Daniel Plakosh

Complex COTS-based software systems: practical steps for their maintenance

This paper makes pragmatic recommendations for the maintenance of complex COTS-based systems. We first enumerate the issues that can arise in systems that rely on COTS products, whether in operational systems themselves or in the support systems used to create, modify, or test operational systems. We then suggest principles by which maintenance practice for such systems can be facilitated, particularly for those safety-critical systems for which significant risk is present if they fail. These principles aim at making explicit, during system creation, the COTS-related development practices upon which successful system maintenance will subsequently depend. They also depend on a reasonable means of determining, during system maintenance, how much risk is acceptable in using new releases of COTS products. Copyright

Measuring software sustainability

Planning and management of software sustainment is impaired by a lack of consistently applied, practical measures. Without these measures, it is impossible to determine the effect of efforts to improve sustainment practices. In this paper we provide a context for evaluating sustainability and discuss a set of measures developed at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Handling interdependent values in an auction mechanism for bandwidth allocation in tactical data networks

We consider a tactical data network with limited bandwidth, in which each agent is tracking objects and may have value for receiving data from other agents. The agents are self-interested and would prefer to receive data than share data. Each agent has private information about the quality of its data and can misreport this quality and degrade or otherwise decline to share its data. The problem is one of interdependent value mechanism design because the value to one agent for the broadcast of data on an object depends on the quality of the data, which is privately known to the sender. A recent two-stage mechanism due to Mezzetti (2004) can be modified to our setting. Our mechanism achieves efficient bandwidth allocation and provides incentive compatibility by conditioning payments on the realized value for data shared between agents.

Predicting the Behavior of a Highly Configurable Component Based Real-Time System

Software components and the technology supporting component based software engineering contribute greatly to the rapid development and configuration of systems for a variety of application domains. Such domains go beyond desktop office applications and information systems supporting e-commerce, but include systems having real-time performance requirements and critical functionality. Discussed in this paper are the results from an experiment that demonstrates the ability to predict deadline satisfaction of threads in a real-time system where the functionality performed is based on the configuration of the assembled software components. Presented is the method used to abstract the large, legacy code base of the system software and the application software components in the system; the model of those abstractions based on available architecture documentation and empirically-based, runtime observations; and the analysis of the predictions which yielded objective confidence in the observations and model created which formed the underlying basis for the predictions.

Adaptive Quality of Service in ad hoc wireless networks

In high criticality crisis scenarios, such as disaster management, ad hoc wireless networks are quickly assembled in the field to support decision makers through situational awareness using messaging-, voice-, and video-based applications. These applications cannot afford the luxury of stalling or failing due to overwhelming bandwidth demand on these networks as this could contribute to overall mission failure. This paper describes an approach for satisfying application-specific Quality of Service (QoS) expectations operating on ad hoc wireless networks where available bandwidth fluctuates. The proposed algorithm, D-Q-RAM (Distributed QoS Resource Allocation Model) incorporates a distributed optimization heuristic that results in near optimal adaptation without the need to know, estimate, or predict available bandwidth at any moment in time.

Web services for handheld tactical systems

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural pattern for constructing and deploying systems characterized by components called services that can be composed into applications using standard interface formats. While service orientation can reduce integration cost and enhance agility in response to changing situations, it has not been widely applied to support mobile users in ad hoc, wireless computing environments common to tactical military situations and first responders to humanitarian disasters. These environments are impoverished in terms of computational resources and network characteristics. This paper describes a set of prototypes that demonstrate the use of SOA in tactical environments in which users are employing handheld devices to obtain situational awareness data.

Mechanism design for sensor fusion: tactical networks as a foil for ultra large scale systems

Economic mechanisms, such as markets and auctions, offer a design language and mathematical concepts that might prove to be effective in addressing human incentives as first-class elements in the design of ultra large-scale systems. To study this possibility at realistic but controllable scale, we developed an emulation of a combat system tactical data network, and developed a variant of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism to allocate network bandwidth for radar sensor fusion. The overall conclusion of the study is that economic mechanisms are a feasible and interesting alternative to traditional systems approaches to resource allocation in systems that are highly dynamic, and that involve many actors engaged in varying activities, and having varying and possibly competing, goals.

Introduction to Software Security for Mobile Platforms Minitrack

This minitrack focuses on the research and automation techniques that can be applied to mobile platforms to ensure that software developed for these devices is secure without compromising other system properties such as performance or reliability.

Secure Software Architecture, Design, Implementation and Assurance

The secure software architecture, design, implementation and assurance minitrack focuses on the research and automation required to develop secure software systems that do not compromise other system properties such as performance and reliability. The goal of this minitrack is to facilitate a dialogue between software security researchers and practitioners so that software security research can be guided by practical requirements and research techniques can be more quickly transitioned to practice