Andrei Furda

Towards increased road safety: Real-time decision making for driverless city vehicles

This work elaborates on the topic of decision making for driverless city vehicles, particularly focusing on the aspects on how to develop a reliable approach which meets the requirements of safe city traffic. Decision making in this context refers to the problem of identifying the most appropriate driving maneuver to be performed in a given traffic situation. The overall decision making problem is decomposed into two consecutive stages. The first stage is safety-crucial, representing the decision regarding the set of feasible driving maneuvers. The second stage represents the decision regarding the most appropriate driving maneuver from the set of feasible ones. The developed decision making approach has been implemented in C++ and initially tested in a 3D simulation environment and, thereafter, in real-world experiments. The real-world experiments also included the integration of wireless communication between vehicles.

An object-oriented design of a World Model for autonomous city vehicles

This paper presents an object-oriented world model for the road traffic environment of autonomous (driver-less) city vehicles. The developed World Model is a software component of the autonomous vehicles control system, which represents the vehicles view of its road environment. Regardless whether the information is a priori known, obtained through on-board sensors, or through communication, the World Model stores and updates information in real-time, notifies the decision making subsystem about relevant events, and provides access to its stored information. The design is based on software design patterns, and its application programming interface provides both asynchronous and synchronous access to its information. Experimental results of both a 3D simulation and real-world experiments show that the approach is applicable and real-time capable.

Improving Safety for Driverless City Vehicles: Real-Time Communication and Decision Making

This paper elaborates on the Cybercars-2 Wireless Communication Framework for driverless city vehicles, which is used for Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communication. The developed framework improves the safety and efficiency of driverless city vehicles. Furthermore, this paper also elaborates on the vehicle control software architecture. On-road tests of both the communication framework and its application for real-time decision making show that the communication framework is reliable and useful for improving the safe operation of driverless city vehicles.

Migrating Enterprise Legacy Source Code to Microservices: On Multitenancy, Statefulness, and Data Consistency

Microservice migration is a promising technique to incrementally modernize monolithic legacy enterprise applications and enable them to exploit the benefits of cloud-computing environments. This article elaborates on three challenges of microservice migration: multitenancy, statefulness, and data consistency. The authors show how to identify each of these challenges in legacy code and explain refactoring and architectural pattern-based migration techniques relevant to microservice architectures. They explain how multitenancy enables microservices to be utilized by different organizations with distinctive requirements, why statefulness affects both the availability and reliability of a microservice system, and why data consistency challenges are encountered when migrating legacy code that operates on a centralized data repository to microservices operating on decentralized data repositories. They also explain the interdependencies between multitenancy, statefulness, and data consistency.

Multiple Criteria-Based Real-Time Decision Making by Autonomous City Vehicles

This paper addresses the topic of real-time decision making for autonomous city vehicles, i.e. the autonomous vehicles’ ability to make appropriate driving decisions in city road traffic situations. After decomposing the problem into two consecutive decision making stages, and giving a short overview about previous work, the paper explains how Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) can be used in the process of selecting the most appropriate driving maneuver.

Re-engineering data-centric information systems for the Cloud – A method and architectural patterns promoting multi-tenancy

Abstract Enterprise applications are data-centric information systems that are being increasingly deployed as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Cloud offerings. Such service-oriented enterprise applications allow multiple tenants (i.e., groups of service consumers) to share the computational and storage capabilities of a single Cloud application instance. Compared to a more traditional single-tenant application deployment model, a multitenant SaaS architecture promises to lower both deployment and maintenance costs. Such cost reductions motivate architects to reengineer existing enterprise applications to support multitenancy at the application level. However, in order to preserve data integrity and data confidentiality, the reengineering process must guarantee that different tenants allocated to the same application instance cannot access one anothers data, including both persistent values stored in databases and transient values created during calculations. This chapter presents a method and a set of architectural patterns for systematically reengineering data-sensitive enterprise applications into secure multitenant software services that can be deployed to public and private cloud offerings seamlessly. Architectural refactoring is introduced as a novel reengineering practice and the necessary steps in multitenant refactoring are described from planning to execution to validation (including testing and code reviews). The method and patterns are validated in a fictitious, but realistic and representative case study that was distilled from real-world requirements and application architectures.

The Role and Future Challenges of Wireless Communication Networks for Cooperative Autonomous City Vehicles

This paper elaborates on the use of future wireless communication networks for autonomous city vehicles. After addressing the state of technology, the paper explains the autonomous vehicle control system architecture and the Cybercars-2 communication framework; it presents experimental tests of communication-based real-time decision making; and discusses potential applications for communication in order to improve the localization and perception abilities of autonomous vehicles in urban environments.

A practical approach for detecting multi-tenancy data interference

This paper presents a practical solution for identifying tenant data interference defects when migrating single-tenant legacy code to multi-tenant components or multi-tenant microservices. The paper explains the concepts of multi-tenant components and microservices, elaborates a formal definition of the multi-tenancy data interference problem based on information flow control theory, and presents a practical method to identify potential defects by analysing the code statically. The method has been implemented as a prototype developer support tool for PHP code. The implemented support tool prototype demonstrates the methods effectiveness for supporting the transformation of single-tenant legacy source code into multi-tenant components or microservices. It could also be used to confirm that multi-tenant components or microservices are free of data interference defects. The prototype implementation has been validated in a case study with code from the open-source enterprise application SugarCRM. Results indicate that the developed approach significantly increases the efficiency of multi-tenancy transformation in larger code bases by pointing out potential defects.

Making optimal and justifiable asset maintenance decisions

Maintenance decisions for large-scale asset systems are often beyond an asset manager’s capacity to handle. The presence of a number of possibly conflicting decision criteria, the large number of possible maintenance policies, and the reality of budget constraints often produce complex problems, where the underlying trade-offs are not apparent to the asset manager. This chapter presents the decision support tool Justification and Optimisation of Budgets (JOB), which has been designed to help asset managers of large systems assess, select, interpret and optimise the effects of their maintenance policies in the presence of limited budgets. This decision support capability is realized through an efficient, scalable backtracking-based algorithm for the optimisation of maintenance policies, while enabling the user to view a number of solutions near this optimum and explore trade-offs with other decision criteria. To assist the asset manager in selecting between various policies, JOB also provides the capability of Multiple Criteria Decision Making. In this chapter, the JOB tool is presented and a real-world case study on a power plant system demonstrates JOB’s capability to significantly improve the decision making process.

Real-Time Decision Making for Autonomous City Vehicles

This paper addresses the topic of real-time decision making by autonomous city vehicles. Beginning with an overview of the state of research, the paper presents the vehicle decision making & control systemarchitecture, explains the subcomponents which are relevant for decision making (World Model and Driving Maneuver subsystem), and presents the decision making process. Experimental test results confirmthe suitability of the developed approach to deal with the complex real-world urban traffic.