We study the evolution and the dominance of the service based functions and their distinguishing features. As the service industry matures, its functions bear many similarities with the software development processes, such as intense man-machine interaction, knowledge intensive activities, flexibility in the organization, control and execution of tasks. In this paper we discuss wide range of interconnected topics, emphasizing the multi-faceted nature of service functions. These include the evolution of service industry and their products, the consumerization of high tech products based on their large-scale adoption and the consequent creation of implicit requirements; the technology transfer processes; the error proneness due to intense and prolonged interaction with computers and some methods of mitigating error incidence. We argue that by proper 'humanization and personalization' of interactive systems and by the use of teams of computer supported professionals, we can prevent such errors. We discuss some useful team types, models of their behavior and their control aspects. As the cost of communications shrinks like due to the Internet, we conclude that a fully decentralized system control provides a flat, flexible, and fair and friction-free organization for large team based service systems.

To bridge a wide gap between the end users and the requirements engineers, we propose a business flow diagram for acquiring users' requirements of the object oriented software development in the business application domain. Each field of this diagram shows either a role or a responsibility of a particular person or an organization. This paper proposes a development method that the engineers acquire the requirements by using our diagrams. We have implemented a supporting tool based on this study for collaborating the requirements engineers with their users. At first, the end users of an information system to be developed draw diagrams representing the flows of information and physical objects in their work from their own points of view. Sometimes the engineers write them with the users. If all users submit their diagrams, then our tool collects them and constructs a total diagram. The requirements engineers analyze the total diagram for improving the business flow. After the engineers complete this diagram, our tool can automatically transform it into an initial version of the class diagram. We show the effectiveness of our approach with some experiments. Comparing the related works, we discuss some issues of the practical aspects of this proposal.

In a software maintenance phase, since quality assurance engineers frequently only change source codes, the consistency between the source codes and their specification documents cannot be kept. In this paper we propose a supporting technique for changing specification documents automatically so that the specifications can be consistent with the source codes. In our technique, we represent a program with multiple graphs and we consider the changes on programs as the modification of the graphs. The modification of the graphs is formalized with a sequence of the operation on the graphs. We design the rules of how to relate the operations on program graphs to the operations on graphs that represent specification documents. By applying these rules, we can detect what modification and which parts of the specification document should be made to maintain the consistency between the specification and the program, when the program is modified.

This paper discusses the characteristics of human design knowledge. By studying a number of actual human made designs of excellent designers, the most frequent basic mental operations of a typical human designer have been found. They are: a design rule for hierarchical detailing reported previously, a micro design rule for generating a hierarchical expansion, dictionary operations to build a micro design rule and dictionaries. This study assumes a multiplicity of knowledge based on Zipf's theory, "the principle of least effort. " Zipf's principle may be proved and it becomes possible to understand the fundamental nature of human design.

The vehicle routing and facility location fields are well-developed areas in management science and operations research application. There is an increasing recognition that effective decision-making in these fields requires the adoption of optimization software that can be embedded into a decision support system. In this paper, we describe the implementation details of our software components for solving the vehicle routing and facility location problems.

The abilities of fuzzy inference methods in modeling of complicated systems are implemented to electromagnetics for the first time. The very popular and well known monopole antenna is chosen as a general example and a fast, simple and accurate fuzzy model for its input impedance is made by introducing a new point of view to impedance basic parameters. It is established that a surprisingly little number of input data points is sufficient to make a full model and also the system behavior (dominant rules) are saved as simple membership functions. The validity of the derived rules is confirmed through applying them to the case of thin-angled monopole antenna and comparing the results with the measured. Finally using the spatial membership function context, input impedance of thick-angled monopole antenna is predicted and a novel view point to conventional electromagnetic parameters is discussed to generalize the modeling method.

This paper proposes an implementation of the Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA) connection management system, based on our involvement of The TINA Trial (TTT). The system is used for managing ATM networks, which consist of network elements with SNMP interfaces. It provides setup, configuration, and release of ATM connection with a GUI-based network design tool that generates network resource data used for deploying TINA software components. This paper reports on a method of implementing TINA components over a Distributed Processing Environment (DPE) and an effective way to manage computational objects with multiple interfaces by using the Trading Service.

An efficient algorithm for reconstructing all polyhedral 3D objects from two orthographic views is presented. Since the two-view orthographic representation of a 3D object is ambiguous, it requires a numerous amount of combinatorial searches in the process of reconstruction. Also, multiple number of solutions in contrast to the designers intention can be existed in the problem. This paper proposes a two phase algorithm to reduce the search space and to select the most plausible solution described by the given projections. First, the partially constructed objects are reconstructed from the restricted candidate faces corresponding to each area on the two-view drawings in its first phase. Then the complete objects are obtained from the partially constructed objects by adding other candidates with geometrical validity in the second phase. The algorithm performs a combinatorial search based on the face decision rules along with two heuristics. Decision rules check geometrical validity and heuristic rules enhance the search speed. In addition, the reconstruction finds the most plausible 3D object that human observers are most likely to select first among the given multiple solutions. Several examples from a working implementation are given to show the completeness of the algorithm.

Critical properties of real-time embedded systems must be verified before these systems are deployed as failing to meet these properties may cause considerable property damages and/or human casualties. Although Statechart is one of the most popular languages for modeling behavior of real-time systems, proof systems and analysis tools for Statechart so far are in research and do not fully support the semantics of the original Statechart, or have limited capabilities for proving real-time properties. This paper introduces a toolset ASADAL/PROVER for verifying temporal properties of Statechart extended with justice and compassion properties. ASADAL/PROVER is composed of two subsystems, RTTL-Prover and Model-Checker. The RTTL-Prover converts Statechart specifications into real-time temporal logic (RTTL) formulas of Ostroff, and then checks if the formulas satisfy a temporal property (also in RTTL) using theorem proving techniques. The Model-Checker supports verification of a predefined set of real-time properties using a model checking technique. The RTTL-Prover can support verification of any real-time properties as long as they can be specified in RTTL and, therefore, messages generated by the tool are general and may not be of much help in debugging Statechart specifications. The Model-Checker, however, can provide detailed information for debugging. ASADAL/PROVER has been applied successfully to some experimental systems. One of on-going researches in this project is to apply the symbolic model-checking technique by[3]to support Statecharts with a much larger global-state space. We are also extending the types of temporal properties supported by the Model-Checker.

The software requirements specification process consists of three steps; requirements capture and analysis, requirements definition and specification, and requirements validation. At the beginning of the second step which this paper focuses on, there have been several types of massive documents generated in the first step. Since the developers and the clients/users of the new software system may not have common knowledge in the field which the system deals with, it is difficult for the developers to produce correct requirements specification by using these documents. There has been few research work to solve this problem. The authors have developed a support tool to produce correct requirements specification by arranging and restructuring those documents into clearly understandable forms. In the second step, the developers must specify the functions and their constraints of the new system from those documents. Analyzing the developers' real activities for designing the support tool, the authors propose a model of this step as the following four activities. To specify the functions of the new system, the developers must collect the sentences which may suggest the functions scattering those documents. To define the details of each function, the developers must gather the paragraphs including the descriptions of the functions. To verify the correctness of each function, the developers must survey all related documents. To perform above activities successfully, the developers must manage various versions of those documents correctly. According to these four types of activities, the authors propose the effective ways to support the developers by arranging those documents. This paper shows algorithms based on this model by using the structures of the documents and keywords which may suggest the functions or constraints. To examine the feasibility of their proposal, the authors implemented a prototype tool. Their tool extracts complete information scattering those documents. The effectiveness of their proposal is demonstrated by their experiments.

With the introduction of ATM technology, service providers around the world have actively engaged in offering high bandwidth services. Currently, services, such as T1/E1, T3/E3 circuit emulation, are made available to large-volume account users. However, more advanced services, such as multimedia applications, have demanded not just high bandwidth but also flexible rate adaptation with quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee. To support the above service requirements, sophisticated network planning and engineering procedures should be taken. In the past few years, we have conducted various researches on developing the engineering strategies for resource control and management to support multi-rate service offering. We have also looked into the design details of connection control and management for achieving the QoS requirement. We considered the service quality of the underlying transport in regard with the QoS management. In this paper, we will outline those results and give an overview description about the proposed framework.

Originally intended for application to B-ISDN, which is carrier oriented, ATM technology has been actively studied for application to LAN based environments since the beginning of the 1990s. One of the most notable things in LAN area is development of a rich set of application services. A number of technical specifications for major application services have been developed, which include LAN Emulation, IP over ATM, Multi-protocol over ATM, Voice and Telephony over ATM, as well as Native ATM services such as MPEG2 over ATM. Development of these new services raises new challenges related to traffic management. Keeping pace with the development, a number of traffic control mechanisms have also been developed to maximize the performance of these services. Traffic control and management techniques, however, are still in the early stage of their learning curve. Network engineers are facing challenging problems related to traffic management. This paper reviews major service-related technologies and discusses traffic management issues associated with these services. Especially, it describes the real world traffic management as practiced by average network engineers with state-of-the-art products. Although the thechnology developments have advanced through many research works, there seems to be a considerable gaps between the practice and principles. This paper discusses the traffic issues of ATM LAN from this perspective and points out some challenges for the future. Most of the difficulties in handling traffic issues stems from the differences in implementation details. To alleviate this difficulty, the introduction of a unified node model which describes the traffic handling capability of ATM nodes in sufficient detail is suggested.

Rapid system prototyping is one of the main applications for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). At the stage of rapid system prototyping, design specifications can often be changed since they cannot be determined completely. In this paper, layout design change is focused on and a layout reconfiguration algorithm is proposed for FPGAs. The target FPGA architecture is developed for transport processing. In order to implement more various circuits flexibly, it has three-input lookup tables (LUTs) as minimum logic cells. Since its logic granularity is finer than that of conventional FPGAs, it requires more routing resources to connect them and minimization of routing congestion is indispensable. In layout reconfiguration, the main problem is to add LUTs to initial layouts. Our algorithm consists of two steps: For given placement and global routing of LUTs, in Step 1 an added LUT is placed with allowing that the position of the added LUT may overlap that of a preplaced LUT; Then in Step 2 preplaced LUTs are moved to their adjacent positions so that the overlap of the LUT positions can be resolved. Global routes are updated corresponding to reconfiguration of placement. The algorithm keeps routing congestion small by evaluating global routes directly both in Steps 1 and 2. Especially in Step 2, if the minimum number of preplaced LUTs are moved to their adjacent positions, our algorithm minimizes routing congestion. Experimental results demonstrate that, if the number of added LUTs is at most 20% of the number of initial LUTs, our algorithm generates the reconfigured layouts whose routing congestion is as small as that obtained by executing a conventional placement and global routing algorithm. Run time of our algorithm is within approximately one second.

A traffic engineering method has been developed to meet the requirements for efficient bandwidth dimensioning and for a practical and consolidated network design method. It characterizes the offered-traffic burstiness on a transit link by using time-series measurement of the aggregate traffic. It estimates future traffic characteristics based on the average traffic volume at that time which is easily derived from trend analysis, i. e. , an x% increase in bandwidth each year and gives the required link capacity. Simulation showed that the parameters estimated using this method fit the actual behavior of a network well. This method enables an appropriate bandwidth to be allocated to a transit link without having to estimate the specific traffic characteristics for each connection over the link. Once the burstiness parameter and its trend have been identified based on this method, it is possible to use a simple traffic measurement method to detect changes in network traffic and feed them back to the engineering procedure.

This paper deals with two different quantitative inversion algorithms for reconstructing the complex permittivity profile of bounded inhomogeneous objects from measured scattered field data. The first algorithm involves an imaging method with single frequency excitation and multiincidence illumination and the second algorithm involves a method with synthetic pulse (multifrequency mode) excitation for objects surrounded by freespace or buried in stratified half-space media. Transmission or reflection imaging protocols are considered depending on aimed applications: microwave imaging in free-space from far-field data for target identification, microwave imaging from near-field data for nondestructive testing (NDT), microwave tomography of buried objects for mine detection and localization, civil engineering and geophysical applications. And Edge-Preserving regularization scheme leading to a significant enhancement in the image reconstructions is also proposed. The methods are illustrated with synthetic and experimental data.

The design and engineering of new network intelligence platforms to accommodate the ever-changing and growing demands of customers, presents rich market opportunities and challenges tempered by concerns arising from the problematic experiences of similar system and network developments. As the telecommunications industry evolves, customers are increasingly coming to expect the perception of instantaneous access to service providers together with transparency to network failures. System performance dictates that response times need to be minimised, sufficient redundant capacity installed in case of failure and controls embedded within the design to manage the exceptional situations (such as media stimulated events) that continually threaten network integrity. Network design based on a 'top-down,' 'end-to-end' methodology plays a fundamental role in delivering solutions that meet customers' performance needs. It is necessary to consider service scenario mixes, service demand, physical network topology, signalling message flows, the mapping of functional entities to physical components, and routing as part of the network design process to ensure that performance requirements are met. The use of 'what-if' design tools is particularly relevant as part of this process. A challenging task faces the System Designer with the often conflicting goals of good performance and provision of service flexibility.

This paper discusses how to derive message sequence charts (MSCs) from a set of state transition descriptions. Recently, MSC notation has received much attention in the communications software field because it graphically shows system global behavior, So MSC handling techniques are being widely studied. These studies have recommended the design a system by a set of formal MSCs in the early stages of development and then to convert them into state transition descriptions. However, it is difficult to apply those results to existing communications software products. This is because these systems are designed based on state transition descriptions and there are no formal MSCs for them. In this paper, we propose a method of deriving MSCs based on optimized reachability analysis. This method generates MCSs that avoid state explosion. A case study using Q.931 protocol shows the feasibility of this method.

When circuits which include inductive loads are turned off by contact, showering noise generates across contact gap. Showering noise waveforms seem not to be stable in the case that wire-spring relay contact is used to turn on/off inductive load. It seems that various factors are concerned in the irregularity of showering noise waveforms. This paper clarifies the relation between showering noise waveform and the cathodic contact surface variation with the number of contact operation, and moving velocity of contact.

A performance estimation method has been developed that combines conventional performance evaluation with Bayesian regression analysis. The conventional method is used to estimate performance a priori; this a priori estimate is then updated through Bayesian regression analysis using monitored performance. This method compensates for modeling errors in the conventional technique without recreating complex performance models; it does not require additional traffic measurement or system behavior models. Numerical examples and applications of traffic management in ATM PVC networks have demonstrated its effectiveness.

CAMs (Content Addressable Memories) are functional memories which have functions such as word-parallel equivalence search, bilateral 1-bit data shifting between consecutive words, and word-parallel writing. Since CAMs can be integrated because of their regular structure, massively parallel CAM functions can be executed. Taking advantage of CAMs, Ishiura and Yajima have proposed a parallel fault simulation algorithm using a CAM. This algorithm, however, requires a large amount of CAM storage to simulate large-scale circuits. In this paper, we propose a new massively parallel fault simulation algorithm requiring less CAM storage, and compare it with Ishiura and Yajima's algorithm. Experimental results of the algorithm on CHARGE --the CAM-based hardware engine developed in our laboratory--are also reported.