Functional criteria often drive the component selection in the assembly of a software system. Minimal distance strategies are frequently adopted to select the components that require minimal adaptation effort. This type of approach hides to developers the non-functional characteristics of components, although they may play a crucial role to meet the system specifications. In this paper we intro...

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) allows datacenters to consolidate network appliance functions onto commodity servers and devices. Currently telecommunication carriers are re-architecting their central offices as NFV datacenters that, along with Software-Defined Networking (SDN), help network service providers to speed deployment and reduce cost. However, it is still unclear how a carrier ...

Managers often face difficulties when making project decisions that involve large number of interrelated activities – the planning and scheduling of which is project management. Most problems often arise in areas such as product development, production planning and control and setting up the production facilities. One important aspect of project management is activity crashing, i.e. reducing th...

Generally, there is a tradeoff between quality and computational workload required to obtain that quality. In this paper, we focus on practical issues in implementing a pig activity monitoring system. We first propose a method for evaluating the quality-workload tradeoff in the activity monitoring application. Then, we derive the cost-effective solution within the acceptable range of quality fo...

An important feature of heat exchanger network design is the energy-capital tradeoff. This tradeoff has been regarded as complex due to the number of structural network alternatives usually available, each being subject to continuous optimization. Current procedures tend to first identify minimum energy networks. The total cost (capital and energy) can then be improved by evolution and continuo...

An important design issue in distributed data processing systems is to determine optimal data distribution. The problem requires a tradeoff between time and cost. For instance, quick response time conflicts with low cost. The paper addresses the data distribution problem in this conflicting environment. A formulation of the problem as a non-linear program is developed. An algorithm employing a ...

Hardware square-root units require large numbers of gates even for iterative implementations. In this paper, we present four low-cost high-performance fullypipelined n-select implementations (nS-Root) based on a non-restoring-remainder square root algorithm. The nSRoot uses a parallel array of carry-save adders (CSAs). For a square root bit calculation, a CSA is used once. This means that the c...