An old question of Yates as to whether all minimal degrees have a strong minimal cover remains one of the longstanding problems of degree theory, apparently largely impervious to present techniques. We survey existing results in this area, focussing especially on some recent progress.

The paper discusses the modeling of a central solar heating plant with seasonal storage in the ground using the new object-oriented physical systems modeling language Modelica. Main emphasis is put on the hierarchical decomposition of the system model and on the re-engineering of an existing Fortran code for the ground store model. The object-oriented physical system model is compiled to a math...

This article investigates the application of the service-oriented architectural style in the context of large organizations. It introduces an architectural reference framework that allows for a business process-centered development of composite applications. The framework groups artifacts of similar abstraction levels as well as concerns at five distinguished layers. This way, the service-orien...

Advanced future applications require to exploit new types of objects such as continuous media objects and distributed objects. Such new requirements stress operating systems to support variable levels of responsiveness and reliability. One computational model and resource management policy cannot cover the various requirements from all users so a exible structure is important when building futu...

Tropos is an agent-oriented development methodology based on knowledge-level concepts (such as actor, goal, and the dependency between actors) with a particular focus on requirements analysis. This paper presents a pattern language for guiding developers, especially those without previous Tropos experience, through the various design challenges faced when using Tropos. The patterns format allow...

This literature review synthesizes existing research in the field of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) from a business perspective and integrates results from 40 works to offer researchers an overview about the existing body of knowledge in this research field as well as a research agenda, which unifies and extends previous efforts. While the literature regarding the technologies and design ...

Flash memories are a type of non-volatile memory based on floating-gate transistors. The use of commodity and embedded flash memories are growing rapidly as we enter the system-on-chip (SOC) era. Conventional tests for flash memories are usually ad hoc—the test procedure is developed for a specific design. We propose improved March-like algorithms (i.e., March FT) for both bit-oriented and word...

Mobile Agents are becoming important technology for the development of distributed, heterogeneous and always available systems. The application of Mobile Agent technologies requires extensions to the existing object-oriented modeling languages to accommodate agent-related abstractions such as roles, organizations and environments. If it is difficult to analyze and establish the well-formedness ...

This paper shows an extensive software performance analysis of dedicated hash functions, particularly concentrating on Pentium III, which is a current dominant processor. The targeted hash functions are MD5, RIPEMD-128 -160, SHA-1 -256 -512 and Whirlpool, which fully cover currently used and future promising hashing algorithms. We try to optimize hashing speed not only by carefully arranging pi...

We define a weighted zeta function of a digraph and a weighted L-function of a symmetric digraph, and give determinant expressions of them. Furthermore, we give a decomposition formula for the weighted zeta function of a g-cyclic -cover of a symmetric digraph for any finite group and g ∈ . A decomposition formula for the weighted zeta function of an oriented line graph L(G̃) of a regular coverin...