay between software semantic and change relationship strengths has also not been extensively studied. This work aims to fill both gaps by comparing the effectiveness of measuring semantic coupling of OO software classes using (i) simple identifier based techniques and (ii) the word corpora of the entire classes in a software system. Afterwards, we empirically investigate the interplay between semantic and change coupling. The empirical results show that: (1) identifier based methods have more computational efficiency but cannot always be used interchangeably with corpora-based methods of computing semantic coupling of classes and (2) there is no correlation between semantic and change coupling. Furthermore we found that (3) there is a directional relationship between the two, as over 70% of the semantic dependencies are also linked by change coupling but not vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PAR platform is a software platform developed by our research team to support software formality and automated development. The platform fully embodies the advantages of functional abstraction and data abstraction, thus making software development convenient and reliable. The key to achieving this performance is a batch of reusable software components. In order to ensure the correctness and reliability of the whole software platform, it is very important to ensure the correctness and reliability of the software components. In this paper, we select some typical software components in the PAR platform, formalize the semantics of the components in a formal way，and prove the correctness of the components with the help of the Coq theorem prover，hence improving the efficiency of software compoents' formal verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]