Configuration Management Research Articles

GEOMETRY APPLICATION EVOLUTION - FROM RESEARCH TO INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS OVER TWO DECADES

AbstractDigitalisation is making significant inroads into society at the same time as the general commercial trend is to able to personalise the product one acquires. The field of digital product representation, and the techniques for adopting a particular product in accordance with the customer's expectations, have become very important corporate assets. From a company's perspective these assets can be leveraged both for internal efficiency and also for different types of external customer interactions. In this article, the standpoint is that product geometry forms the foundation for digital product representation. It is from this perspective that the geometrical ecosystem comes into focus. Geometry creation and geometry consumption, in combination with geometrical configuration management, are high-value areas that must be mastered. A research-based 20-year industrial perspective building up such capabilities serves as an example. The article concludes with a forward-looking perspective on potential areas for continued exploration on this journey.

Principles of electrical grid configuration management and tasks of their implementation

THE PURPOSE. To consider and analyze the definitions of the concepts "configuration of the electrical grid", "control of the configuration of the electrical grid ", "parameters of the configuration of the electrical grid ". To justify the need to manage the configuration of electrical grid, describe the principles and methods of managing the configuration of the electrical grid. To demonstrate the implementation of the principles of managing the configuration of the electrical grid on the example of an electrical grid with a nominal voltage of 0.4 kV with the use of proprietary technical configuration management tools. METHODS. Based on the literature review, the study identified the wording of key concepts, such as" configuration of the electrical grid"," management of the electrical grid configuration", "parameters of the electrical grid configuration". Methods of managing the configuration of the electrical grid are shown. The principles of electrical grid configuration management proposed by the authors are considered, which include observability, manageability, segmentability, flexibility of the electrical grid configuration, equipment intellectualization, and integration into the economy. The essence of each of the management principles is revealed and the effects of their implementation are shown. The effects of implementing the configuration management principles are to reduce the number of power supply interruptions and reduce the time of power supply interruptions to consumers, mismatch the quality parameters of the electricity supplied to them, as well as to increase the availability of electricity infrastructure. The rationale for the need to manage the configuration of electrical grid is given. Within the framework of the conducted research, the method of system analysis, methods of comparisons and analogies, and expert assessments were used. RESULTS. On the example of the scheme of power supply to consumers at a voltage of 0.4 kV, the implementation of the principles of control of the configuration of electrical grid with the use of proprietary technical means – multi-contact switching systems, input-accounting-distribution devices integrated into the monitoring systems of the parameters of the operating modes of electrical grid and other devices is illustrated. CONCLUSION. The implementation of the principles of configuration management of electrical grid allows to increase the efficiency of power supply systems for consumers and at the same time causes the need to develop new technical means of automation and monitoring of parameters of operating modes of electrical grids.

Information Security Assurance and the Role of Security Configuration Management: Substantive and Symbolic Perspectives

ABSTRACT This paper explores whether IT and audit professionals have different perceptions of the substantive and symbolic perspectives of information security assurance and the role of security configuration management (SCM) using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Importance performance analysis (IPA) is utilized to identify differences in perceived importance and perceived controllability from both substantive and symbolic perspectives between these two professional groups. Our results suggest that SCM plays a vital role in maintaining consistency between the IT and audit professionals by enhancing their confidence in controlling and managing information security control sets. IPA also helps determine an information security program's strengths and weaknesses and supports remedial strategic actions more efficiently. Implications for both research and practice are discussed.

Automated Deployment of CBC/Radio-Canada’s Media-Over-IP Data Center

<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CBC/Radio-Canada is finalizing its new Internet Protocol (IP)-based production center in Montréal. During the design and early deployment of this major facility, it became clear that the staging and configuration of the thousands of media devices should be automated and managed in a fashion similar to an information technology (IT) data center. In fact, these new devices require thousands of parameters to be configured, and there are more frequent updates than for conventional devices. Moreover, once the system is in place, business continuity imposes careful management of system changes to minimize the risk of technical regressions and human errors. The good news is that the IT industry has solved the problem of operating huge data centers that require high availability. Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices have proven track records for operating data centers throughout their lifecycle, from configuration and provisioning, updates and changes, to sanity checks and monitoring. Tools such as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), domain name server (DNS), IP address management (IPAM), and configuration management tools are mature and widely used. This paper presents the architecture and implementation of CBC’s automated deployment workflow. We cover requirements on endpoint devices and the technical and human-factor challenges we encountered during our journey putting in place the novel approach for the media facility. We believe that these tools and methods will be applicable as a way forward to many media-over-IP projects at all scales</i> .

Leader Election in a Cluster using Zookeeper

This paper presents an algorithm for flexible and fast leader election in distributed systems using Apache Zookeeper for configuration management.&#x0D; The algorithm proposed in this paper is designed for applications that do not use symmetric nodes so they need a specialized election process or for applications that require a more flexible approach in the leader election process. The algorithm proposes a different approach as it allows assigning prioritizations for servers in the cluster that are candidates to become a leader. The algorithm is flexible as it takes into consideration during the leader election process of the different server settings and roles, network properties, communication latency or specific application requirements.

Types of Threats and Appropriate Countermeasures for Internet Communications

Threats can translate into various types of attacks an intruder can take on entities in a network: flooding the target with protocol messages, smurfing (targeted broadcasting of an ICMP protocol-based messaging protocol), distributed attacks that lead to blocking the service for legitimate users, IP address theft and flooding targets with unsolicited emails, identity theft, or fraudulent routing. Against these threats, a variety of security measures can be implemented, such as: configuration management, firewall installation, intrusion detection system installation. Used separately or together, these protection measures can eliminate or even minimize the probability of materializing security threats and preventing attacks on the security features of a system.

AVUBDI: A Versatile Usable Big Data Infrastructure and Its Monitoring Approaches for Process Industry

The amount of sensors in process industry is continuously increasing as they are getting faster, better and cheaper. Due to the rising amount of available data, the processing of generated data has to be automatized in a computationally efficient manner. Such a solution should also be easily implementable and reproducible independently of the details of the application domain. This paper provides a suitable and versatile usable infrastructure that deals with Big Data in the process industry on various platforms using efficient, fast and modern technologies for data gathering, processing, storing and visualization. Contrary to prior work, we provide an easy-to-use, easily reproducible, adaptable and configurable Big Data management solution with a detailed implementation description that does not require expert or domain-specific knowledge. In addition to the infrastructure implementation, we focus on monitoring both infrastructure inputs and outputs, including incoming data of processes and model predictions and performances, thus allowing for early interventions and actions if problems occur.

Endodontic management of Type-2 and Type-3 C-shaped root canal system in mandibular second molars: A case series

The most common anatomical variation of the root canal system is a C-shaped root canal configuration and exists mostly in mandibular second molars, but may be found also in other teeth. Because of the broad spectrum of canal configurations, management of C-shaped canals is challenging for clinicians in diagnosis, shaping, cleaning and obturation. First case of c-shaped canal was documented in literature by Cooke and Cox in 1979. In this case series, we present the management of C-shaped canal configuration in mandibular second molars.

Optimal dispatching of an energy system with integrated compressed air energy storage and demand response

The integrated energy system is considered to be an important way to avoid energy supply risks by virtue of advantages in meeting diversified energy demand and improving energy utilization efficiency. Energy storage enables microgrid operators to respond to variability or loss of generation sources. In view of the difficulty of battery to fully improve the energy utilization efficiency and solve the problems of clean energy power large-scale consumption, and the difficulty of single demand response to significantly improve the operational reliability and economy of the integrated energy system, a rolling optimization planning framework and model of an integrated energy system considering compressed air energy storage and sliding time window-based electric and heating integrated response demand is proposed, which can obtain both optimal resource configuration and energy management strategy. The planning problem is to coordinate the output of various dispatching resources on the basis of satisfying the constraints, so as to minimize the total cost. Taking into account the uncertainty of wind power and photovoltaic output and the unplanned outage risk of the unit, a stochastic optimization model is constructed based on the probability density function of the risk variable, and finally the cost probability distribution is obtained. The results verify the universality of the planning model. The comparison of five different energy system configuration schemes and multiple time window length schemes verifies the validity and superiority of the model. The simulation results show that the integrated energy system scheme proposed by this planning model has better economy than the scheme without compressed air energy storage, and the operating cost decreases by 11.9% and the total cost decreases by 4.5%. In addition, the results show that through the introduction of demand response, the operating economy and flexibility of the integrated energy system are improved, and as the sliding window length increases, the total cost gradually decreases.

СПЕЦИАЛЬНОЕ МОДЕЛЬНО-АЛГОРИТМИЧЕСКОЕ И ПРОГРАММНОЕ ОБЕСПЕЧЕНИЕ ПРОАКТИВНОГО УПРАВЛЕНИЯ ГРУППОВЫМ ПОВЕДЕНИЕМ РОБОТОТЕХНИЧЕСКИХ СРЕДСТВ

The paper describes the proactive control of robots group behavior using Behavior-Based Systemmodels, where the intellect is formed by a physical entities behavior. The observed complex is anarray of distributed agents functioning in real time under disturbances. John Boyd’s OODA loopmodel is used to describe the control system work cycle of such network object. The input data of thecontrol task are a planning horizon, a group action scenario, an array of agents and their possibleelementary operations, a set of scenarios using restrictions and a quality indicator of the controlproblem solution. The output data is the distribution plan of agents in space and time to realize thescenario under restrictions. The developed technology predicts the environmental disturbances. Thecomplex predictive modeling methodology for a self-organized robots group control is used withlogical-dynamic models. One of the key advantages of developed combined models, methods, algorithmsand software is the possibility to coordinate analytical and simulation control models of complexdynamic objects and their logical-algebraic analogs and models based on intelligent informationtechnology. This coordination is on the conceptual, model-algorithmic, information and softwaredetailing levels. The special language for modeling, planning, proactive monitoring and controltask description is also developed. This language can be used for dialog interaction, calculationplanning and data mining too. The proposed method main advantage is the non-isolated, but integratedsolving of robotics configuration (reconfiguration) modeling, planning and management withthe structural dynamics proactive control common problem solution.

Civil Aircraft Spare Parts Prediction and Configuration Management Techniques: Review and Prospect

Spare parts are treated as the basis to guarantee the safe and economic operation of civil aircraft, its scientific prediction and reasonable configuration play an important role in perfecting integrated logistics support (ILS) and achieving win-win situation of stakeholders (e.g. manufacturers, operators, maintenance providers). This paper studies the existing spare parts prediction and configuration methods of civil aircraft, and discusses future development trend of spare parts from the perspective of prediction and configuration, respectively. The current development status of civil aircraft spare parts prediction techniques are firstly introduced, according to demand characteristics of spare parts; the present research status of civil aircraft spare parts configuration methods are then elaborated, based on the traditional methods and machine learning methods; the development trend of civil aircraft spare parts prediction and configuration methods is finally analyzed, combined with the advantages and disadvantages of the existing methods of civil aircraft spare parts management methods. The efforts of this work provide a reference for the comprehensive management of civil aircraft spare parts and improve the perfection degree for the ILS of civil aircraft.

From Brown-Field to Future Industrial Networks, a Case Study

The network infrastructures in the future industrial networks need to accommodate, manage and guarantee performance to meet the converged Internet technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) traffics requirements. The pace of IT–OT networks development has been slow despite their considered benefits in optimizing the performance and enhancing information flows. The hindering factors vary from general challenges in performance management of the diverse traffic for green-field configuration to lack of outlines for evolving from brown-fields to the converged network. Focusing on the brown-field, this study provides additional insight into a brown-field characteristic to set a baseline that enables the subsequent step development towards the future’s expected converged networks. The case study highlights differences between real-world network behavior and the common assumptions for analyzing the network traffic covered in the literature. Considering the unsatisfactory performance of the existing methods for characterization of brown-field traffic, a performance and dynamics mixture measurement is proposed. The proposed method takes both IT and OT traffic into consideration and reduces the complexity, and consequently improves the flexibility, of performance and configuration management of the brown-field.

Application and Satisfaction Study of Medua-Based TEACHING &amp; LEARNING Method in Beauty Education: Focusing on Flipped Learning using Google Classroom

Purpose: After the 4th Industrial Revolution, changes in innovation are required in education. With a report by technology company, Dell estimating that 85 percent of jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t yet been in-vented, today’s school leavers are facing a future in an uncertain job market. Find out how schools are helping students to develop skills that will make them work-ready. This researcher applied media-based teaching and learning methods to provide classes to beauty major students. Method: As a result of the survey, most of the students were satisfied with the medium-based teaching and learning method for flipped learning using Google classroom. The following is a summary of what students are satisfied with in the Google classroom and Flipped Learning class. The students responded that they were able to have fun classes without being bored, received a lot of help from the professor, were able to repeat learning at home, check the contents of the assignments correctly, and concentrate well. Students pointed out that it was a little difficult to use at first, and that they had to download class-related apps as an inconvenience during class. Results: As a result of the survey, most students were satisfied with the class using media-based teaching and learning methods. The contents that were good for teaching using the media-based teaching and learning method are summarized as follows. “It was great to be able to have more fun classes”, “I received a lot of help from the professor”, “I can study at home”, “I was able to check exactly what the assignment was”, “It is possi-ble to repeat learning”, “It wasn t boring. and I was able to concentrate well”. The inconvenient points in class were “It was a little difficult to use for the first time”, “Internet data is essential”, “You need to download a class-related app”. Conclusion: To transform future education, the ability of media-based teaching and learning methods using digital skills is essential for both instructors and learners. For this, the foundation should be actively formed to study the effectiveness and application of media-based education such as infrastructure configuration and op-eration management, various content development and support, and digital skills.

Network Protection Against Node Attacks Based on Probabilistic Availability Measures

We consider a network security and configuration management problem of locating service controllers so as to maximize availability of services in case of targeted attacks on the network infrastructure. Assuming that the attacker has full knowledge of the network topology but can only try to predict controller locations, we model the attacker's behavior introducing a set of probabilistic network availability measures and formulating an optimization problem model that determines the potentially most dangerous attacks the attacker might launch. We also formulate a counter-part optimization model that allows the network operator to derive the optimal placement of controllers, which maximizes availability of services with respect to a given set of network attacks. We explain the models and illustrate our considerations using a running small, intuitive network example. And we also perform extensive numerical experiments with a realistic network data to evaluate and compare the potential effectiveness of different attack strategies, and the effectiveness of the counter-measures that the network operator can adopt.

Human Competency Assessment for Software Configuration Management

Late product delivery is a common problem in software projects. Late delivery can be attributed to software change especially in the development and maintenance phases, leading to more work than originally planned, thus increasing project completion time. One approach for managing software change is Software Configuration Management (SCM). SCM was first introduced in the 1970s to ensure the timely delivery of software products. To date, SCM implementation is supported by recognized standards, best practice, and countless commercial and proprietary tools. However, after more than 50 years, the issue of late software product delivery still prevails, questioning the practice of SCM in software organizations. One aspect of SCM that has received little focus in mainstream research is the human aspects. This study aims to identify how the competency of SCM practitioners can be assessed through the identification of SCM competency criteria and the development of a competency assessment framework. The framework was validated through expert reviews and case studies involving practitioners from the public sector, industry, institutes of higher learning and international organizations. Results confirmed the reliability of the SCM competency criteria and the plausibility of the competency assessment framework.

Continuously Managing NFRs: Opportunities and Challenges in Practice

Non-functional requirements (NFR), which include performance, availability, and maintainability, are vitally important to overall software quality. However, research has shown NFRs are, in practice, poorly defined and difficult to verify. Continuous software engineering practices, which extend agile practices, emphasize fast paced, automated, and rapid release of software that poses additional challenges to handling NFRs. In this multi-case study we empirically investigated how three organizations, for which NFRs are paramount to their business survival, manage NFRs in their continuous practices. We describe four practices these companies use to manage NFRs, such as offloading NFRs to cloud providers or the use of metrics and continuous monitoring, both of which enable almost real-time feedback on managing the NFRs. However, managing NFRs comes at a cost—as we also identified a number of challenges these organizations face while managing NFRs in their continuous software engineering practices. For example, the organizations in our study were able to realize an NFR by strategically and heavily investing in configuration management and infrastructure as code, in order to offload the responsibility of NFRs; however, this offloading implied potential loss of control. Our discussion and key research implications show the opportunities, trade-offs, and importance of the unique give-and-take relationship between continuous software engineering and NFRs. Research artifacts may be found at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3376342</uri> .

Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Data Analytics and Machine Learning for Network and Service Management—Part II

Network and Service analytics can harness the immense stream of operational data from clouds, to services, to social and communication networks. In the era of big data and connected devices of all varieties, analytics and machine learning have found ways to improve reliability, configuration, performance, fault and security management. In particular, we see a growing trend towards using machine learning, artificial intelligence and data analytics to improve operations and management of information technology services, systems and networks.

Information Security Assurance and the Role of Security Configuration Management: Substantive and Symbolic Perspectives

This paper explores whether IT and audit professionals have different perceptions of the substantive and symbolic perspectives of information security assurance and the role of security configuration management (SCM) using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Importance performance analysis (IPA) is utilized to identify differences in perceived importance and perceived controllability from both substantive and symbolic perspectives between these two professional groups. Our results suggest that SCM plays a vital role in maintaining consistency between the IT and audit professionals by enhancing their confidence in controlling and managing information security control sets. IPA also helps determine an information security program's strengths and weaknesses and supports remedial strategic actions more efficiently. Implications for both research and practice are discussed.

Application of Intelligent Sensing in Power Test System

Smart grid is the development trend of the power industry under the new situation. As an important part of smart grid, smart power consumption directly faces the society and power users, and plays a very important role in the construction of smart grid. With the development of intelligent power construction, the traditional power service can not meet the needs of users to participate in demand side management and interact with the power grid in time. Therefore, the construction of a new intelligent sensing power measurement system to improve the quality and level of intelligent power service has become the focus of current power industry research. Firstly, according to the requirements analysis and design principles of the intelligent sensing power detection system, this paper proposes the function analysis and three-tier architecture design of the intelligent sensing power detection system. The intelligent sensing power detection system is logically divided into business application layer, network communication layer and sensing device layer. Externally, it realizes data integration and interaction with power consumption information collection system, marketing business management system and other intelligent power consumption information systems. Internally, it realizes interconnection with user side perception interactive terminal and perception unit, and realizes data acquisition, information transmission and control functions of power consumption terminal equipment. This paper presents a method of applying intelligent sensing technology to data editing environment of power simulation software, and realizes online error detection of simulation original data, automatic completion of keywords, automatic prompt of data card and intelligent help of data domain. The power simulation data editing software with intelligent sensing function developed in this paper is suitable for primary and advanced users, which can improve work efficiency and reduce error rate. The configurable rule management method applied in the implementation of intelligent sensing technology extends the application of data editor to the developers of models and algorithms, and provides a simple way for the timely upgrade and release of new models and algorithms.

Tun-OCM: A model-driven approach to support database tuning decision making

Database tuning is a task executed by Database Administrators (DBAs) based on their practical experience and on tuning systems, which support DBA actions towards improving the performance of a database system. It is notoriously a complex task that requires precise domain knowledge about possible database configurations. Ideally, a DBA should keep track of several Database Management Systems (DBMS) parameters, configure data structures, and must be aware about possible interferences among several database (DB) configurations. We claim that an automatic tuning system is a decision support system and DB tuning may also be seen as a configuration management task. Therefore, we may characterize it by means of a formal domain conceptualization, benefiting from existing control practices and computational support in the configuration management domain. This work presents Tun-OCM, a conceptual model represented as a well-founded ontology, that encompasses a novel characterization of the database tuning domain as a configuration management conceptualization to support decision making. We develop and represent Tun-OCM using the CM-OPL methodology and its underlying language. The benefits of Tun-OCM are discussed by instantiating it in a real scenario.