Alexandre Mota

A fuzzy rule-based system to assess e-government technical interoperability maturity level

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to present a system called NEBULOSUS, which is a fuzzy rule-based expert system for assessing the maturity level of an agency regarding technical interoperability. Design/methodology/approach – The study introduces the use of artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic to deal with the imprecision and uncertainty present in the assessment process. To validate the system proposed and demonstrate its operation, the study takes into account the Brazilian technical interoperability maturity model, based on the Brazilian Government Interoperability Framework (GIF). Findings – With the system proposed and its methodology, it could be possible to increase the assessment process to management level and to provide decision-making support without worrying about technical details that make it complex and time-consuming. Moreover, NEBULOSUS is a standalone system that offers an easy-to-use, open and flexible structuring database that can be adapted by governments throughout the worl...

An Analytical Approach to the Economical Assessment of Wind Distributed Generators Penetration in Electric Power Systems with Centralized Thermal Generation

This paper presents an approach for economical assessment related to the penetration of wind power generators in electric power networks. The proposed method is based on analytical formulation that considers the uncertainties involved with wind speed and load demand. The results show that the methodology also permits the analysis of distributed wind generators insertion considering different technical and economical parameters.

IDEAS05: Unifying Models of Test Cases and Requirements

In industry, due to market pressures, it is common that the system requirements are out of date or incomplete for certain parts of the system. Nevertheless, we can always find up to date test cases which implicitly complements the related requirements. Therefore, instead of simply using test cases to detect software failures, in this paper we present an approach to update requirements using test cases. To accomplish this, we first assume that both requirements and test cases are formally documented; we reuse previous works that provide such models automatically as CSP formal specifications. Thus, we formally define a merge operation using the operational semantics of CSP. Finally, we use part of a real case study to experience the proposed approach.

IDEAS08: An Strategy for Automatic Conformance Testing in Embedded Systems

Software testing is an expensive and time-consuming activity; it is also error-prone due to human factors. But, it still is the most common effort used in the software industry to achieve an acceptable level of quality for its products. An alternative is to use formal verification approaches, although they are not widespread in industry yet. This paper proposes an automatic verification approach to aid system testing based on refinement checking, where the underlying formalisms are hidden from the developers. Our approach consists in using a controlled natural language (a subset of English) to describe requirements (where it is automatically translated into the formal specification language CSP) and extracting a model directly from a mobile phone using a developed tool support; these artifacts are normalized in the same abstraction level and compared using the refinement checker FDR. This approach is being used at Motorola; the source of our case study.