This paper tackles the problem of structural integration testing of stateful classes. Previous work on structural testing of object-oriented software exploits data flow analysis to derive test requirements for class testing and defines contextual def-use associations to characterize inter-method relations. Non-contextual data flow testing of classes works well for unit testing, but not for...
|
In this paper, we study the atomic broadcast and multicast problems, two fundamental abstractions for building fault-tolerant systems. As opposed to atomic broadcast, atomic multicast allows messages to be addressed to a subset of the processes in the system, each message possibly being multicast to a different subset. We require atomic multicast algorithms to be genuine, i.e., only processes...
|
Software development practice still relies on the notion that programming is equivalent to editing text. This view is also supported by mainstream versioning systems, such as CVS and SubVersion, which are excellent at versioning text files. We argue that programming = text editing may have been true years ago, but nowadays we construct complex systems by changing them piecemeal. However, despite...
|
We describe the implementation and experimental evaluation of a fault-tolerant leader election service for dynamic systems. Intuitively, distributed applications can use this service to elect and maintain an operational leader for any group of processes which may dynamically change. If the leader of a group crashes, is temporarily disconnected, or voluntarily leaves the group, the service...
|
In: Health Policy, 2006, vol. 78, no. 1, p. 77-92
This paper investigates the determinants of regional variations in outpatient antibiotic consumption using Swiss data. The analysis contributes to the debate on appropriate antibiotic use by improving the understanding of its determinants, and may help to define more effective health care policies to reduce the resistance phenomenon. Findings suggest that Switzerland exhibits relatively low...
|
In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006, vol. 4209, p. 316-328
As part of a Distributed Information Retrieval system a description of each remote information resource, archive or repository is usually stored centrally in order to facilitate resource selection. The acquisition of precise resource descriptions is therefore an important phase in Distributed Information Retrieval, as the quality of such representations will impact on selection accuracy, and...
|
In this paper we propose to regard an Agent Communication Language (ACL) as a set of conventions to act on a fragment of institutional reality, defined in the context of an artificial institution. Within such an approach, we first reformulate a previously proposed commitment-based semantics for ACLs. In particular we show that all commonly used types of communicative acts can be defined in terms...
|
The notion of artificial institution is crucial for the specification of open and dynamic interaction frameworks where heterogeneous and autonomous agents can interact to face problems in various fields, like for instance electronic commerce, business-to-business (B2B) applications, and personal assistant applications. In our view the specification of artificial institutions requires a clear...
|
Software agents’ ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents’ interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open...
|
In this paper, the system is viewed as a construction based on the actors’ cognitive and social interactions. The system is the result of multiple – actor sense making (Weick 1995), but at the same time it orients social sense making. In this process each actor’s point of view is a representation of both the system and the context perceived as pertinent by the actor. In other words, the...
|
