CRAB—CombinatoRial Auction Body Software System

Auctions are important market mechanisms for the allocation of goods and services. Combinatorial auctions are those auctions in which buyers can place bids on combinations of items. Combinatorial auctions have many applications. The paper presents the CRAB software system. CRAB is a non-commercial software system for generating, solving, and testing of combinatorial auction problems. The system solves problems by Balas’ method or by the primal-dual algo-rithm. CRAB is implemented in Ruby and it is distributed as the file crab.rb. The system is freely available on web pag-es for all interested

MDCHeS: Model-Driven Dynamic Composition of Heterogeneous Service

Web Service Composition provides an opportunity for enterprises to increase the ability to adapt themselves to frequent changes in users' requirements by integrating existing services. Our research has focused on proposing a framework to support dynamic composition and to use both SOAP-based and RESTful Web services simultaneously in composite services. In this paper a framework called "Model-driven Dynamic Composition of Heterogeneous Service" (MDCHeS) is introduced. It is elaborated in three different ways;each represents a particular view of the framework: data view, which consists of a Meta model and composition elements as well their relationships;process view, which introduces composition phases and used models in each phase;and component view, which shows an abstract view of the components and their interactions. In order to increase the dynamicity of MDCHeS framework, Model Driven Architecture and proxy based ideas are used.

Formalization of Federated Schema Architectural Style Variability

Data integration requires managing heterogeneous schema information. A federated database system integrates heterogeneous, autonomous database systems on the schema level, whereby both local applications and global applications accessing multiple component database systems are supported. Such a federated database system is a complex system of systems which requires a well-designed organization at the system and software architecture level. A specific challenge that federated database systems face is the organization of schemas into a schema architecture. This paper provides a detailed, formal investigation of variability in the family of schema architectures, which are central components in the architecture of federated database systems. It is shown how the variability of specific architectures can be compared to the reference architecture and to each other. To achieve this, we combine the semi-formal object-oriented modeling language UML with the formal object-oriented specification language Object-Z. Appropriate use of inheritance in the formal specification, as enabled by Object-Z, greatly supports specifying and analyzing the variability among the studied schema architectures. The investigation also serves to illustrate the employed specification techniques for analyzing and comparing software architecture specifications.

Determination of the Bromine, Manganese and Antimony in Nicotiana tabacum Solanaceae by Using the Neutron Activation Analysis Technique

Tobacco addiction has been mentioned as a leading cause of preventable illnesses and premature disability. Smoking is the main cause of lung cancer and one of the factors that most contribute to the occurrence of heart diseases, among others. The herbaceous species Nicotiana tabacum is a plant of the solanaceae family used for tobacco production. Some authors have conducted research about heavy metals and the toxicity of tobacco. It is, frequently, found in low concentrations in the ground, and superficial and underground waters, even though they do not have environmental anthropogenic contributions. However, with the increase of industrial activities and mining together with the agrochemical use of contaminated organic and inorganic fertilizers, an alteration of the geochemical cycle occurs. As a consequence, the natural flow of these materials increases and is released into the biosphere, where they are often accumulated in the superior layer of the ground, accessible to the roots of the plants. During planting and plant development, fertilizers and insecticides, including organochlorines and organophosphates, are used;consequently, the smoke from cigarette smoking presents various toxic substances, such as bromine (Br), manganese (Mn) and antimony (Sb), elements studied in this work. The procedures for the preparation of the samples were carried out in our laboratories and submitted to irradiation with thermal neutrons at Nuclear and Energy Research Institute (IPEN/CNEN-SP), in the Atomic Energy Institute IEA-R1 research reactor. The irradiated material was, then, analyzed by gamma spectrometry, using a high purity germanium detector (HPGe).

Feature-Oriented Nonfunctional Requirement Analysis for Software Product Line

Domain analysis in software product line （SPL） development provides a basis for core assets design and imple- mentation by a systematic and comprehensive commonality/variability analysis. In feature-oriented SPL methods, products of the domain analysis are domain feature models and corresponding feature decision models to facilitate application-oriented customization. As in requirement analysis for a single system, the domain analysis in the SPL development should con- sider both flmctional and nonfunctional domain requirements. However, the nonfunctional requirements （NFRs） are often neglected in the existing domain analysis methods. In this paper, we propose a context-based method of the NFR analysis for the SPL development. In the method, NFRs are materialized by connecting nonfunctional goals with real-world context, thus NFR elicitation and variability analysis can be performed by context analysis for the whole domain with the assistance of NFR templates and NFR graphs. After the variability analysis, our method integrates both functional and nonfunc- tional perspectives by incorporating the nonfunctional goals and operationalizations into an initial functional feature model. NFR-related constraints are also elicited and integrated. Finally, a decision model with both functional and nonfunctional perspectives is constructed to facilitate application-oriented feature model customization. A computer-aided grading system （CAGS） product line is employed to demonstrate the method throughout the paper.

Software development processes in ocean system modeling

Scientific modeling provides mathematical abstractions of real-world systems and builds software as implementations of these mathematical abstractions.Ocean science is a multidisciplinary discipline developing scientific models and simulations as ocean sys-tem models that are an essential research asset.In software engineering and information systems research,modeling is also an essential activity.In particular,business process modeling for business process management and systems engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise,so that the current process may be analyzed,improved and automated.In this paper,we employ process modeling for analyzing sci-entific software development in ocean science to advance the state in engineering of ocean system models and to better understand how ocean system models are developed and maintained in ocean science.We interviewed domain experts in semi-structured inter-views,analyzed the results via thematic analysis,and modeled the results via the Busi-ness Process Modeling Notation(BPMN).The processes modeled as a result describe an aspired state of software development in the domain,which are often not(yet)imple-mented.This enables existing processes in simulation-based system engineering to be improved with the help of these process models.