Universitätsbibliothek

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The goal of the white paper at hand is as follows. The definitions of the terms build a framework for discussions around the hype topic ‘crowdsourcing’. This serves as a basis for differentiation and a consistent view from different perspectives on crowdsourced network measurements, with the goal to provide a commonly accepted definition in the community. The focus is on the context of mobile and fixed network operators, but also on measurements of different layers (network, application, user layer). In addition, the white paper shows the value of crowdsourcing for selected use cases, e.g., to improve QoE or regulatory issues. Finally, the major challenges and issues for researchers and practitioners are highlighted. This white paper is the outcome of the Würzburg seminar on “Crowdsourced Network and QoE Measurements” which took place from 25-26 September 2019 in Würzburg, Germany. International experts were invited from industry and academia. They are well known in their communities, having different backgrounds in crowdsourcing, mobile networks, network measurements, network performance, Quality of Service (QoS), and Quality of Experience (QoE). The discussions in the seminar focused on how crowdsourcing will support vendors, operators, and regulators to determine the Quality of Experience in new 5G networks that enable various new applications and network architectures. As a result of the discussions, the need for a white paper manifested, with the goal of providing a scientific discussion of the terms “crowdsourced network measurements” and “crowdsourced QoE measurements”, describing relevant use cases for such crowdsourced data, and its underlying challenges. During the seminar, those main topics were identified, intensively discussed in break-out groups, and brought back into the plenum several times. The outcome of the seminar is this white paper at hand which is – to our knowledge – the first one covering the topic of crowdsourced network and QoE measurements.

The three-dimensional cuneiform script is one of the oldest known writing systems and a central object of research in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Hittitology. An important step towards the understanding of the cuneiform script is the provision of opportunities and tools for joint analysis. This paper presents an approach that contributes to this challenge: a collaborative compatible web-based scientific exploration and analysis of 3D scanned cuneiform fragments. The WebGL -based concept incorporates methods for compressed web-based content delivery of large 3D datasets and high quality visualization. To maximize accessibility and to promote acceptance of 3D techniques in the field of Hittitology, the introduced concept is integrated into the Hethitologie-Portal Mainz, an established leading online research resource in the field of Hittitology, which until now exclusively included 2D content. The paper shows that increasing the availability of 3D scanned archaeological data through a web-based interface can provide significant scientific value while at the same time finding a trade-off between copyright induced restrictions and scientific usability.

This paper discusses the categorization of Quranic chapters by major phases of Prophet Mohammad’s messengership using machine learning algorithms. First, the chapters were categorized by places of revelation using Support Vector Machine and naïve Bayesian classifiers separately, and their results were compared to each other, as well as to the existing traditional Islamic and western orientalists classifications. The chapters were categorized into Meccan (revealed in Mecca) and Medinan (revealed in Medina). After that, chapters of each category were clustered using a kind of fuzzy-single linkage clustering approach, in order to correspond to the major phases of Prophet Mohammad’s life. The major phases of the Prophet’s life were manually derived from the Quranic text, as well as from the secondary Islamic literature e.g hadiths, exegesis. Previous studies on computing the places of revelation of Quranic chapters relied heavily on features extracted from existing background knowledge of the chapters. For instance, it is known that Meccan chapters contain mostly verses about faith and related problems, while Medinan ones encompass verses dealing with social issues, battles…etc. These features are by themselves insufficient as a basis for assigning the chapters to their respective places of revelation. In fact, there are exceptions, since some chapters do contain both Meccan and Medinan features. In this study, features of each category were automatically created from very few chapters, whose places of revelation have been determined through identification of historical facts and events such as battles, migration to Medina…etc. Chapters having unanimously agreed places of revelation were used as the initial training set, while the remaining chapters formed the testing set. The classification process was made recursive by regularly augmenting the training set with correctly classified chapters, in order to classify the whole testing set. Each chapter was preprocessed by removing unimportant words, stemming, and representation with vector space model. The result of this study shows that, the two classifiers have produced useable results, with an outperformance of the support vector machine classifier. This study indicates that, the proposed methodology yields encouraging results for arranging Quranic chapters by phases of Prophet Mohammad’s messengership.

The Visual Editor for XML (Vex)[1] used by TextGrid [2]and other applications has got rendering and layout engines. The layout engine is well documented but the rendering engine is not. This lack of documenting the rendering engine has made refactoring and extending the editor hard and tedious. For instance many CSS2.1 and upcoming CSS3 properties have not been implemented. Software developers in different projects such as TextGrid using Vex would like to update its CSS rendering engine in order to provide advanced user interfaces as well as support different document types. In order to minimize the effort of extending Vex functionality, I found it beneficial to write a basic documentation about Vex software architecture in general and its CSS rendering engine in particular. The documentation is mainly based on the idea of architectural layered diagrams. In fact layered diagrams can help developers understand software’s source code faster and easier in order to alter it, and fix errors. This paper is written for the purpose of providing direct support for exploration in the comprehension process of Vex source code. It discusses Vex software architecture. The organization of packages that make up the software, the architecture of its CSS rendering engine, an algorithm explaining the working principle of its rendering engine are described.

In this thesis, we present novel approaches for formation driving of nonholonomic robots and optimal trajectory planning to reach a target region. The methods consider a static known map of the environment as well as unknown and dynamic obstacles detected by sensors of the formation. The algorithms are based on leader following techniques, where the formation of car-like robots is maintained in a shape determined by curvilinear coordinates. Beyond this, the general methods of formation driving are specialized and extended for an application of airport snow shoveling. Detailed descriptions of the algorithms complemented by relevant stability and convergence studies will be provided in the following chapters. Furthermore, discussions of the applicability will be verified by various simulations in existing robotic environments and also by a hardware experiment.

This article is about a measurement analysis based approach to help software practitioners in managing the additional level complexities and variabilities in software product line applications. The architecture of the proposed approach i.e. ZAC is designed and implemented to perform preprocessesed source code analysis, calculate traditional and product line metrics and visualize results in two and three dimensional diagrams. Experiments using real time data sets are performed which concluded with the results that the ZAC can be very helpful for the software practitioners in understanding the overall structure and complexity of product line applications. Moreover the obtained results prove strong positive correlation between calculated traditional and product line measures.

Parametric weighted finite automata (PWFA) are a multi-dimensional generalization of weighted finite automata. The expressiveness of PWFA contains the expressiveness of weighted finite automata as well as the expressiveness of affine iterated function system. The thesis discusses theory and applications of PWFA. The properties of PWFA definable sets are studied and it is shown that some fractal generator systems can be simulated using PWFA and that various real and complex functions can be represented by PWFA. Furthermore, the decoding of PWFA and the interpretation of PWFA definable sets is discussed.

The internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) has been used as a phylogenetic marker for more than two decades. As ITS2 research mainly focused on the very variable ITS2 sequence, it confined this marker to low-level phylogenetics only. However, the combination of the ITS2 sequence and its highly conserved secondary structure improves the phylogenetic resolution1 and allows phylogenetic inference at multiple taxonomic ranks, including species delimitation. The ITS2 Database presents an exhaustive dataset of internal transcribed spacer 2 sequences from NCBI GenBank accurately reannotated. Following an annotation by profile Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), the secondary structure of each sequence is predicted. First, it is tested whether a minimum energy based fold (direct fold) results in a correct, four helix conformation. If this is not the case, the structure is predicted by homology modeling. In homology modeling, an already known secondary structure is transferred to another ITS2 sequence, whose secondary structure was not able to fold correctly in a direct fold. The ITS2 Database is not only a database for storage and retrieval of ITS2 sequence-structures. It also provides several tools to process your own ITS2 sequences, including annotation, structural prediction, motif detection and BLAST search on the combined sequence-structure information. Moreover, it integrates trimmed versions of 4SALE and ProfDistS for multiple sequence-structure alignment calculation and Neighbor Joining tree reconstruction. Together they form a coherent analysis pipeline from an initial set of sequences to a phylogeny based on sequence and secondary structure. In a nutshell, this workbench simplifies first phylogenetic analyses to only a few mouse-clicks, while additionally providing tools and data for comprehensive large-scale analyses.

The thesis looks at the question asking for the computability of the dot-depth of star-free regular languages. Here one has to determine for a given star-free regular language the minimal number of alternations between concatenation on one hand, and intersection, union, complement on the other hand. This question was first raised in 1971 (Brzozowski/Cohen) and besides the extended star-heights problem usually refered to as one of the most difficult open questions on regular languages. The dot-depth problem can be captured formally by hierarchies of classes of star-free regular languages B(0), B(1/2), B(1), B(3/2),... and L(0), L(1/2), L(1), L(3/2),.... which are defined via alternating the closure under concatenation and Boolean operations, beginning with single alphabet letters. Now the question of dot-depth is the question whether these hierarchy classes have decidable membership problems. The thesis makes progress on this question using the so-called forbidden pattern approach: Classes of regular languages are characterized in terms of patterns in finite automata (subgraphs in the transition graph) that are not allowed. Such a characterization immediately implies the decidability of the respective class, since the absence of a certain pattern in a given automaton can be effectively verified. Before this work, the decidability of B(0), B(1/2), B(1) and L(0), L(1/2), L(1), L(3/2) were known. Here a detailed study of these classes with help of forbidden patterns is given which leads to new insights into their inner structure. Furthermore, the decidability of B(3/2) is proven. Based on these results a theory of pattern iteration is developed which leads to the introduction of two new hierarchies of star-free regular languages. These hierarchies are decidable on one hand, on the other hand they are in close connection to the classes B(n) and L(n). It remains an open question here whether they may in fact coincide. Some evidence is given in favour of this conjecture which opens a new way to attack the dot-depth problem. Moreover, it is shown that the class L(5/2) is decidable in the restricted case of a two-letter alphabet.

This technical report introduces the Descartes Modeling Language (DML), a new architecture-level modeling language for modeling Quality-of-Service (QoS) and resource management related aspects of modern dynamic IT systems, infrastructures and services. DML is designed to serve as a basis for self-aware resource management during operation ensuring that system QoS requirements are continuously satisfied while infrastructure resources are utilized as efficiently as possible.

RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) has become a powerful tool to understand molecular mechanisms and/or developmental programs. It provides a fast, reliable and cost-effective method to access sets of expressed elements in a qualitative and quantitative manner. Especially for non-model organisms and in absence of a reference genome, RNA-seq data is used to reconstruct and quantify transcriptomes at the same time. Even SNPs, InDels, and alternative splicing events are predicted directly from the data without having a reference genome at hand. A key challenge, especially for non-computational personnal, is the management of the resulting datasets, consisting of different data types and formats. Here, we present TBro, a flexible de novo transcriptome browser, tackling this challenge. TBro aggregates sequences, their annotation, expression levels as well as differential testing results. It provides an easy-to-use interface to mine the aggregated data and generate publication-ready visualizations. Additionally, it supports users with an intuitive cart system, that helps collecting and analysing biological meaningful sets of transcripts. TBro’s modular architecture allows easy extension of its functionalities in the future. Especially, the integration of new data types such as proteomic quantifications or array-based gene expression data is straightforward. Thus, TBro is a fully featured yet flexible transcriptome browser that supports approaching complex biological questions and enhances collaboration of numerous researchers.

This thesis deals with the management and analysis of source code, which is represented in XML. Using the elementary methods of the XML repository, the XML source code representation is accessed, changed, updated, and saved. We reason about the source code, refactor source code and we visualize dependency graphs for call analysis. The visualized dependencies between files, modules, or packages are used to structure the source code in order to get a system, which is easily to comprehend, to modify and to complete. Sophisticated methods have been developed to slice the source code in order to obtain a working package of a large system, containing only a specific functionality. The basic methods, on which the visualizations and analyses are built on can be changed like changing a plug-in. The visualization methods can be reused in order to handle arbitrary source code representations, e.g., JAML, PHPML, PROLOGML. Dependencies of other context can be visualized, too, e.g., ER diagrams, or website references. The tool SCAV supports source code visualization and analyzing methods.

A complete simulation system is proposed that can be used as an educational tool by physicians in training basic skills of Minimally Invasive Vascular Interventions. In the first part, a surface model is developed to assemble arteries having a planar segmentation. It is based on Sweep Surfaces and can be extended to T- and Y-like bifurcations. A continuous force vector field is described, representing the interaction between the catheter and the surface. The computation time of the force field is almost unaffected when the resolution of the artery is increased. The mechanical properties of arteries play an essential role in the study of the circulatory system dynamics, which has been becoming increasingly important in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. In Virtual Reality Simulators, it is crucial to have a tissue model that responds in real time. In this work, the arteries are discretized by a two dimensional mesh and the nodes are connected by three kinds of linear springs. Three tissue layers (Intima, Media, Adventitia) are considered and, starting from the stretch-energy density, some of the elasticity tensor components are calculated. The physical model linearizes and homogenizes the material response, but it still contemplates the geometric nonlinearity. In general, if the arterial stretch varies by 1% or less, then the agreement between the linear and nonlinear models is trustworthy. In the last part, the physical model of the wire proposed by Konings is improved. As a result, a simpler and more stable method is obtained to calculate the equilibrium configuration of the wire. In addition, a geometrical method is developed to perform relaxations. It is particularly useful when the wire is hindered in the physical method because of the boundary conditions. The physical and the geometrical methods are merged, resulting in efficient relaxations. Tests show that the shape of the virtual wire agrees with the experiment. The proposed algorithm allows real-time executions and the hardware to assemble the simulator has a low cost.

Semantic fusion is a central requirement of many multimodal interfaces. Procedural methods like finite-state transducers and augmented transition networks have proven to be beneficial to implement semantic fusion. They are compliant with rapid development cycles that are common for the development of user interfaces, in contrast to machine-learning approaches that require time-costly training and optimization. We identify seven fundamental requirements for the implementation of semantic fusion: Action derivation, continuous feedback, context-sensitivity, temporal relation support, access to the interaction context, as well as the support of chronologically unsorted and probabilistic input. A subsequent analysis reveals, however, that there is currently no solution for fulfilling the latter two requirements. As the main contribution of this article, we thus present the Concurrent Cursor concept to compensate these shortcomings. In addition, we showcase a reference implementation, the Concurrent Augmented Transition Network (cATN), that validates the concept’s feasibility in a series of proof of concept demonstrations as well as through a comparative benchmark. The cATN fulfills all identified requirements and fills the lack amongst previous solutions. It supports the rapid prototyping of multimodal interfaces by means of five concrete traits: Its declarative nature, the recursiveness of the underlying transition network, the network abstraction constructs of its description language, the utilized semantic queries, and an abstraction layer for lexical information. Our reference implementation was and is used in various student projects, theses, as well as master-level courses. It is openly available and showcases that non-experts can effectively implement multimodal interfaces, even for non-trivial applications in mixed and virtual reality.

Small satellites contribute significantly in the rapidly evolving innovation in space engineering, in particular in distributed space systems for global Earth observation and communication services. Significant mass reduction by miniaturization, increased utilization of commercial high-tech components, and in particular standardization are the key drivers for modern miniature space technology. This thesis addresses key fields in research and development on miniature satellite technology regarding efficiency, flexibility, and robustness. Here, these challenges are addressed by the University of Wuerzburg’s advanced pico-satellite bus, realizing a generic modular satellite architecture and standardized interfaces for all subsystems. The modular platform ensures reusability, scalability, and increased testability due to its flexible subsystem interface which allows efficient and compact integration of the entire satellite in a plug-and-play manner. Beside systematic design for testability, a high degree of operational robustness is achieved by the consequent implementation of redundancy of crucial subsystems. This is combined with efficient fault detection, isolation and recovery mechanisms. Thus, the UWE-3 platform, and in particular the on-board data handling system and the electrical power system, offers one of the most efficient pico-satellite architectures launched in recent years and provides a solid basis for future extensions. The in-orbit performance results of the pico-satellite UWE-3 are presented and summarize successful operations since its launch in 2013. Several software extensions and adaptations have been uploaded to UWE-3 increasing its capabilities. Thus, a very flexible platform for in-orbit software experiments and for evaluations of innovative concepts was provided and tested.

The Internet sees an ongoing transformation process from a single best-effort service network into a multi-service network. In addition to traditional applications like e-mail,WWW-traffic, or file transfer, future generation networks (FGNs) will carry services with real-time constraints and stringent availability and reliability requirements like Voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing, virtual private networks (VPNs) for finance, other real-time business applications, tele-medicine, or tele-robotics. Hence, quality of service (QoS) guarantees and resilience to failures are crucial characteristics of an FGN architecture. At the same time, network operations must be efficient. This necessitates sophisticated mechanisms for the provisioning and the control of future communication infrastructures. In this work we investigate such echanisms for resilient FGNs. There are many aspects of the provisioning and control of resilient FGNs such as traffic matrix estimation, traffic characterization, traffic forecasting, mechanisms for QoS enforcement also during failure cases, resilient routing, or calability concerns for future routing and addressing mechanisms. In this work we focus on three important aspects for which performance analysis can deliver substantial insights: load balancing for multipath Internet routing, fast resilience concepts, and advanced dimensioning techniques for resilient networks. Routing in modern communication networks is often based on multipath structures, e.g., equal-cost multipath routing (ECMP) in IP networks, to facilitate traffic engineering and resiliency. When multipath routing is applied, load balancing algorithms distribute the traffic over available paths towards the destination according to pre-configured distribution values. State-of-the-art load balancing algorithms operate either on the packet or the flow level. Packet level mechanisms achieve highly accurate traffic distributions, but are known to have negative effects on the performance of transport protocols and should not be applied. Flow level mechanisms avoid performance degradations, but at the expense of reduced accuracy. These inaccuracies may have unpredictable effects on link capacity requirements and complicate resource management. Thus, it is important to exactly understand the accuracy and dynamics of load balancing algorithms in order to be able to exercise better network control. Knowing about their weaknesses, it is also important to look for alternatives and to assess their applicability in different networking scenarios. This is the first aspect of this work. Component failures are inevitable during the operation of communication networks and lead to routing disruptions if no special precautions are taken. In case of a failure, the robust shortest-path routing of the Internet reconverges after some time to a state where all nodes are again reachable – provided physical connectivity still exists. But stringent availability and reliability criteria of new services make a fast reaction to failures obligatory for resilient FGNs. This led to the development of fast reroute (FRR) concepts for MPLS and IP routing. The operations of MPLS-FRR have already been standardized. Still, the standards leave some degrees of freedom for the resilient path layout and it is important to understand the tradeoffs between different options for the path layout to efficiently provision resilient FGNs. In contrast, the standardization for IP-FRR is an ongoing process. The applicability and possible combinations of different concepts still are open issues. IP-FRR also facilitates a comprehensive resilience framework for IP routing covering all steps of the failure recovery cycle. These points constitute another aspect of this work. Finally, communication networks are usually over-provisioned, i.e., they have much more capacity installed than actually required during normal operation. This is a precaution for various challenges such as network element failures. An alternative to this capacity overprovisioning (CO) approach is admission control (AC). AC blocks new flows in case of imminent overload due to unanticipated events to protect the QoS for already admitted flows. On the one hand, CO is generally viewed as a simple mechanism, AC as a more complex mechanism that complicates the network control plane and raises interoperability issues. On the other hand, AC appears more cost-efficient than CO. To obtain advanced provisioning methods for resilient FGNs, it is important to find suitable models for irregular events, such as failures and different sources of overload, and to incorporate them into capacity dimensioning methods. This allows for a fair comparison between CO and AC in various situations and yields a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of both concepts. Such an advanced capacity dimensioning method for resilient FGNs represents the third aspect of this work.

Studies investigating the correlates of immune protection against Yersinia infection have established that both humoral and cell mediated immune responses are required for the comprehensive protection. In our previous study, we established that the bivalent fusion protein (rVE) comprising immunologically active regions of Y pestis LcrV (100-270 aa) and YopE (50-213 aa) proteins conferred complete passive and active protection against lethal Y enterocolitica 8081 challenge. In the present study, cohort of BALB/c mice immunized with rVE or its component proteins rV, rE were assessed for cell mediated immune responses and memory immune protection against Y enterocolitica 8081 rVE immunization resulted in extensive proliferation of both CD4 and CD8 T cell subsets; significantly high antibody titer with balanced IgG1: IgG2a/IgG2b isotypes (1:1 ratio) and up regulation of both Th1 (INF-\(\alpha\), IFN-\(\gamma\), IL 2, and IL 12) and Th2 (IL 4) cytokines. On the other hand, rV immunization resulted in Th2 biased IgG response (11:1 ratio) and proliferation of CD4+ T-cell; rE group of mice exhibited considerably lower serum antibody titer with predominant Th1 response (1:3 ratio) and CD8+ T-cell proliferation. Comprehensive protection with superior survival (100%) was observed among rVE immunized mice when compared to the significantly lower survival rates among rE (37.5%) and rV (25%) groups when IP challenged with Y enterocolitica 8081 after 120 days of immunization. Findings in this and our earlier studies define the bivalent fusion protein rVE as a potent candidate vaccine molecule with the capability to concurrently stimulate humoral and cell mediated immune responses and a proof of concept for developing efficient subunit vaccines against Gram negative facultative intracellular bacterial pathogens.

Der Betrieb von Satelliten wird sich in Zukunft gravierend ändern. Die bisher ausgeübte konventionelle Vorgehensweise, bei der die Planung der vom Satelliten auszuführenden Aktivitäten sowie die Kontrolle hierüber ausschließlich vom Boden aus erfolgen, stößt bei heutigen Anwendungen an ihre Grenzen. Im schlimmsten Fall verhindert dieser Umstand sogar die Erschließung bisher ungenutzter Möglichkeiten. Der Gewinn eines Satelliten, sei es in Form wissenschaftlicher Daten oder der Vermarktung satellitengestützter Dienste, wird daher nicht optimal ausgeschöpft. Die Ursache für dieses Problem lässt sich im Grunde auf eine ausschlaggebende Tatsache zurückführen: Konventionelle Satelliten können ihr Verhalten, d.h. die Folge ihrer Tätigkeiten, nicht eigenständig anpassen. Stattdessen erstellt das Bedienpersonal am Boden - vor allem die Operatoren - mit Hilfe von Planungssoftware feste Ablaufpläne, die dann in Form von Kommandosequenzen von den Bodenstationen aus an die jeweiligen Satelliten hochgeladen werden. Dort werden die Befehle lediglich überprüft, interpretiert und strikt ausgeführt. Die Abarbeitung erfolgt linear. Situationsbedingte Änderungen, wie sie vergleichsweise bei der Codeausführung von Softwareprogrammen durch Kontrollkonstrukte, zum Beispiel Schleifen und Verzweigungen, üblich sind, sind typischerweise nicht vorgesehen. Der Operator ist daher die einzige Instanz, die das Verhalten des Satelliten mittels Kommandierung, per Upload, beeinflussen kann, und auch nur dann, wenn ein direkter Funkkontakt zwischen Satellit und Bodenstation besteht. Die dadurch möglichen Reaktionszeiten des Satelliten liegen bestenfalls bei einigen Sekunden, falls er sich im Wirkungsbereich der Bodenstation befindet. Außerhalb des Kontaktfensters kann sich die Zeitschranke, gegeben durch den Orbit und die aktuelle Position des Satelliten, von einigen Minuten bis hin zu einigen Stunden erstrecken. Die Signallaufzeiten der Funkübertragung verlängern die Reaktionszeiten um weitere Sekunden im erdnahen Bereich. Im interplanetaren Raum erstrecken sich die Zeitspannen aufgrund der immensen Entfernungen sogar auf mehrere Minuten. Dadurch bedingt liegt die derzeit technologisch mögliche, bodengestützte, Reaktionszeit von Satelliten bestenfalls im Bereich von einigen Sekunden. Diese Einschränkung stellt ein schweres Hindernis für neuartige Satellitenmissionen, bei denen insbesondere nichtdeterministische und kurzzeitige Phänomene (z.B. Blitze und Meteoreintritte in die Erdatmosphäre) Gegenstand der Beobachtungen sind, dar. Die langen Reaktionszeiten des konventionellen Satellitenbetriebs verhindern die Realisierung solcher Missionen, da die verzögerte Reaktion erst erfolgt, nachdem das zu beobachtende Ereignis bereits abgeschlossen ist. Die vorliegende Dissertation zeigt eine Möglichkeit, das durch die langen Reaktionszeiten entstandene Problem zu lösen, auf. Im Zentrum des Lösungsansatzes steht dabei die Autonomie. Im Wesentlichen geht es dabei darum, den Satelliten mit der Fähigkeit auszustatten, sein Verhalten, d.h. die Folge seiner Tätigkeiten, eigenständig zu bestimmen bzw. zu ändern. Dadurch wird die direkte Abhängigkeit des Satelliten vom Operator bei Reaktionen aufgehoben. Im Grunde wird der Satellit in die Lage versetzt, sich selbst zu kommandieren. Die Idee der Autonomie wurde im Rahmen der zugrunde liegenden Forschungsarbeiten umgesetzt. Das Ergebnis ist ein autonomes Planungssystem. Dabei handelt es sich um ein Softwaresystem, mit dem sich autonomes Verhalten im Satelliten realisieren lässt. Es kann an unterschiedliche Satellitenmissionen angepasst werden. Ferner deckt es verschiedene Aspekte des autonomen Satellitenbetriebs, angefangen bei der generellen Entscheidungsfindung der Tätigkeiten, über die zeitliche Ablaufplanung unter Einbeziehung von Randbedingungen (z.B. Ressourcen) bis hin zur eigentlichen Ausführung, d.h. Kommandierung, ab. Das Planungssystem kommt als Anwendung in ASAP, einer autonomen Sensorplattform, zum Einsatz. Es ist ein optisches System und dient der Detektion von kurzzeitigen Phänomenen und Ereignissen in der Erdatmosphäre. Die Forschungsarbeiten an dem autonomen Planungssystem, an ASAP sowie an anderen zu diesen in Bezug stehenden Systemen wurden an der Professur für Raumfahrttechnik des Lehrstuhls Informatik VIII der Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg durchgeführt.

Future broadband wireless networks should be able to support not only best effort traffic but also real-time traffic with strict Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. In addition, their available resources are scare and limit the number of users. To facilitate QoS guarantees and increase the maximum number of concurrent users, wireless networks require careful planning and optimization. In this monograph, we studied three aspects of performance optimization in wireless networks: resource optimization in WLAN infrastructure networks, quality of experience control in wireless mesh networks, and planning and optimization of wireless mesh networks. An adaptive resource management system is required to effectively utilize the limited resources on the air interface and to guarantee QoS for real-time applications. Thereby, both WLAN infrastructure and WLAN mesh networks have to be considered. An a-priori setting of the access parameters is not meaningful due to the contention-based medium access and the high dynamics of the system. Thus, a management system is required which dynamically adjusts the channel access parameters based on the network load. While this is sufficient for wireless infrastructure networks, interferences on neighboring paths and self-interferences have to be considered for wireless mesh networks. In addition, a careful channel allocation and route assignment is needed. Due to the large parameter space, standard optimization techniques fail for optimizing large wireless mesh networks. In this monograph, we reveal that biology-inspired optimization techniques, namely genetic algorithms, are well-suitable for the planning and optimization of wireless mesh networks. Although genetic algorithms generally do not always find the optimal solution, we show that with a good parameter set for the genetic algorithm, the overall throughput of the wireless mesh network can be significantly improved while still sharing the resources fairly among the users.

Internet applications are becoming more and more flexible to support diverge user demands and network conditions. This is reflected by technical concepts, which provide new adaptation mechanisms to allow fine grained adjustment of the application quality and the corresponding bandwidth requirements. For the case of video streaming, the scalable video codec H.264/SVC allows the flexible adaptation of frame rate, video resolution and image quality with respect to the available network resources. In order to guarantee a good user-perceived quality (Quality of Experience, QoE) it is necessary to adjust and optimize the video quality accurately. But not only have the applications of the current Internet changed. Within network and transport, new technologies evolved during the last years providing a more flexible and efficient usage of data transport and network resources. One of the most promising technologies is Network Virtualization (NV) which is seen as an enabler to overcome the ossification of the Internet stack. It provides means to simultaneously operate multiple logical networks which allow for example application-specific addressing, naming and routing, or their individual resource management. New transport mechanisms like multipath transmission on the network and transport layer aim at an efficient usage of available transport resources. However, the simultaneous transmission of data via heterogeneous transport paths and communication technologies inevitably introduces packet reordering. Additional mechanisms and buffers are required to restore the correct packet order and thus to prevent a disturbance of the data transport. A proper buffer dimensioning as well as the classification of the impact of varying path characteristics like bandwidth and delay require appropriate evaluation methods. Additionally, for a path selection mechanism real time evaluation mechanisms are needed. A better application-network interaction and the corresponding exchange of information enable an efficient adaptation of the application to the network conditions and vice versa. This PhD thesis analyzes a video streaming architecture utilizing multipath transmission and scalable video coding and develops the following optimization possibilities and results: Analysis and dimensioning methods for multipath transmission, quantification of the adaptation possibilities to the current network conditions with respect to the QoE for H.264/SVC, and evaluation and optimization of a future video streaming architecture, which allows a better interaction of application and network.

While developing modern applications, it is necessary to ensure an efficient and performant communication between different applications. In current environments, a middleware software is used, which supports the publish/subscribe communication pattern. Using this communication pattern, a publisher sends information encapsulated in messages to the middleware. A subscriber registers its interests at the middleware. The monograph describes three different steps to determine the performance of such a system. In a first step, the message throughput performance of a publish/subscribe in different scenarios is measured using a Java Message Service (JMS) based implementation. In the second step the maximum achievable message throughput is described by adapted models depending on the filter complexity and the replication grade. Using the model, the performance characteristics of a specific system in a given scenario can be determined. These numbers are used for the queuing model described in the third part of the thesis, which supports the dimensioning of a system in realistic scenarios. Additionally, we introduce a method to approximate an M/G/1 system numerically in an efficient way, which can be used for real time analysis to predict the expected performance in a certain scenario. Finally, the analytical model is used to investigate different possibilities to ensure the scalability of the maximum achievable message throughput of the overall system.

Next generation networks (NGNs) must integrate the services of current circuit-switched telephone networks and packet-switched data networks. This convergence towards a unified communication infrastructure necessitates from the high capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operational expenditures (OPEX) due to the coexistence of separate networks for voice and data. In the end, NGNs must offer the same services as these legacy networks and, therefore, they must provide a low-cost packet-switched solution with real-time transport capabilities for telephony and multimedia applications. In addition, NGNs must be fault-tolerant to guarantee user satisfaction and to support business-critical processes also in case of network failures. A key technology for the operation of NGNs is the Internet Protocol (IP) which evolved to a common and well accepted standard for networking in the Internet during the last 25 years. There are two basically different approaches to achieve QoS in IP networks. With capacity overprovisioning (CO), an IP network is equipped with sufficient bandwidth such that network congestion becomes very unlikely and QoS is maintained most of the time. The second option to achieve QoS in IP networks is admission control (AC). AC represents a network-inherent intelligence that admits real-time traffic flows to a single link or an entire network only if enough resources are available such that the requirements on packet loss and delay can be met. Otherwise, the request of a new flow is blocked. This work focuses on resource management and control mechanisms for NGNs, in particular on AC and associated bandwidth allocation methods. The first contribution consists of a new link-oriented AC method called experience-based admission control (EBAC) which is a hybrid approach dealing with the problems inherent to conventional AC mechanisms like parameter-based or measurement-based AC (PBAC/MBAC). PBAC provides good QoS but suffers from poor resource utilization and, vice versa, MBAC uses resources efficiently but is susceptible to QoS violations. Hence, EBAC aims at increasing the resource efficiency while maintaining the QoS which increases the revenues of ISPs and postpones their CAPEX for infrastructure upgrades. To show the advantages of EBAC, we first review today’s AC approaches and then develop the concept of EBAC. EBAC is a simple mechanism that safely overbooks the capacity of a single link to increase its resource utilization. We evaluate the performance of EBAC by its simulation under various traffic conditions. The second contribution concerns dynamic resource allocation in transport networks which implement a specific network admission control (NAC) architecture. In general, the performance of different NAC systems may be evaluated by conventional methods such as call blocking analysis which has often been applied in the context of multi-service asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. However, to yield more practical results than abstract blocking probabilities, we propose a new method to compare different AC approaches by their respective bandwidth requirements. To present our new method for comparing different AC systems, we first give an overview of network resource management (NRM) in general. Then we present the concept of adaptive bandwidth allocation (ABA) in capacity tunnels and illustrate the analytical performance evaluation framework to compare different AC systems by their capacity requirements. Different network characteristics influence the performance of ABA. Therefore, the impact of various traffic demand models and tunnel implementations, and the influence of resilience requirements is investigated. In conclusion, the resources in NGNs must be exclusively dedicated to admitted traffic to guarantee QoS. For that purpose, robust and efficient concepts for NRM are required to control the requested bandwidth with regard to the available transmission capacity. Sophisticated AC will be a key function for NRM in NGNs and, therefore, efficient resource management concepts like experience-based admission control and adaptive bandwidth allocation for admission-controlled capacity tunnels, as presented in this work are appealing for NGN solutions.

In today's Internet, building overlay structures to provide a service is becoming more and more common. This approach allows for the utilization of client resources, thus being more scalable than a client-server model in this respect. However, in these architectures the quality of the provided service depends on the clients and is therefore more complex to manage. Resource utilization, both at the clients themselves and in the underlying network, determine the efficiency of the overlay application. Here, a trade-off exists between the resource providers and the end users that can be tuned via overlay mechanisms. Thus, resource management and traffic management is always quality-of-service management as well. In this monograph, the three currently significant and most widely used overlay types in the Internet are considered. These overlays are implemented in popular applications which only recently have gained importance. Thus, these overlay networks still face real-world technical challenges which are of high practical relevance. We identify the specific issues for each of the considered overlays, and show how their optimization affects the trade-offs between resource efficiency and service quality. Thus, we supply new insights and system knowledge that is not provided by previous work.

The issue of sustainability is at the top of the political and societal agenda, being considered of extreme importance and urgency. Human individual action impacts the environment both locally (e.g., local air/water quality, noise disturbance) and globally (e.g., climate change, resource use). Urban environments represent a crucial example, with an increasing realization that the most effective way of producing a change is involving the citizens themselves in monitoring campaigns (a citizen science bottom-up approach). This is possible by developing novel technologies and IT infrastructures enabling large citizen participation. Here, in the wider framework of one of the first such projects, we show results from an international competition where citizens were involved in mobile air pollution monitoring using low cost sensing devices, combined with a web-based game to monitor perceived levels of pollution. Measures of shift in perceptions over the course of the campaign are provided, together with insights into participatory patterns emerging from this study. Interesting effects related to inertia and to direct involvement in measurement activities rather than indirect information exposure are also highlighted, indicating that direct involvement can enhance learning and environmental awareness. In the future, this could result in better adoption of policies towards decreasing pollution.

Motivated by results on interactive proof systems we investigate the computational power of quantifiers applied to well-known complexity classes. In special, we are interested in existential, universal and probabilistic bounded error quantifiers ranging over words and sets of words, i.e. oracles if we think in a Turing machine model. In addition to the standard oracle access mechanism, we also consider quantifiers ranging over oracles to which access is restricted in a certain way.

Consider the situation where two or more images are taken from the same object. After taking the first image, the object is moved or rotated so that the second recording depicts it in a different manner. Additionally, take heed of the possibility that the imaging techniques may have also been changed. One of the main problems in image processing is to determine the spatial relation between such images. The corresponding process of finding the spatial alignment is called “registration”. In this work, we study the optimization problem which corresponds to the registration task. Especially, we exploit the Lie group structure of the set of transformations to construct efficient, intrinsic algorithms. We also apply the algorithms to medical registration tasks. However, the methods developed are not restricted to the field of medical image processing. We also have a closer look at more general forms of optimization problems and show connections to related tasks.

No abstract available

Die Dissertation befaßt sich mit der Entwicklung einer multimedialen, datenbankgestützten Lehr- und Lernplattform. Die entwickelten Module ermöglichen und erweitern nicht nur die Möglichkeit des Selbststudiums für den Studenten sondern erleichtern auch die Arbeit der Dozenten. Außerdem wird auch die Zusammenarbeit und der Austausch von Lernobjekten zwischen verschiedenen Institutionen ermöglicht. In der Lehr- und Lernplattform können verschiedene Lernobjekt-Typen verwaltet werden. Exemplarisch wurden die Typen Bilder, 3D-Animationen, Vorlesungen, Lerntexte, Fallbeispiele und Quizelemente integriert. Die Lehr- und Lernplattform besteht aus drei Bausteinen: 1. In der Lernobjekt-Datenbank werden alle Lernobjekt-Typen und Lernobjekte verwaltet. 2. Autorenwerkzeuge dienen zur Erstellung von Lernobjekten. 3. In der Lernplattform werden die Lernobjekte den Studenten zum (Selbst-)Lernen präsentiert. Neben den Vorteilen, die der Einsatz von E-Learning im allgemeinen bietet, wie die flexible Lernorganisation oder die Nutzung von Lerninhalten unabhängig von Ort und Zeit, zeichnet sich die entwickelte Lehr- und Lernplattform besonders durch folgende Punkte aus: Generierung von Lerninhalten höherer Qualität durch multizentrische Expertenbündelung und Arbeitsteilung, Erweiterbarkeit auf andere, neue Lernobjekt-Typen, Verwaltbarkeit, Konsistenz, Flexibilität, geringer Verwaltungsaufwand, Navigationsmöglichkeiten für den Studenten, Personalisierbarkeit und Konformität zu internationalen Standards. Sowohl bei der Modellierung als auch bei der Umsetzung wurde darauf geachtet, möglichst gut die Anforderungen der Dermatologie bei gleichzeitiger Erweiterbarkeit auf andere, ähnliche Szenarien zu erfüllen. Besonders einfach sollte die Anpassung der Plattform für andere bildorientierte Disziplinen sein.

Imagine a technology that automatically creates a full 3D thermal model of an environment and detects temperature peaks in it. For better orientation in the model it is enhanced with color information. The current state of the art for analyzing temperature related issues is thermal imaging. It is relevant for energy efficiency but also for securing important infrastructure such as power supplies and temperature regulation systems. Monitoring and analysis of the data for a large building is tedious as stable conditions need to be guaranteed for several hours and detailed notes about the pose and the environment conditions for each image must be taken. For some applications repeated measurements are necessary to monitor changes over time. The analysis of the scene is only possible through expertise and experience. This thesis proposes a robotic system that creates a full 3D model of the environment with color and thermal information by combining thermal imaging with the technology of terrestrial laser scanning. The addition of a color camera facilitates the interpretation of the data and allows for other application areas. The data from all sensors collected at different positions is joined in one common reference frame using calibration and scan matching. The first part of the thesis deals with 3D point cloud processing with the emphasis on accessing point cloud data efficiently, detecting planar structures in the data and registering multiple point clouds into one common coordinate system. The second part covers the autonomous exploration and data acquisition with a mobile robot with the objective to minimize the unseen area in 3D space. Furthermore, the combination of different modalities, color images, thermal images and point cloud data through calibration is elaborated. The last part presents applications for the the collected data. Among these are methods to detect the structure of building interiors for reconstruction purposes and subsequent detection and classification of windows. A system to project the gathered thermal information back into the scene is presented as well as methods to improve the color information and to join separately acquired point clouds and photo series. A full multi-modal 3D model contains all the relevant geometric information about the recorded scene and enables an expert to fully analyze it off-site. The technology clears the path for automatically detecting points of interest thereby helping the expert to analyze the heat flow as well as localize and identify heat leaks. The concept is modular and neither limited to achieving energy efficiency nor restricted to the use in combination with a mobile platform. It also finds its application in fields such as archaeology and geology and can be extended by further sensors.

This work focuses on coordination methods and the control of motion in groups of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots, in particular of the car-like type. These kind of vehicles are particularly restricted in their mobility. In the main part of this work the two problems of formation motion coordination and of rendezvous in distributed multi-vehicle systems are considered. We introduce several enhancements to an existing motion planning approach for formations of nonholonomic mobile robots. Compared to the original method, the extended approach is able to handle time-varying reference speeds as well as adjustments of the formation's shape during reference trajectory segments with continuously differentiable curvature. Additionally, undesired discontinuities in the speed and steering profiles of the vehicles are avoided. Further, the scenario of snow shoveling on an airfield by utilizing multiple formations of autonomous snowplows is discussed. We propose solutions to the subproblems of motion planning for the formations and tracking control for the individual vehicles. While all situations that might occur have been tested in a simulation environment, we also verified the developed tracking controller in real robot hardware experiments. The task of the rendezvous problem in groups of car-like robots is to drive all vehicles to a common position by means of decentralized control laws. Typically there exists no direct interaction link between all of the vehicles. In this work we present decentralized rendezvous control laws for vehicles with free and with bounded steering. The convergence properties of the approaches are analyzed by utilizing Lyapunov based techniques. Furthermore, they are evaluated within various simulation experiments, while the bounded steering case is also verified within laboratory hardware experiments. Finally we introduce a modification to the bounded steering system that increases the convergence speed at the expense of a higher traveled distance of the vehicles.

The correct behavior of spacecraft components is the foundation of unhindered mission operation. However, no technical system is free of wear and degradation. A malfunction of one single component might significantly alter the behavior of the whole spacecraft and may even lead to a complete mission failure. Therefore, abnormal component behavior must be detected early in order to be able to perform counter measures. A dedicated fault detection system can be employed, as opposed to classical health monitoring, performed by human operators, to decrease the response time to a malfunction. In this paper, we present a generic model-based diagnosis system, which detects faults by analyzing the spacecraft’s housekeeping data. The observed behavior of the spacecraft components, given by the housekeeping data is compared to their expected behavior, obtained through simulation. Each discrepancy between the observed and the expected behavior of a component generates a so-called symptom. Given the symptoms, the diagnoses are derived by computing sets of components whose malfunction might cause the observed discrepancies. We demonstrate the applicability of the diagnosis system by using modified housekeeping data of the qualification model of an actual spacecraft and outline the advantages and drawbacks of our approach.

Overlapping is a common word used to describe documents whose structural dimensions cannot be adequately represented using tree structure. For instance a quotation that starts in one verse and ends in another verse. The problem of overlapping hierarchies is a recurring one, which has been addressed by a variety of approaches. There are XML based solutions as well as Non-XML ones. The XML-based solutions are: multiple documents, empty elements, fragmentation, out-of-line markup, JITT and BUVH. And the Non-XML approaches comprise CONCUR/XCONCUR, MECS, LMNL ...etc. This paper presents shortly state-of-the-art in overlapping hierarchies, and introduces two variations on the TEI fragmentation markup that have several advantages.

Data mining has proved its significance in various domains and applications. As an important subfield of the general data mining task, subgroup mining can be used, e.g., for marketing purposes in business domains, or for quality profiling and analysis in medical domains. The goal is to efficiently discover novel, potentially useful and ultimately interesting knowledge. However, in real-world situations these requirements often cannot be fulfilled, e.g., if the applied methods do not scale for large data sets, if too many results are presented to the user, or if many of the discovered patterns are already known to the user. This thesis proposes a combination of several techniques in order to cope with the sketched problems: We discuss automatic methods, including heuristic and exhaustive approaches, and especially present the novel SD-Map algorithm for exhaustive subgroup discovery that is fast and effective. For an interactive approach we describe techniques for subgroup introspection and analysis, and we present advanced visualization methods, e.g., the zoomtable that directly shows the most important parameters of a subgroup and that can be used for optimization and exploration. We also describe various visualizations for subgroup comparison and evaluation in order to support the user during these essential steps. Furthermore, we propose to include possibly available background knowledge that is easy to formalize into the mining process. We can utilize the knowledge in many ways: To focus the search process, to restrict the search space, and ultimately to increase the efficiency of the discovery method. We especially present background knowledge to be applied for filtering the elements of the problem domain, for constructing abstractions, for aggregating values of attributes, and for the post-processing of the discovered set of patterns. Finally, the techniques are combined into a knowledge-intensive process supporting both automatic and interactive methods for subgroup mining. The practical significance of the proposed approach strongly depends on the available tools. We introduce the VIKAMINE system as a highly-integrated environment for knowledge-intensive active subgroup mining. Also, we present an evaluation consisting of two parts: With respect to objective evaluation criteria, i.e., comparing the efficiency and the effectiveness of the subgroup discovery methods, we provide an experimental evaluation using generated data. For that task we present a novel data generator that allows a simple and intuitive specification of the data characteristics. The results of the experimental evaluation indicate that the novel SD-Map method outperforms the other described algorithms using data sets similar to the intended application concerning the efficiency, and also with respect to precision and recall for the heuristic methods. Subjective evaluation criteria include the user acceptance, the benefit of the approach, and the interestingness of the results. We present five case studies utilizing the presented techniques: The approach has been successfully implemented in medical and technical applications using real-world data sets. The method was very well accepted by the users that were able to discover novel, useful, and interesting knowledge.

In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird das Problem der Kalibrierung Agenten-basierter Simulationen (ABS) behandelt, also das Problem, die Parameterwerte eines Agenten-basierten Simulationsmodells so einzustellen, dass valides Simulationsverhalten erreicht wird. Das Kalibrierungsproblem für Simulationen an sich ist nicht neu und ist im Rahmen klassischer Simulationsparadigmen, wie z.B. der Makro-Simulation, fester Bestandteil der Forschung. Im Vergleich zu den dort betrachteten Kalibrierungsproblemen zeichnet sich das Kalibrierungsproblem für ABS jedoch durch eine Reihe zusätzlicher Herausforderungen aus, welche die direkte Anwendung existierender Kalibrierungsverfahren in begrenzter Zeit erschweren, bzw. nicht mehr sinnvoll zulassen. Die Lösung dieser Probleme steht im Zentrum dieser Dissertation: Das Ziel besteht darin, den Nutzer bei der Kalibrierung von ABS auf der Basis von unzureichenden, potentiell fehlerhaften Daten und Wissen zu unterstützen. Dabei sollen drei Hauptprobleme gelöst werden: 1)Vereinfachung der Kalibrierung großer Agenten-Parametermengen auf der Mikro- Ebene in Agenten-basierten Simulationen durch Ausnutzung der spezifischen Struktur von ABS (nämlich dem Aufbau aus einer Menge von Agentenmodellen). 2)Kalibrierung Agenten-basierter Simulationen, so dass auf allen relevanten Beobachtungsebenen valides Simulationsverhalten erzeugt wird (mindestens Mikro und Makro-Ebene). Als erschwerende Randbedingung muss die Kalibrierung unter der Voraussetzung einer Makro-Mikro-Wissenslücke durchgeführt werden. 3)Kalibrierung Agenten-basierter Simulationen auf der Mikro-Ebene unter der Voraussetzung, dass zur Kalibrierung einzelner Agentenmodelle nicht ausreichend und potentiell verfälschte Daten zur Verhaltensvalidierung zur Verfügung stehen. Hierzu wird in dieser Arbeit das sogenannte Makro-Mikro-Verfahren zur Kalibrierung von Agenten-basierten Simulationen entwickelt. Das Verfahren besteht aus einem Basisverfahren, das im Verlauf der Arbeit um verschiedene Zusatzverfahren erweitert wird. Das Makro-Mikro-Verfahren und seine Erweiterungen sollen dazu dienen, die Modellkalibrierung trotz stark verrauschter Daten und eingeschränktem Wissen über die Wirkungszusammenhänge im Originalsystem geeignet zu ermöglichen und dabei den Kalibrierungsprozess zu beschleunigen: 1) Makro-Mikro-Kalibrierungsverfahren: Das in dieser Arbeit entwickelte Makro- Mikro-Verfahren unterstützt den Nutzer durch eine kombinierte Kalibrierung auf der Mikro- und der Makro-Beobachtungsebene, die gegebenenfalls durch Zwischenebenen erweitert werden kann. Der Grundgedanke des Verfahrens besteht darin, das Kalibrierungsproblem in eines auf aggregierter Verhaltensebene und eines auf der Ebene des Mikro-Agentenverhaltens aufzuteilen. Auf der Makro-Ebene wird nach validen idealen aggregierten Verhaltensmodellen (IVM) der Agenten gesucht. Auf der Mikro-Ebene wird versucht die individuellen Modelle der Agenten auf Basis des erwünschten Gesamtverhaltens und der ermittelten IVM so zu kalibrieren, das insgesamt Simulationsverhalten entsteht, das sowohl auf Mikro- als auch auf Makro-Ebene valide ist. 2) Erweiterung 1: Robuste Kalibrierung: Um den Umgang mit potentiell verrauschten Validierungskriterien (d.h. mit verrauschten Daten über ein Originalsystem, auf denen die Validierungskriterien der Simulation beruhen) und Modellteilen während der Kalibrierung von ABS zu ermöglichen, wird eine robuste Kalibrierungstechnik zur Anwendung im Makro-Mikro-Verfahren entwickelt. 3) Erweiterung 2: Kalibrierung mit Heterogenitätssuche: Als zweite Erweiterung des Makro-Mikro-Verfahrens wird ein Verfahren entwickelt, das das Problem des unklaren Detaillierungsgrades von ABS auf der Ebene der Parameterwerte adressiert. Prinzipiell kann zwar jeder Agent unterschiedliche Parameterwerte verwenden, obwohl eine geringere Heterogenität zur Erzeugung validen Verhaltens ausreichend wäre. Die entwickelte Erweiterung versucht, während der Kalibrierung, eine geeignete Heterogenitätsausprägung für die Parameterwerte der Agenten zu ermitteln. Unter einer Heterogenitätsausprägung wird dabei eine Einteilung der simulierten Agenten in Gruppen mit jeweils gleichen Parameterwerten verstanden. Die Heterogenitätssuche dient dazu, einen Kompromiss zu finden zwischen der Notwendigkeit, sehr große Parametersuchräume durchsuchen zu müssen und gleichzeitig den Suchraum so klein wie möglich halten zu wollen.

This article discusses web frameworks that are available to a software developer in Java language. It introduces MVC paradigm and some frameworks that implement it. The article presents an overview of Struts, Spring MVC, JSF Frameworks, as well as guidelines for selecting one of them as development environment.

Eine Übersicht über die Aktivitäten des Rechenzentrums im Jahr 2017.

Jahresbericht 2015 des Rechenzentrums der Universität Würzburg

This work is composed of three main parts: remote control of mobile systems via Internet, ad-hoc networks of mobile robots, and remote control of mobile robots via 3G telecommunication technologies. The first part gives a detailed state of the art and a discussion of the problems to be solved in order to teleoperate mobile robots via the Internet. The focus of the application to be realized is set on a distributed tele-laboratory with remote experiments on mobile robots which can be accessed world-wide via the Internet. Therefore, analyses of the communication link are used in order to realize a robust system. The developed and implemented architecture of this distributed tele-laboratory allows for a smooth access also with a variable or low link quality. The second part covers the application of ad-hoc networks for mobile robots. The networking of mobile robots via mobile ad-hoc networks is a very promising approach to realize integrated telematic systems without relying on preexisting communication infrastructure. Relevant civilian application scenarios are for example in the area of search and rescue operations where first responders are supported by multi-robot systems. Here, mobile robots, humans, and also existing stationary sensors can be connected very fast and efficient. Therefore, this work investigates and analyses the performance of different ad-hoc routing protocols for IEEE 802.11 based wireless networks in relevant scenarios. The analysis of the different protocols allows for an optimization of the parameter settings in order to use these ad-hoc routing protocols for mobile robot teleoperation. Also guidelines for the realization of such telematics systems are given. Also traffic shaping mechanisms of application layer are presented which allow for a more efficient use of the communication link. An additional application scenario, the integration of a small size helicopter into an IP based ad-hoc network, is presented. The teleoperation of mobile robots via 3G telecommunication technologies is addressed in the third part of this work. The high availability, high mobility, and the high bandwidth provide a very interesting opportunity to realize scenarios for the teleoperation of mobile robots or industrial remote maintenance. This work analyses important parameters of the UMTS communication link and investigates also the characteristics for different data streams. These analyses are used to give guidelines which are necessary for the realization of or industrial remote maintenance or mobile robot teleoperation scenarios. All the results and guidelines for the design of telematic systems in this work were derived from analyses and experiments with real hardware.

Modern software is often realized as a modular combination of subsystems for, e. g., knowledge management, visualization, verification, or the interaction with users. As a result, software libraries from possibly different programming languages have to work together. Even more complex the case is if different programming paradigms have to be combined. This type of diversification of programming languages and paradigms in just one software application can only be mastered by mechanisms for a seamless integration of the involved programming languages. However, the integration of the common logic programming language Prolog and the popular object-oriented programming language Java is complicated by various interoperability problems which stem on the one hand from the paradigmatic gap between the programming languages, and on the other hand, from the diversity of the available Prolog systems. The subject of the thesis is the investigation of novel mechanisms for the integration of logic programming in Prolog and object–oriented programming in Java. We are particularly interested in an object–oriented, uniform approach which is not specific to just one Prolog system. Therefore, we have first identified several important criteria for the seamless integration of Prolog and Java from the object–oriented perspective. The main contribution of the thesis is a novel integration framework called the Connector Architecture for Prolog and Java (CAPJa). The framework is completely implemented in Java and imposes no modifications to the Java Virtual Machine or Prolog. CAPJa provides a semi–automated mechanism for the integration of Prolog predicates into Java. For compact, readable, and object–oriented queries to Prolog, CAPJa exploits lambda expressions with conditional and relational operators in Java. The communication between Java and Prolog is based on a fully automated mapping of Java objects to Prolog terms, and vice versa. In Java, an extensible system of gateways provides connectivity with various Prolog system and, moreover, makes any connected Prolog system easily interchangeable, without major adaption in Java.

Einzelne Artikel zum Thema IT-Sicherheit an der Universität Würzburg

Background: Because most human stroke victims are elderly, studies of experimental stroke in the aged rather than the young rat model may be optimal for identifying clinically relevant cellular responses, as well for pinpointing beneficial interventions. Methodology/Principal Findings: We employed the Affymetrix platform to analyze the whole-gene transcriptome following temporary ligation of the middle cerebral artery in aged and young rats. The correspondence, heat map, and dendrogram analyses independently suggest a differential, age-group-specific behaviour of major gene clusters after stroke. Overall, the pattern of gene expression strongly suggests that the response of the aged rat brain is qualitatively rather than quantitatively different from the young, i.e. the total number of regulated genes is comparable in the two age groups, but the aged rats had great difficulty in mounting a timely response to stroke. Our study indicates that four genes related to neuropathic syndrome, stress, anxiety disorders and depression (Acvr1c, Cort, Htr2b and Pnoc) may have impaired response to stroke in aged rats. New therapeutic options in aged rats may also include Calcrl, Cyp11b1, Prcp, Cebpa, Cfd, Gpnmb, Fcgr2b, Fcgr3a, Tnfrsf26, Adam 17 and Mmp14. An unexpected target is the enzyme 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-Coenzyme A synthase 1 in aged rats, a key enzyme in the cholesterol synthesis pathway. Post-stroke axonal growth was compromised in both age groups. Conclusion/Significance: We suggest that a multi-stage, multimodal treatment in aged animals may be more likely to produce positive results. Such a therapeutic approach should be focused on tissue restoration but should also address other aspects of patient post-stroke therapy such as neuropathic syndrome, stress, anxiety disorders, depression, neurotransmission and blood pressure.

Swelling-activated pathways for myo-inositol, one of the most abundant organic osmolytes in mammalian cells, have not yet been identified. The present study explores the SLC5A3 protein as a possible transporter of myo-inositol in hyponically swollen HEK293 cells. To address this issue, we examined the relationship between the hypotonicity-induced changes in plasma membrane permeability to myo-inositol Pino [m/s] and expression/localization of SLC5A3. Pino values were determined by cell volumetry over a wide tonicity range (100–275 mOsm) in myo-inositol-substituted solutions. While being negligible under mild hypotonicity (200–275 mOsm), Pino grew rapidly at osmolalities below 200 mOsm to reach a maximum of ∼3 nm/s at 100–125 mOsm, as indicated by fast cell swelling due to myo-inositol influx. The increase in Pino resulted most likely from the hypotonicity-mediated incorporation of cytosolic SLC5A3 into the plasma membrane, as revealed by confocal fluorescence microscopy of cells expressing EGFP-tagged SLC5A3 and super-resolution imaging of immunostained SLC5A3 by direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM). dSTORM in hypotonic cells revealed a surface density of membrane-associated SLC5A3 proteins of 200–2000 localizations/μm2. Assuming SLC5A3 to be the major path for myo-inositol, a turnover rate of 80–800 myo-inositol molecules per second for a single transporter protein was estimated from combined volumetric and dSTORM data. Hypotonic stress also caused a significant upregulation of SLC5A3 gene expression as detected by semiquantitative RT-PCR and Western blot analysis. In summary, our data provide first evidence for swelling-mediated activation of SLC5A3 thus suggesting a functional role of this transporter in hypotonic volume regulation of mammalian cells.

While teleoperation of technical highly sophisticated systems has already been a wide field of research, especially for space and robotics applications, the automation industry has not yet benefited from its results. Besides the established fields of application, also production lines with industrial robots and the surrounding plant components are in need of being remotely accessible. This is especially critical for maintenance or if an unexpected problem cannot be solved by the local specialists. Special machine manufacturers, especially robotics companies, sell their technology worldwide. Some factories, for example in emerging economies, lack qualified personnel for repair and maintenance tasks. When a severe failure occurs, an expert of the manufacturer needs to fly there, which leads to long down times of the machine or even the whole production line. With the development of data networks, a huge part of those travels can be omitted, if appropriate teleoperation equipment is provided. This thesis describes the development of a telemaintenance system, which was established in an active production line for research purposes. The customer production site of Braun in Marktheidenfeld, a factory which belongs to Procter & Gamble, consists of a six-axis cartesian industrial robot by KUKA Industries, a two-component injection molding system and an assembly unit. The plant produces plastic parts for electric toothbrushes. In the research projects "MainTelRob" and "Bayern.digital", during which this plant was utilised, the Zentrum für Telematik e.V. (ZfT) and its project partners develop novel technical approaches and procedures for modern telemaintenance. The term "telemaintenance" hereby refers to the integration of computer science and communication technologies into the maintenance strategy. It is particularly interesting for high-grade capital-intensive goods like industrial robots. Typical telemaintenance tasks are for example the analysis of a robot failure or difficult repair operations. The service department of KUKA Industries is responsible for the worldwide distributed customers who own more than one robot. Currently such tasks are offered via phone support and service staff which travels abroad. They want to expand their service activities on telemaintenance and struggle with the high demands of teleoperation especially regarding security infrastructure. In addition, the facility in Marktheidenfeld has to keep up with the high international standards of Procter & Gamble and wants to minimize machine downtimes. Like 71.6 % of all German companies, P&G sees a huge potential for early information on their production system, but complains about the insufficient quality and the lack of currentness of data. The main research focus of this work lies on the human machine interface for all human tasks in a telemaintenance setup. This thesis provides own work in the use of a mobile device in context of maintenance, describes new tools on asynchronous remote analysis and puts all parts together in an integrated telemaintenance infrastructure. With the help of Augmented Reality, the user performance and satisfaction could be raised. A special regard is put upon the situation awareness of the remote expert realized by different camera viewpoints. In detail the work consists of: - Support of maintenance tasks with a mobile device - Development and evaluation of a context-aware inspection tool - Comparison of a new touch-based mobile robot programming device to the former teach pendant - Study on Augmented Reality support for repair tasks with a mobile device - Condition monitoring for a specific plant with industrial robot - Human computer interaction for remote analysis of a single plant cycle - A big data analysis tool for a multitude of cycles and similar plants - 3D process visualization for a specific plant cycle with additional virtual information - Network architecture in hardware, software and network infrastructure - Mobile device computer supported collaborative work for telemaintenance - Motor exchange telemaintenance example in running production environment - Augmented reality supported remote plant visualization for better situation awareness

The field of small satellite formations and constellations attracted growing attention, based on recent advances in small satellite engineering. The utilization of distributed space systems allows the realization of innovative applications and will enable improved temporal and spatial resolution in observation scenarios. On the other side, this new paradigm imposes a variety of research challenges. In this monograph new networking concepts for space missions are presented, using networks of ground stations. The developed approaches combine ground station resources in a coordinated way to achieve more robust and efficient communication links. Within this thesis, the following topics were elaborated to improve the performance in distributed space missions: Appropriate scheduling of contact windows in a distributed ground system is a necessary process to avoid low utilization of ground stations. The theoretical basis for the novel concept of redundant scheduling was elaborated in detail. Additionally to the presented algorithm was a scheduling system implemented, its performance was tested extensively with real world scheduling problems. In the scope of data management, a system was developed which autonomously synchronizes data frames in ground station networks and uses this information to detect and correct transmission errors. The system was validated with hardware in the loop experiments, demonstrating the benefits of the developed approach.

Electric shock is a common stimulus for nociception-research and the most widely used reinforcement in aversive associative learning experiments. Yet, nothing is known about the mechanisms it recruits at the periphery. To help fill this gap, we undertook a genome-wide association analysis using 38 inbred Drosophila melanogaster strains, which avoided shock to varying extents. We identified 514 genes whose expression levels and/or sequences covaried with shock avoidance scores. We independently scrutinized 14 of these genes using mutants, validating the effect of 7 of them on shock avoidance. This emphasizes the value of our candidate gene list as a guide for follow-up research. In addition, by integrating our association results with external protein-protein interaction data we obtained a shock avoidance- associated network of 38 genes. Both this network and the original candidate list contained a substantial number of genes that affect mechanosensory bristles, which are hairlike organs distributed across the fly's body. These results may point to a potential role for mechanosensory bristles in shock sensation. Thus, we not only provide a first list of candidate genes for shock avoidance, but also point to an interesting new hypothesis on nociceptive mechanisms.

Starfree regular languages can be build up from alphabet letters by using only Boolean operations and concatenation. The complexity of these languages can be measured with the so-called dot-depth. This measure leads to concatenation hierarchies like the dot-depth hierarchy (DDH) and the closely related Straubing-Thérien hierarchy (STH). The question whether the single levels of these hierarchies are decidable is still open and is known as the dot-depth problem. In this thesis we prove/reprove the decidability of some lower levels of both hierarchies. More precisely, we characterize these levels in terms of patterns in finite automata (subgraphs in the transition graph) that are not allowed. Therefore, such characterizations are called forbidden-pattern characterizations. The main results of the thesis are as follows: forbidden-pattern characterization for level 3/2 of the DDH (this implies the decidability of this level) decidability of the Boolean hierarchy over level 1/2 of the DDH definition of decidable hierarchies having close relations to the DDH and STH Moreover, we prove/reprove the decidability of the levels 1/2 and 3/2 of both hierarchies in terms of forbidden-pattern characterizations. We show the decidability of the Boolean hierarchies over level 1/2 of the DDH and over level 1/2 of the STH. A technique which uses word extensions plays the central role in the proofs of these results. With this technique it is possible to treat the levels 1/2 and 3/2 of both hierarchies in a uniform way. Furthermore, it can be used to prove the decidability of the mentioned Boolean hierarchies. Among other things we provide a combinatorial tool that allows to partition words of arbitrary length into factors of bounded length such that every second factor u leads to a loop with label u in a given finite automaton.

Historical maps are fascinating documents and a valuable source of information for scientists of various disciplines. Many of these maps are available as scanned bitmap images, but in order to make them searchable in useful ways, a structured representation of the contained information is desirable. This book deals with the extraction of spatial information from historical maps. This cannot be expected to be solved fully automatically (since it involves difficult semantics), but is also too tedious to be done manually at scale. The methodology used in this book combines the strengths of both computers and humans: it describes efficient algorithms to largely automate information extraction tasks and pairs these algorithms with smart user interactions to handle what is not understood by the algorithm. The effectiveness of this approach is shown for various kinds of spatial documents from the 16th to the early 20th century.

Background: Natural language processing (NLP) is a powerful tool supporting the generation of Real-World Evidence (RWE). There is no NLP system that enables the extensive querying of parameters specific to multiple myeloma (MM) out of unstructured medical reports. We therefore created a MM-specific ontology to accelerate the information extraction (IE) out of unstructured text. Methods: Our MM ontology consists of extensive MM-specific and hierarchically structured attributes and values. We implemented “A Rule-based Information Extraction System” (ARIES) that uses this ontology. We evaluated ARIES on 200 randomly selected medical reports of patients diagnosed with MM. Results: Our system achieved a high F1-Score of 0.92 on the evaluation dataset with a precision of 0.87 and recall of 0.98. Conclusions: Our rule-based IE system enables the comprehensive querying of medical reports. The IE accelerates the extraction of data and enables clinicians to faster generate RWE on hematological issues. RWE helps clinicians to make decisions in an evidence-based manner. Our tool easily accelerates the integration of research evidence into everyday clinical practice.

Internet is the biggest database that science and technology have ever produced. The world wide web is a large repository of information that cannot be used for automation by many applications due to its limited target audience. One of the solutions to the automation problem is to develop wrappers. Wrapping is a process whereby unstructured extracted information is transformed into a more structured one such as XML, which could be provided as webservice to other applications. A web service is a web page whose content is well structured so that a computer program can consume it automatically. This paper describes steps involved in constructing wrappers manually in order to automatically generate web services.