Esterel is a mature reactive language used to specify and implement realtime and time-critical systems. In this article, we investigate its use with Java and describe a Java binding for Esterel. We show that Esterel programs translate and integrate well into Java. The real-time, critical part of the code can be specified with Esterel and verified with a large set of tools, before being turned i...

In computer graphics, it is often an advantage to calculate refractions directly, especially when the application is time-critical or when line graphics have to be displayed. We specify efficient formulas and parametric equations for the refraction on straight lines and planes. Furthermore, we develop a general theory of refractions, with reflections as a special case. In the plane case, all re...

Complex event analytics systems continuously evaluate massive workloads of pattern queries on high volume event streams to detect and extract complex events of interest to the application. Such time-critical stream-based applications range from real-time fraud detection to personalized health monitoring. Achieving near real-time system responsiveness when processing these workloads composed of ...

In multitasking, priority-driven systems, resource access-control protocols such as Priority Ceiling Protocol (PCP) reduce the undesirable effects of resource contention. In general, software implementation of these protocols entails costly computations that can degrade the system performance to unacceptable levels. In this paper, we present the design for a hardware-accelerator to execute the ...

E mergency response deals with the reaction to a natural or man-made disaster and involves containing the disaster situation. The process is time-critical because many lives depend on how quickly and accurately emergency responders make decisions. During an emergency response, emergency operations centers (EOCs) face different problems depending on the category the emergency falls under (fire, ...

Many time-critical applications require predictable performance and tasks in these applications have deadlines to be met. For tasks with hard deadlines, a deadline miss can be catastrophic while for QoS degradable tasks (soft realtime tasks) timely approximate results of poorer quality or occasional deadline misses are acceptable. Imprecise computation and (m,k)-firm guarantee are two workload ...

Materialization and hierarchical routing algorithms are becoming important tools in querying databases for the shortest paths in time-critical applications like Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), due to the growing size of their spatial graph databases 16]. A hierarchical routing algorithm decomposes the original graph into a set of fragment graphs and a boundary graph which summarizes t...

A spate of recent work demonstrates that humans seek to avoid the expenditure of cognitive effort, much like physical effort or economic resources. Less is clear, however, about the circumstances dictating how and when people decide to expend cognitive effort. Here we adopt a popular theory of opportunity costs and response vigor and to elucidate this question. This account, grounded in Reinfor...

Health care processes are nowadays heavily dependent on Information Technology (IT). On the other side, assessing a higher quality of health care to patients has become increasingly important. Effective health care processes are thereby heavily dependent on a comprehensive IT-support. Therefore, a thorough understanding about both the hospital IT-systems and clinical pathways is required, to id...

This paper describes a real-time decision-making model that combines the expressiveness and exibility of knowledge-based systems with the real-time advantages of anytime algorithms. Anytime algorithms ooer a simple means by which an intelligent system can trade oo computation time for quality of results. Previous attempts to develop knowledge-based anytime algorithms failed to produce consisten...