• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.10-21
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• 2005

Software architecture is increasingly being viewed as a key design in developing complex software systems, which largely affects the achievement of quality attributes. During the architecture-based software development, therefore, architectural transformation is needed to achieve quality attributes. Due to the variety of design alternatives and the poor predictability of the effects of the transformation, however, it is not easy to apply architectural transformation. Therefore, the method is needed to support architectural transformation through systematically analyzing the effects of applying various design alternatives to the architecture. This paper proposes an approach to support software architecture transformation. Based on architectural design decisions and the constraints on them included in the architecture, our approach defines a decision constraint graph representing the dependencies among architectural design decisions. Through using the decision constraint graph, architectural transformation can be systematically performed by understanding the effects of applying a transformation. While this work supports more understanding of applying architectural transformation, it also helps reconstruct a software architecture to improve the quality of the software.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2006

This paper proposes a real-time resource allocation algorithm for minimizing the completion time of overall workflow process. The jobs in a workflow process are interrelated through the precedence graph including Sequence, AND, OR and Loop control structure. A resource should be allocated for the processing of each job, and the required processing time of the job can be varied by the resource allocation decision. Each resource has several inherent restrictions such as the functional, geographical, positional and other operational characteristics. The algorithm suggested in this paper selects an effective resource for each job by considering the precedence constraint and the resource characteristics such as processing time and the inherent restrictions. To investigate the performance of the proposed algorithm, several numerical tests are performed for four different workflow graphs including standard, parallel and two series-parallel structures. In the tests, the solutions by the proposed algorithm are compared with random and optimal solutions which are obtained by a random selection rule and a full enumeration method respectively.

• The Journal of Engineering Research
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.11-22
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• 2004

A distributed constraint satisfaction problem (distributed CSP) is a constraint satisfaction problem(CSP) in which variables and constraints are distributed among multiple automated agents. ACSP is a problem to find a consistent assignment of values to variables. Even though the definition of a CSP is very simple, a surprisingly wide variety of AI problems can be formalized as CSPs. Similarly, various application problems in DAI (Distributed AI) that are concerned with finding a consistent combination of agent actions can be formalized as distributed CAPs. In recent years, many new backtracking algorithms for solving distributed CSPs have been proposed. But most of all, they have common drawbacks that the algorithm assumes the priority of agents is static. In this thesis, we establish a basic algorithm for solving distributed CSPs called dynamic priority search algorithm that is more efficient than common backtracking algorithms in which the priority order is static. In this algorithm, agents act asynchronously and concurrently based on their local knowledge without any global control, and have a flexible organization, in which the hierarchical order is changed dynamically, while the completeness of the algorithm is guaranteed. And we showed that the dynamic priority search algorithm can solve various problems, such as the distributed 200-queens problem, the distributed graph-coloring problem that common backtracking algorithm fails to solve within a reasonable amount of time. The experimental results on example problems show that this algorithm is by far more efficient than the backtracking algorithm, in which the priority order is static. The priority order represents a hierarchy of agent authority, i.e., the priority of decision-making. Therefore, these results imply that a flexible agent organization, in which the hierarchical order is changed dynamically, actually performs better than an organization in which the hierarchical order is static and rigid. Furthermore, we describe that the agent can be available to hold multiple variables in the searching scheme.