User-defined Exception Research Articles

Extending the learning and communicating shout-ahead architecture with user-defined exception rules -- a case study for traffic light controls

We present an extension of the shout-ahead agent architecture that allows for adding human user-defined exception rules to the rules created by the hybrid learning approach for this architecture. The user-defined rules can be added after learning as reaction to weaknesses of the learned rules or learning can be performed with the user-defined rules already in place. We applied the extended shout-ahead architecture and the associated learning to a new application area, cooperating controllers for the traffic lights of intersections. In our experimental evaluations, adding user-defined exception rules to the learned rules for several traffic flow instances increased the efficiency of the resulting controllers substantially compared to just using the learned rules. Performing learning with user-defined exception rules already in place decreased the learning time substantially for all flows, but had mixed results with respect to efficiency. We also evaluated user-defined exception rules for a variant of the architecture that is not using communication and saw similar effects as for the variant with communication. For the communicating version, both variants of adding user-defined exception rules create controllers that are much more flexible than what using the original shout-ahead architecture with its learning is able to create as indicated by experiments with variations of flows.

Extending symbolic execution for automated testing of stored procedures

Stored procedures in database management systems are often used to implement complex business logic. Correctness of these procedures is critical for flawless working of the system. However, testing them remains difficult due to many possible database states and constraints on data. This leads to mostly manual testing. Newer tools offer automated execution for unit testing of stored procedures but the test cases are still written manually. We propose an approach of using dynamic symbolic execution for generating automated test cases and corresponding database states for stored procedures. We model the constraints on data imposed by the schema and the SQL statements, treating values in database tables as symbolic. We use SMT solver to find values that will drive the stored procedure on a particular execution path. We instrument the internal execution plans generated by PostgreSQL to extract constraints. We use Z3 to generate test cases consisting of table data and procedure inputs. Our evaluation using stored procedures from a large business application and various GitHub repositories quantifies the evidence of effectiveness of our technique by generating test cases that lead to schema constraint violations and user-defined exceptions.

A Dataflow-Based Scientific Workflow Composition Framework

Scientific workflow has recently become an enabling technology to automate and speed up the scientific discovery process. Although several scientific workflow management systems (SWFMSs) have been developed, a formal scientific workflow composition model in which workflow constructs are fully compositional one with another is still missing. In this paper, we propose a dataflow-based scientific workflow composition framework consisting of (1) a dataflow-based scientific workflow model that separates the declaration of the workflow interface from the definition of its functional body; (2) a set of workflow constructs, including Map, Reduce, Tree, Loop, Conditional, and Curry, which are fully compositional one with another; (3) a dataflow-based exception handling approach to support hierarchical exception propagation and user-defined exception handling. Our workflow composition framework is unique in that workflows are the only operands for composition; in this way, our approach elegantly solves the two-world problem in existing composition frameworks, in which composition needs to deal with both the world of tasks and the world of workflows. The proposed framework is implemented and several case studies are conducted to validate our techniques.

A Flexible Framework for Fault Tolerance in the Grid

This paper presents a failure detection service (FDS) and a flexible failure handling framework (Grid-WFS) as a fault tolerance mechanism on the Grid. The FDS enables the detection of both task crashes and user-defined exceptions. A major challenge in providing such a generic failure detection service on the Grid is to detect those failures without requiring any modification to both the Grid protocol and the local policy of each Grid node. This paper describes how to overcome the challenge by using a notification mechanism which is based on the interpretation of notification messages being delivered from the underlying Grid resources. The Grid-WFS built on top of FDS allows users to achieve failure recovery in a variety of ways depending on the requirements and constraints of their applications. Central to the framework is flexibility in handling failures. This paper describes how to achieve the flexibility by the use of workflow structure as a high-level recovery policy specification, which enables support for multiple failure recovery techniques, the separation of failure handling strategies from the application code, and user-defined exception handlings. Finally, this paper presents an experimental evaluation of the Grid-WFS using a simulation, demonstrating the value of supporting multiple failure recovery techniques in Grid applications to achieve high performance in the presence of failures.