Design and Implementation of a Service Management Framework for Avionics Systems

In this work, we investigate an online service management problem in vehicular edge computing networks. To satisfy the varying service demands of mobile vehicles, a service management framework is required to make decisions on the service lifecycle to maintain good network performance. We describe the service lifecycle consists of creating an instance of a given service (scale-out), moving an instance to a different edge node (migration), and/or termination of an underutilized instance (scale-in). In this paper, we propose an efficient online algorithm to perform service management in each time slot, where performance quality in the current time slot, the service demand in future time slots, and the minimal observed delay by vehicles and the minimal migration delay are considered while making the decisions on service lifecycle. Here, the future service demand is computed from a gated recurrent unit (GRU)based prediction model, and the network performance quality is estimated using a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) model which has the ability to interact with the vehicular environment in real-time. The choice of optimal edge location to deploy a service instance at different times is based on our proposed optimization formulations. Simulation experiments using real-world vehicle trajectories are carried out to evaluate the performance of our proposed demand-prediction based online service management (DOSM) framework against different state-of-the-art solutions using several performance metrics.

Real-time software is becoming more prevalent in avionics systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles and spacecrafts. More often, these systems operate with limited human interaction or an increased latency in human response. Therefore, these systems require autonomous fault detection and a repair mechanism to respond to off nominal conditions that could arise. In order to prevent a hazard, these systems require assurance that they will operate in a safe manner while successfully completing a mission. Assurance, as a software engineering activity involves the reduction of risk, and inversely, an increase in confidence in a software system. In the context of fault management, this becomes a question of increasing confidence that a software system can detect and respond to the offnominal conditions occur. This activity is not always straight forward as off-nominal conditions in complex real-time systems do not always manifest as singular events, but rather as a combination of symptoms. Furthermore, for fault management assurance to be useful it needs to be rigorous. Therefore, the approach needs to be supported by a standard, repeatable framework. The foundation for this framework is in the ability to model the fault management system integrated in the hardware and software avionics real-time system. Models can assist in assuring both functional and quality attribute requirements such as reliability. The Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) is a Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) standard notation (AS5506/1) for the modeling and analysis of real-time systems. AADL has been extended to model fault management behavior through the AADL Error Annex, also an SAE standard. At its core, the AADL Error Annex provides rules for how software and hardware components are allowed to propagate an error across the avionics real-time system modeled in AADL. Because a standard notation is being used, there is intrinsic confidence to the approach. This paper will explore how the assurance of software fault management can be applied in practice. First, it is important to briefly review AADL and the AADL Error Annex as well as common terminology related to software fault management. Next, the application of software fault management assurance will be discussed. The first step in this application is to understand the very basic (atomic) hardware and software faults that occur at the component level. This information can be collected in the form of a failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA). An analysis is required in order to evaluate the ability of the software fault management system to, at the very least, detect the symptoms. This analysis answers two fundamental questions. First, to what degree are faults visible to the avionics software? Second, to what degree does the avionics software handle these faults? This paper presents an example to demonstrate the assurance of software fault management. The software fault management assurance framework proposed in this paper utilizes a standard notation, coupled with a formal mechanism for modeling faults. This provides a rigorous foundation for analysis on the avionics software real-time system in a repeatable manner. Therefore a model based assurance activity of a software fault management system can successfully be applied.

Several frameworks have been developed to assist the analysis of service management systems. However, most of these frameworks only capture limited aspects of a service-oriented enterprise. This paper first reviews several popular service management frameworks. An enterprise architecture approach that is commonly used in information systems planning has been adapted to integrate various service management frameworks and tools, as well as to support the planning and documentation of a service-oriented enterprise. The proposed service-oriented enterprise architecture (SOEA) includes the following aspects: service, process, people, information, and motivation. Each aspect can be viewed from a strategic, tactical, and operational level. The mapping of the conceptual constructs of existing service management frameworks to the proposed SOEA is discussed in detail.

Shortened military avionics life cycles, growing real time processing performance requirements, and commercial product technology adaptation to military operational environments makes the move to COTS challenging. Avionics systems integrators must focus on procuring avionics box enclosures that support military operational environments. Aircraft wiring modification processes have to be developed to provide upgrades that support high speed computing systems using greater data bandwidths. Software engineering processes have to be tailored to incorporate new computing system standards and methodologies. Avionics Systems Engineering processes must evolve and adapt to dynamically changing COTS NDI product lines that incorporate emerging standards. COTS-OSEP embraces the combination of art and science that includes insight, intuition, and technology projection necessary to upgrade avionics suites with the latest capabilities. With the convergence of telecommunication, high definition television, multimedia, and super computing desktop technologies, traditional military ECBS architecting paradigms have to significantly evolve in order to reap 'value engineering' benefits from the commercial marketplace.

The main objective of the Service Level Management process is to ensure that an agreed level of IT service is provided for all current IT services and that future services are delivered to agreed achievable targets. The number of agreed SLAs has rapidly increased in the IT industry while more and more IT customers have become aware of Service Level Management best practices. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most widely used IT service management framework that provides best practices for implementing IT service management processes including Service Level Management. The research problem of this study is: how Service Level Agreements can be implemented with an IT service management tool. We use a combination of IT service management and knowledge management approach to study the problem. The main contribution of this paper is to present results of a case study that focused on improving Service Level Management practices in a Finnish IT service provider company Tieto.

IT service catalogs are a pivotal element for managing IT services in many organizations, in accordance with common practice IT service management frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library. However, both in theory and practice, IT service catalogs are underspecified as much emphasis is put on the structure and content of the catalogs while the use and integration into IT service management processes are often neglected. Consequentially, the aim of the present paper is to propose a maturity model for IT service catalogs that covers structure and content as well as use and integration. This advances our understanding of this pivotal artifact in many IT service management systems and helps practitioners to identify improvement potentials for their IT service catalog-related practices.

Implementing and debugging high-performance network subsystems is a challenging task. In this paper, we present our experiences from developing and debugging a network interface card (NIC). Our NIC targets networked storage subsystems (Marazakis et al., 2006). For this purpose it mainly provides support for remote direct-memory-access (RDMA) write, sender-side notification of RDMA write completion, and receiver-side interrupt generation. In our work we examine issues that arise during system implementation and debugging, both in terms of correctness as well as performance. We present an analysis of the individual problems we encounter and we discuss how we address each case. For most problems we encounter, it is not possible to rely on existing debugging tools. However, we find that most of the techniques we use in this process, rely on collecting some form of event records from software or hardware components. We believe that such capabilities can be provided for independent hardware or software components in isolation, a fairly straight-forward task, thus, significantly simplifying the debugging process in complex systems of this nature

The economics of semiconductor manufacturing have forced process engineers to develop techniques to increase wafer yield. Improvements in process controls and uniformities in all areas of the fab have reduced film thickness variations at the very edge of the wafer surface. This improved uniformity has provided the opportunity to consider decreasing edge exclusions, and now the outermost extents of the wafer must be considered in the yield model and expectations. These changes have increased the requirements on lithography to improve wafer edge printability in areas that previously were not even coated. This has taxed all software and hardware components used in defining the optical focal plane at the wafer edge. We have explored techniques to determine the capabilities of extreme wafer edge printability and the components of the systems that influence this printability. We will present current capabilities and new detection techniques and the influence that the individual hardware and software components have on edge printability. We will show effects of focus sensor designs, wafer layout, utilization of dummy edge fields, the use of non-zero overlay targets and chemical/optical edge bead optimization.

MOPS is a platform for surgical robotics research. It consists of hardware and software components for building surgical robot systems based on existing robot arms. The reference system presented in this paper has two robot arms, each with an adapter for mounting and actuating different types of surgical instruments. Additionally, the system has a high-resolution stereo camera and a simple operator console with haptic devices and foot pedals for teleoperating the manipulators. Software components are based on Robot Operating System (ROS) to keep them modular and reusable for different types of hardware. We evaluate the precision of our system for vision-based tasks and demonstrate its potential for surgical task automation. The mean end-to-end error, including that of the vision system, for a trajectory following task was 1.2mm / 0.3° for one manipulator and 2.7mm / 0.7° for the other. MOPS software and hardware components are made available under an open-source license to encourage collaboration and facilitate the advancement of surgical robotics research.

A framework and associated metrics and measures that can be used to measure the performance of IT service management with an accompanying contingency theory of IT service management.

The aggregate use of complex cyber-physical systems, incorporation of artificial intelligence and autonomy in flight operations has reconceptualised the aerospace cybersecurity paradigm to a new era. Cybersecurity is about the prevention or mitigation of malicious acts undertaken to either compromise systems directly or access valuable information that could be subject to criminal misuse. The cybersecurity of Communication, Navigation, and surveillance / Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) systems is aimed at controlling the effects of such threats and enhancing the safety of flying passengers. Besides, the cybers resilience of state-of-the-art CNS/ATM and avionics systems have been impacted by convoluted risk management issues. The security of legacy aviation and airport infrastructure has been curtailed owing to their annexure to public networks, which constitute a significant risk to the aviation industry and the general public as a whole. The existing control mechanisms in place, with the aim of assuring Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) of information, have a multitude of deficiencies in deciding the extent of vulnerability of systems, the severity of impact and subsequently overall risk rating. Weaknesses in some of the security controls which are intended to mitigate the impact of cyber-attacks also contribute towards this issue. A risk-based system engineering solution is envisioned in managing today's cyber-physical systems which may comprise of interwound Systems of Systems (SoS). This paper aims to investigate threats to aviation assets, vulnerabilities of aviation systems and to adopt a holistic approach to mitigate possible risks. The article also recommends a novel methodology to manage risks by enhancing the consistency and accuracy of risk attributes of CNS/ATM systems, avionics and airport systems.

Preface. 1. Introduction. 1.1 What is COP? 1.2 Why is COP important? 1.3 What is a component? 1.4 Hardware components and software components. 1.5 From OOP to COP. 1.6 Component-based software engineering. 1.7 Summary. 1.8 Self-review questions. 1.9 Exercises. 2. A Theory of Components. 2.1 Principles of COP. 2.2 Infrastructures of COP. 2.3 Component models. 2.4 Connection models. 2.5 Deployment models. 2.6 Unifying component technologies. 2.7 Summary. 2.8 Self-review questions. 2.9 Exercises. 3. COP with JavaBeans. 3.1 Overview of JavaBeans technology. 3.2 The component model of JavaBeans. 3.3 The connection model of JavaBeans. 3.4 The deployment model of JavaBeans. 3.5 Examples and lab practice. 3.6 Summary. 3.7 Self-review questions. 3.8 Exercises. 4. Enterprise JavaBeans Components. 4.1 The EJB a rchitecture. 4.2 The component model of EJB. 4.3 The connection model of EJB. 4.4 The deployment model of EJB. 4.5 Examples and lab practice. 4.6 Summary. 4.7 Self-review questions. 4.8 Exercises. 4.9 Programming exercises. 5. CORBA Components. 5.1 The COBRA component infrastructure. 5.2 The CORBA component model (CCM). 5.3 The connection model of CORBA and CCM. 5.4 The deployment model of CORBA and CCM. 5.5 Examples and lab practice. 5.6 Summary. 5.7 Self-review questions. 5.8 Exercises. 5.9 Programming exercises. 6. .NET Components. 6.1 The .NET framework. 6.2 The component model of .NET. 6.3 The connection model of .NET. 6.4 .NET component deployments. 6.5 Visual Studio .NET. 6.6 Examples and lab practice. 6.7 Summary. 6.8 Self-review questions. 6.9 Exercises. 6.10 Programming exercises. 7. COP with OSGi Components. 7.1 Overview of OSGi technology. 7.2 The component model of OSGi. 7.3 The connection model of OSGi. 7.4 The deployment model of OSGi. 7.5 Examples and lab practice. 7.6 Summary. 7.7 Self-review questions. 7.8 Exercises. 8. Web Services Components. 8.1 The Web Services framework. 8.2 The component model of Web Services. 8.3 The connection model of Web Services. 8.4 Web Services component deployment. 8.5 Examples and lab practice. 8.6 Summary. 8.7 Self-review questions. 8.8 Exercises. 8.9 Programming exercises. Appendix.

Software in the aerospace industry becomes the integral components of modern day avionic systems and plays a key role in conducting successful missions. Further to that, safety critical systems rely on software components where malfunctioning may result in catastrophic consequences. For example, a failure in the software of flight computers or autopilot systems of a commercial aircraft may end in series of damages or even mass of causalities. Increasing competition in the aviation industry forces companies to develop more capable systems in less time with less cost. In competitive market conditions, companies are in the position of having to use new technologies in their product development life cycle processes. One of these technologies used in the aviation industry is the Model Based Development (MBD) technology. The MBD technology has been widely used in the development of airborne software because of the time and cost advantages that it provides to companies. However, although the MBD technology promises to increase productivity, it also introduces a number of new significant issues that need to be considered when it is used for developing safety critical systems. In this study, two of those issues are explained in an example. The first issue relates to the integrity of model when model is transferred from an unqualified tool to a qualified tool and the second issue relates to the comparison between model coverage analysis and structural coverage analysis. These two issues are also among the most questioned topics by the certification authority for the airborne software if MBD technology is used as they may have safety impacts on flight safety and may affect type certification process in terms of software.

IT service management and incident management is a hot topic in every company which serves IT services and they require human effort to manage. In ITIL framework for IT service management, it's always useful to link the incidents with configuration items, in other words the assets or components necessary to deliver IT services and this task is managed manually by IT support technicians in many IT service management tools. The aim of the study is to remove this manual linking step by applying text classification methods and instead to provide an automatic assignment of CI's to incidents. Four of the text classification methods, Naive Bayes Multinomial, k-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machine and J48 decision tree classifiers, are used on three different sets of incidents extracted from the same database by using different filters. The impact of some pre-processing steps is compared on different sizes of datasets.

In the past five years, more and more information technology (IT) projects have been adopting service-oriented solutions. In addition, more and more traditional business and government organizations are focused on clearly identifying and monitoring the core IT services they are delivering. The remarkable growth of web service technologies and service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions yields both challenges and opportunities in improving the quality of IT services and has given rise to a variety of IT service management frameworks like IT Infrastructure Library (ITU) and Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMJ). This paper presents the problem of total quality management (TQM) in IT services, followed by a review of quality definitions from four levels of perspectives. Based on the comparison of the different definitions, the necessity of integration of quality measurement and improvement approaches is identified and our preliminary work on TQM in IT services is introduced.