1,720,978 research outputs found
Enhancing Supply Chain Transparency through Blockchain Product Passports
No full textThe European Union is tackling the challenge of reducing its environmental impact and carbon footprint: the Green Deal, promoted in 2022, is one of the most important regulations proposed by the European Union in terms of sustainability. The goal of this regulation is to make the production of almost all of the products manufactured in Europe more friendly to the environment and energy efficient. This regulation also introduces the Digital Product Passport, a tool designed to collect and share product data across all the phases of its lifecycle. The digital product passport aims to enable secure and transparent communication of essential product information among all economic stakeholders. This initiative is designed to enhance the sustainability and circularity of products. It also serves as a tool for regulatory authorities to ensure manufacturers meet legal requirements and assists consumers in making well-informed purchasing choices. Considering the utility of such information, it is crucial to make them the more trustworthy as possible. Leveraging blockchain’s inherent characteristics, like transparency and data immutability, ensures that the passport remains consistently verifiable and reliable. In this paper, we addressed the challenge of implementing a blockchain-based digital product passport, providing a detailed description of the required features and possible use cases and proposing some practical ideas for the implementation
A Petri net-based approach to model and analyze the management of cloud applications
No full textHow to flexibly manage complex applications over heterogeneous clouds is one of the emerging problems in the cloud era. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specication for Cloud Applications
(TOSCA) aims at solving this problem by providing a language to describe and manage complex cloud applications in a portable, vendoragnostic way. TOSCA permits to dene an application as an orchestration of nodes, whose types can specify states, requirements, capabilities and management operations | but not how they interact each another.
In this paper we rst propose how to extend TOSCA to specify the behaviour of management operations and their relations with states, requirements, and capabilities. We then illustrate how such behaviour can be naturally modelled, in a compositional way, by means of open Petri nets. The proposed modelling permits to automate dierent analyses, such as determining whether a deployment plan is valid, which are its eects, or which plans allow to reach certain system congurations
A Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving Auditable Data Structure Framework
No full textEvery digital process needs to consume some data in order to work properly. It is very common for applications to rely on external data sources, such as APIs. When data is not self-generated, the reliability of both the external data source and its produced data cannot be taken for granted. Therefore, ensuring the trustworthiness and verifiability of the received data is paramount. While authenticated data structures are commonly used to establish trust by authenticating the data source and generating proofs of data authenticity or integrity, they fall short in use cases like data notarization that require also verification of data history and its consistency. This problem seems to be unaddressed by current literature, which proposes some approaches aimed at executing audits by internal actors with prior knowledge about the data structures. In this paper, we analyze the terminology and the current state of the art of the auditable data structures, then we propose a general framework that makes use of a public blockchain as trusted anchor for notarizing data, thereby supporting privacy-preserving audits from both internal and external entities without prior data knowledge. A detailed description of the framework implementation, alongside with experimental results, is provided, showing the effectiveness of our framework in terms of proof generation and evaluation
Fault-aware management protocols for multi-component applications
Full text linkNowadays, applications are composed by multiple heterogeneous components, whose management must be suitably coordinated by taking into account inter-component dependencies and potential failures. In this paper, we first present fault-aware management protocols, which allow to model the management behaviour of application components, and we then illustrate how such protocols can be composed to analyse and automate the overall management of a multi-component application. We also show how to recover applications that got stuck because a fault was not handled properly, or because a component is behaving differently than expected. To illustrate the feasibility of our approach, we present BARREL, a proof-of-concept application that permits editing and analysing fault-aware management protocols in multi-component applications. We also discuss the usefulness of BARREL by showing how it was fruitfully exploited it in a concrete case study and in a controlled experiment
True concurrent management of multi-component applications
No full textComplex applications orchestrate multiple components and services, which are independently managed by different teams (e.g., DevOps squads). As a consequence, various services may happen to be updated, reconfigured or redeployed concurrently, possibly yielding unexpected/undesired management effects. In this paper, we show how the true concurrent management of multi-component applications can be suitably modelled, analysed and automated, also in presence of faults
Modelling the behaviour of management operations in cloud-based applications
Full text linkHow to flexibly manage complex applications over heterogeneous clouds is one of the emerging problems in the cloud era. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) aims at solving this problem by providing a language to describe and manage complex cloud applications in a portable, vendoragnostic way. TOSCA permits to define an application as an orchestration of nodes, whose types can specify states, requirements, capabilities and management operations — but not how they interact each another.
In this paper we first propose how to extend TOSCA to specify the behaviour of management operations and their relations with states, requirements, and capabilities. We then illustrate how such behaviour can be naturally modelled, in a compositional way, by means of open Petri nets. The proposed modelling permits to automate different analyses, such as determining whether a deployment plan is valid, which are its effects, or which plans allow to reach certain system configurations
A high-level and accurate energy model of parallel and concurrent workloads
No full textThe ability to predict the energy needed by a system to perform a task, or several concurrent parallel tasks, allows the scheduler to enforce energy-aware policies while providing acceptable performance. The approaches in literature to model energy consumption of tasks usually focus on low-level descriptors and require invasive instrumentation of the computational environment. We developed an energy model and a methodology to automatically extract features that characterize the computational environment relying only on a single power meter that measures the energy consumption of the whole system. Once the model has been built, the energy consumption of concurrent tasks can be calculated, with a statistically insignificant error, even without any power meter. We show that our model can predict with high accuracy, even only using the utilization time of the cores in a high-performance computing enclosure, without using performance counters. Hence, the model could be easily applicable to heterogeneous systems, where collecting representative performance counters can be problematic
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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