Execution Failures Research Articles

Theory and Measures Used in Addressing Agribusiness SMEs’ Sustainability: A Mapping Review of Recent Literatures

Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) contribute much to local job security, agribusiness SMEs are even more important as they are responsible for food security too. Realising the importance of agribusiness SMEs, various entrepreneurial incentives are provided by policy makers. However, due to resource and knowledge constraint, they are facing high failure rate and sustainability issues. Lack of sector and scale specific study about business sustainability was found to be the reason for mishandled policy execution and adoption failure among agribusiness small firms. Thus, this review article has the aim to identify and group theories and measures used to address agribusiness SMEs sustainability in recent literatures. A total of 22 articles were selected upon screening and mapping review was conducted. As a result, theories involved in addressing agribusiness SMEs sustainability were institutional theory, resource based view (RBV), stakeholder theory and other theories. Sustainability measures also varies from brand loyalty, business performance, competitive advantage, corporate social responsibility (CSR), critical success factors, innovation, sustainable development and triple bottom lines (TBL). Thus, this finding is expected to provide summarised information on theories and measures used to address agribusiness SMEs sustainability in recent literatures to boost more sectors and scale specific studies in future.

Resource Availability Prediction in Distributed Systems: An Approach for Modeling Non-Stationary Transition Probabilities

Large scale distributed systems employ thousands of resources which inevitably suffer from the unavailability issue. Serious side effects like unexpected delay or failure in the application execution are probable in case of such an issue. The imposed outcome might then be catastrophic consequences for real time applications or penalties for the service providers. Better prediction of the resource unavailability helps diminishing the undesired outcomes. This paper proposes a resource availability prediction algorithm for the mentioned goal. The resource availability variation is modeled as a stochastic process. By analyzing the availability information of NDU resources and both physical and virtual machines of the PlantLab, we found that the transition probabilities among the availability levels are non-stationary. To cope with this characteristic, we introduce Availability Transition Patterns (ATPs); the ATPs are dynamically constructed and the transitions between them are modeled by a Markov chain. The future ATP is then predicted based on the constructed Markov chain, according to which the resource availability-level is predicted. Experimental results confirm the efficiency of the proposed prediction algorithm.

Fault Tolerance Grid Scheduling with Checkpoint Based on Ant Colony System

Task resubmission and checkpoint are among several popular techniques used in providing fault tolerance in grid computing. However, due to the lack of side-by-side comparison, it is not certain of the best technique that would not degrade the system performance in addition to providing fault tolerance capability. This study proposed Dynamic ACS-based Fault Tolerance in grid computing using resubmission to new resource, checkpoint technique and utilization of resource execution history with the aim to reduce execution and task processing time and to increase the success rate in grid environment. The proposed algorithm is compared with other relevant algorithms to measure the performance in terms of execution time, success rate and average processing time. The results suggest that the proposed algorithm with improved task resubmission, checkpoint and extended pheromone update formula gives better performance in managing execution failure as well as resource selection during task assignment or resubmission.

Security Assurance for System-on-Chip Designs With Untrusted IPs

Modern system-on-chip (SoC) designs involve integration of a large number of intellectual property (IP) blocks, many of which are acquired from untrusted third-party vendors. An IP containing a security vulnerability-whether inadvertent or malicious-may compromise the trustworthiness of the entire SoC, e.g., by leaking sensitive information or causing execution failures at key points. Existing functional validation approaches, post-manufacturing tests, and IP trust verification techniques are inadequate to accomplish comprehensive system-level security assurance in the presence of untrusted IPs. In this paper, we analyze security issues at the SoC level caused by untrusted IPs. We also propose a novel, resilient SoC security architecture to ensure trusted SoC operation with untrusted IPs. Our architecture realizes fine-grained IP-trust aware security policies in an efficient security policy checker that enables run-time monitoring of security issues arising from untrusted IPs. It also exploits on-chip design-for-debug architecture to ensure trusted information flow from IP blocks to the security policy checker. Unlike existing solutions to the untrusted IP problem, which rely on verification of IP trust before they are integrated into an SoC, the proposed approach follows a fundamentally different architecture-level solution based on run-time resilience. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework for system protection using several illustrative practical use cases. We also provide experimental results to show that the overhead of the proposed architecture is modest on representative SoC designs.

Predicting Plan Failure by Monitoring Action Sequences and Duration

An agent can attempt to achieve multiple goals and each goal can be achieved by applying various different plans. Anticipating failures in agent plan execution is important to enable an agent to develop strategies to avoid or circumvent such failures, allowing the agent to achieve its goal. Plan recognition can be used to infer which plans are being executed from observations of sequences of activities being performed by an agent. Symbolic Plan Recognition is an algorithm that represents knowledge about the agents under observation in the form of a plan library. In this work, we use this symbolic algorithm to find out which plan the agent is performing and we develop a failure prediction system, based on information available in the plan library and in a simplified calendar which manages the goals the agent has to achieve. This failure predictor is able to monitor the sequence of agent actions and detects if an action is taking too long or does not match the plan that the agent was expected to be performing. We have successfully employed this approach in a health-care prototype system.

The Passive vs. Active Conundrum: A New Perspective on the Arithmetic of Index Investing

The rise in passive investment through indexes has been significant in recent decades and is causing a drastic reduction in actively managed assets. In addition to the empirical evidence that index funds outperform actively managed funds, net of fees, the logical basis for index investing, as famously articulated by Professor William Sharpe in The Arithmetic of Active Investing and in other publications, has provided proponents with an unchallenged rationale for indexing — that the average active manager cannot beat the index and actually tends to underperform it after deducting fees. This logical argument has persuaded many investors to increase allocations to index funds given their admitted inability to accurately choose the active outperformers from the active underperformers in advance. It has also reduced active manager’s credibility given their inability to add value (in terms of returns vs. an index) as a group. This paper reexamines the “arithmetic of active investing” as explained by Professor Sharpe and attempts to show that its assumptions do not necessarily hold in practice. If active buyers and active sellers have a roughly equal probability of buying or selling each security in the index, liquidity is available on both sides of each trade and index investors are able to execute orders for all securities at proper market-capitalization weightings. However, once active investors concentrate their orders on one side of a trade, it becomes difficult for index investors to execute the proper orders to keep their weightings in-line with the index. This idea of failed order execution (or costly order execution) has been shown by previous authors in the context of how “informed” traders trade with “uninformed” traders. The same concept can be applied to active vs. passive investors as long as active investors are “informed” on average (i.e., possess skill). By illustrating how index investors are required to trade in the underlying shares of the index (or equivalently that ETF Trusts are forced to issue and redeem shares on a continuous basis) it can be shown that order concentration by active investors can cause index investors to experience tracking difference (commonly referred to as tracking error). By including tracking difference in the arithmetic of index investing, active management is no longer a zero-sum game. As long as active managers as a group possess skill, they can beat the index at the expense of index investors who underperform by an amount equal to tracking difference. This framework also indicates that tracking difference is not necessarily a fixed cost for index investors and could potentially increase to undesirable levels in the future.

Corporate governance challenges in emerging economies

Corporate governance research in the context of emerging economies has received increasing attention in recent years. Corporate scandals and executive failures continue despite the growing emphasis on governance reforms around the world and the increasing activism of shareholders, governments and other corporate stakeholders. Academics and practitioners are becoming aware that firm-level governance mechanisms at work in different countries are embedded in national business systems and are influenced by political, social and legal macro-institutions. To promote the studies on governance challenges in emerging markets, we organized a special issue conference in conjunction with Corporate Governance: An International Review (CGIR) in Edinburgh, UK on December 4-5, 2015 on the theme of “Challenges in Corporate Governance in Emerging Economies”. In this article, we introduce peculiarities of corporate governance in emerging economies, survey the papers included in the special issue and explore future research directions.

Possibilities and limitations of innovative retrofitting for masonry churches: Advanced computations on three case studies

The use of fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) represents an interesting option to inhibit the formation of partial collapse mechanisms on macro-blocks, which is a typical failure mode shown by masonry churches under seismic actions. Furthermore, FRP strips exhibit a very good performance at failure, low invasiveness and high speed of execution. This study provides an insight into the possible applications of FRP on three masonry churches damaged by the 2012 Emilia seismic sequence. Several different linear and non-linear analyses are carried out, including standard response spectrum analyses, limit analyses with both pre-assigned failure mechanisms and Finite Elements (FE), pushover and non-linear dynamic analyses. A remarkable consistency is found between the real seismic performance of the churches and the results obtained through both limit and advanced non-linear dynamic analyses. In particular, both the damage distributions and the active failure mechanisms derived from the numerical analyses are consistent with those observed on the churches after the seismic event. A seismic upgrading of the churches through the application of FRP is proposed, using a proper design procedure based on comprehensive advanced FE computations, with the aim of obtaining the required seismic performance and limited invasiveness. The interaction between FRP strips and masonry substrate is accounted for assuming the FRP behavior in agreement with Italian Guidelines for strengthening with composite materials (CNR DT200). It is found that through a rational design procedure of the FRP strengthening intervention it is possible to prevent the premature collapse of the macro-elements, considerably increasing their load carrying capacity.

Extending HTN to planning and execution control for small combat unit simulation

Modeling how military commanders carry out operations is considered complicated, requiring the capability of not only planning for multiple subordinates but also responding to unexpected events during execution. This paper presents an Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) embedded planning and execution control architecture for small unit commander agents. To be adaptive to dynamic world state changes, the architecture employs a partial planning mechanism and generates actions only applicable to current situations. It is also able to coordinate subordinates’ actions and handle execution failures at runtime. We demonstrate the architecture’s use with an infantry company scenario, where the commander orders three platoons assaulting a defined hill. Our approach shows the effectiveness to control multiple entities in dynamic environments, making the architecture well-suited to represent small unit commanders’ behavior.

Failure Detection Algorithm for Testing Dynamic Web Applications

Web applications are the most widely used software in the internet. When a web application is developed and deployed in the real environment, It is very severe if any bug found by the attacker or the customer or the owner of the web application. It is the very important to do the proper pre-analysis testing before the release. It is very costly thing if the proper testing of web application is not done at the development location and any bug found at the customer location. For web application testing the existing systems such as DART, Cute and EXE are available. These tools generate test cases by executing the web application on concrete user inputs. These tools are best suitable for testing static web sites and are not suitable for dynamic web applications. The existing systems needs user inputs for generating the test cases. It is most difficult thing for the human being to provide dynamic inputs for all the possible cases. This paper presents algorithms and implementation, and an experimental evaluation that revealed HTML Failures, Execution Failures, Includes in PHP Web applications.

Correction to Kane et al. (2016).

Reports an error in "Individual differences in the executive control of attention, memory, and thought, and their associations with schizotypy" by Michael J. Kane, Matt E. Meier, Bridget A. Smeekens, Georgina M. Gross, Charlotte A. Chun, Paul J. Silvia and Thomas R. Kwapil (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2016[Aug], Vol 145[8], 1017-1048). There were errors in Table 3 and Table 7 (these transcription errors were limited to descriptive statistics in the Tables and did not affect any inferential statistics). In Table 3, the ARRO-TUT and LETT-TUT variables had incorrect values for Mean [95% CI], SD, Skew, Kurtosis, and N. In Table 7, the same values (plus Min and Max) were incorrect for the SEM-SART variable. The correct values for these measures are presented in the correction (the values for Min and Max were correct as set in Table 3, but are repeated below for clarity). (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2016-29680-001.) A large correlational study took a latent-variable approach to the generality of executive control by testing the individual-differences structure of executive-attention capabilities and assessing their prediction of schizotypy, a multidimensional construct (with negative, positive, disorganized, and paranoid factors) conveying risk for schizophrenia. Although schizophrenia is convincingly linked to executive deficits, the schizotypy literature is equivocal. Subjects completed tasks of working memory capacity (WMC), attention restraint (inhibiting prepotent responses), and attention constraint (focusing visual attention amid distractors), the latter 2 in an effort to fractionate the "inhibition" construct. We also assessed mind-wandering propensity (via in-task thought probes) and coefficient of variation in response times (RT CoV) from several tasks as more novel indices of executive attention. WMC, attention restraint, attention constraint, mind wandering, and RT CoV were correlated but separable constructs, indicating some distinctions among "attention control" abilities; WMC correlated more strongly with attentional restraint than constraint, and mind wandering correlated more strongly with attentional restraint, attentional constraint, and RT CoV than with WMC. Across structural models, no executive construct predicted negative schizotypy and only mind wandering and RT CoV consistently (but modestly) predicted positive, disorganized, and paranoid schizotypy; stalwart executive constructs in the schizophrenia literature-WMC and attention restraint-showed little to no predictive power, beyond restraint's prediction of paranoia. Either executive deficits are consequences rather than risk factors for schizophrenia, or executive failures barely precede or precipitate diagnosable schizophrenia symptoms. (PsycINFO Database Record

English

English

A MECHANISM FOR THE EARLY DETECTION AND MANAGEMENT OF PHYSICAL ASSET MANAGEMENT STRATEGY EXECUTION FAILURE

The purpose of this paper is to present a mechanism that can assist physical asset management (PAM) practitioners and academics with the early detection and management of PAM strategy execution failure. In the pursuit of this objective, case studies were applied to develop the theory related to this topic the methodologies involved in the development of theory through case studies was were applied. The paper commences with a brief literature review of the contemporary literature on general business strategy, strategy execution, and, more specifically, PAM strategy execution failure (PAMSEF). The physical asset management strategy execution enforcement mechanism (PAMSEEM) is presented next. Validation of each one of the components of the PAMSEEM takes place within the context of an organisation that is highly dependent on physical assets (PA) dependent organization. The conclusion reached is that the PAMSEEM, can indeed assist organisations with the early detection and management of PAMSEF.

GAMESH: A grid architecture for scalable monitoring and enhanced dependable job scheduling

Grid computing is a largely adopted paradigm to federate geographically distributed data centers. Due to their size and complexity, grid systems are often affected by failures that may hinder the correct and timely execution of jobs, thus causing a non-negligible waste of computing resources. Despite the relevance of the problem, state-of-the-art management solutions for grid systems usually neglect the identification and handling of failures at runtime. Among the primary goals to be considered, we claim the need for novel approaches capable to achieve the objectives of scalable integration with efficient monitoring solutions and of fitting large and geographically distributed systems, where dynamic and configurable tradeoffs between overhead and targeted granularity are necessary. This paper proposes GAMESH, a Grid Architecture for scalable Monitoring and Enhanced dependable job ScHeduling. GAMESH is conceived as a completely distributed and highly efficient management infrastructure, concentrating on two crucial aspects for large-scale and multi-domain grid environments: (i) the scalable dissemination of monitoring data and (ii) the troubleshooting of job execution failures. GAMESH has been implemented and tested in a real deployment encompassing geographically distributed data centers across Europe. Experimental results show that GAMESH (i) enables the collection of measurements of both computing resources and conditions of task scheduling at geographically sparse sites, while imposing a limited overhead on the entire infrastructure, and (ii) provides a failure-aware scheduler able to improve the overall system performance, even in the presence of failures, by coordinating local job schedulers at multiple domains.

A Cognitive Human Error Analysis with CREAM in Control Room of Petrochemical Industry

Background: The cognitive human error analysis technique is one of the second-generation techniques used to evaluate human reliability; it has a strong, detailed theoretical background that focuses on the important cognitive features of human behavior. Objectives: The aim of this study was to assign task and jobs crisis using analysis of cognitive human error with CREAM. Finally, based on the results, the major causes of error were detected. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 53 people working in an olefin unit. It is one of the most important control rooms located in a special economic zone in Assaluyeh petrochemical industry. In this study, first a job analysis was conducted and the sub-tasks and conditions affecting the performance of the staff were determined. Then, the control mode coefficient and control mode type, as well as the possibility of total error were determined. Finally, the cognitive functions and type of cognitive error related to each sub-task were identified. Results: Amongthe six evaluated occupational tasks, the tasks performed by board-manandsite-manhadthe highest values of total human error in terms of transitory overall error coefficient (0.056 and 0.031, respectively). In addition, the following results were obtained on the basis of the extended CREAM: execution failure (31.72%), interpretation failure (29.20%), planning failure (14.63%), and observation failure (24.39%). Conclusions: Common Performance Conditions (CPCs), empowerment, and the time available for work were among the most important factors that reduced occupational performance. To optimize a communication system, it is necessary to arrange the priority of tasks, hold joint meetings, inform the staff about the termination of work permits, hold training sessions, and measure the pollutants. Keywords: Human Error, Control Room, Petrochemical Industry, CREAM

Sensorimotor speech disorders in Parkinson's disease: Programming and execution deficits.

ABSTRACTIntroduction: Dysfunction in the basal ganglia circuits is a determining factor in the physiopathology of the classic signs of Parkinson's disease (PD) and hypokinetic dysarthria is commonly related to PD. Regarding speech disorders associated with PD, the latest four-level framework of speech complicates the traditional view of dysarthria as a motor execution disorder. Based on findings that dysfunctions in basal ganglia can cause speech disorders, and on the premise that the speech deficits seen in PD are not related to an execution motor disorder alone but also to a disorder at the motor programming level, the main objective of this study was to investigate the presence of sensorimotor disorders of programming (besides the execution disorders previously described) in PD patients. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in a sample of 60 adults matched for gender, age and education: 30 adult patients diagnosed with idiopathic PD (PDG) and 30 healthy adults (CG). All types of articulation errors were reanalyzed to investigate the nature of these errors. Interjections, hesitations and repetitions of words or sentences (during discourse) were considered typical disfluencies; blocking, episodes of palilalia (words or syllables) were analyzed as atypical disfluencies. We analysed features including successive self-initiated trial, phoneme distortions, self-correction, repetition of sounds and syllables, prolonged movement transitions, additions or omissions of sounds and syllables, in order to identify programming and/or execution failures. Orofacial agility was also investigated. Results: The PDG had worse performance on all sensorimotor speech tasks. All PD patients had hypokinetic dysarthria. Conclusion: The clinical characteristics found suggest both execution and programming sensorimotor speech disorders in PD patients.

Individual differences in the executive control of attention, memory, and thought, and their associations with schizotypy.

A large correlational study took a latent-variable approach to the generality of executive control by testing the individual-differences structure of executive-attention capabilities and assessing their prediction of schizotypy, a multidimensional construct (with negative, positive, disorganized, and paranoid factors) conveying risk for schizophrenia. Although schizophrenia is convincingly linked to executive deficits, the schizotypy literature is equivocal. Subjects completed tasks of working memory capacity (WMC), attention restraint (inhibiting prepotent responses), and attention constraint (focusing visual attention amid distractors), the latter 2 in an effort to fractionate the "inhibition" construct. We also assessed mind-wandering propensity (via in-task thought probes) and coefficient of variation in response times (RT CoV) from several tasks as more novel indices of executive attention. WMC, attention restraint, attention constraint, mind wandering, and RT CoV were correlated but separable constructs, indicating some distinctions among "attention control" abilities; WMC correlated more strongly with attentional restraint than constraint, and mind wandering correlated more strongly with attentional restraint, attentional constraint, and RT CoV than with WMC. Across structural models, no executive construct predicted negative schizotypy and only mind wandering and RT CoV consistently (but modestly) predicted positive, disorganized, and paranoid schizotypy; stalwart executive constructs in the schizophrenia literature-WMC and attention restraint-showed little to no predictive power, beyond restraint's prediction of paranoia. Either executive deficits are consequences rather than risk factors for schizophrenia, or executive failures barely precede or precipitate diagnosable schizophrenia symptoms. (PsycINFO Database Record

Fault tolerance aware scheduling technique for cloud computing environment using dynamic clustering algorithm

In cloud computing, resources are dynamically provisioned and delivered to users in a transparent manner automatically on-demand. Task execution failure is no longer accidental but a common characteristic of cloud computing environment. In recent times, a number of intelligent scheduling techniques have been used to address task scheduling issues in cloud without much attention to fault tolerance. In this research article, we proposed a dynamic clustering league championship algorithm (DCLCA) scheduling technique for fault tolerance awareness to address cloud task execution which would reflect on the current available resources and reduce the untimely failure of autonomous tasks. Experimental results show that our proposed technique produces remarkable fault reduction in task failure as measured in terms of failure rate. It also shows that the DCLCA outperformed the MTCT, MAXMIN, ant colony optimization and genetic algorithm-based NSGA-II by producing lower makespan with improvement of 57.8, 53.6, 24.3 and 13.4?% in the first scenario and 60.0, 38.9, 31.5 and 31.2?% in the second scenario, respectively. Considering the experimental results, DCLCA provides better quality fault tolerance aware scheduling that will help to improve the overall performance of the cloud environment.

Planning and execution through variable resolution planning

Generating sequences of actions–plans–for robots using Automated Planning in stochastic and dynamic environments has been shown to be a difficult task with high computational complexity. These plans are composed of actions whose execution might fail due to different reasons. In many cases, if the execution of an action fails, it prevents the execution of some (or all) of the remainder actions in the plan. Therefore, in most real-world scenarios computing a complete and sound (valid) plan at each (re-)planning step is not worth the computational resources and time required to generate the plan. This is specially true given the high probability of plan execution failure. Besides, in many real-world environments, plans must be generated fast, both at the start of the execution and after every execution failure. In this paper, we present Variable Resolution Planning which uses Automated Planning to quickly compute a reasonable (not necessarily sound) plan. Our approach computes an abstract representation–removing some information from the planning task–which is used once a search depth of k steps has been reached. Thus, our approach generates a plan where the first k actions are applicable if the domain is stationary and deterministic, while the rest of the plan might not be necessarily applicable. The advantages of this approach are that it: is faster than regular full-fledged planning (both in the probabilistic or deterministic settings); does not spend much time on the far future actions that probably will not be executed, since in most cases it will need to replan before executing the end of the plan; and takes into account some information of the far future, as an improvement over pure reactive systems. We present experimental results on different robotics domains that simulate tasks on stochastic environments.

Service Provisioning Problem in Cloud and Multi-Cloud Systems

Cloud computing is a new emerging paradigm that aims to streamline the on-demand provisioning of resources as services, providing end users with flexible and scalable services accessible through the Internet on a pay-per-use basis. Because modern cloud systems operate in an open and dynamic world characterized by continuous changes, the development of efficient resource provisioning policies for cloud-based services becomes increasingly challenging. This paper aims to study the hourly basis service provisioning problem through a generalized Nash game model. We take the perspective of Software as a Service (SaaS) providers that want to minimize the costs associated with the virtual machine instances allocated in a multiple Infrastructures as a Service (IaaS) scenario while avoiding incurring penalties for execution failures and providing quality of service guarantees. SaaS providers compete and bid for the use of infrastructural resources, whereas the IaaSs want to maximize their revenues obtained providing virtualized resources. We propose a solution algorithm based on the best-reply dynamics, which is suitable for a distributed implementation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by performing numerical tests, considering multiple workloads and system configurations. Results show that our algorithm is scalable and provides significant cost savings with respect to alternative methods (5% on average but up to 260% for individual SaaS providers). Furthermore, varying the number of IaaS providers means an 8%–15% cost savings can be achieved from the workload distribution on multiple IaaSs.