On Robustness of Power Grids

Current and future trends in environmental, economical, and human-caused factors (such as power demand growth, over-ageing of assets in power grids, and extreme weather conditions) challenge power grid robustness in the near future, necessitating research to better analyse and understand the notion of robustness in power grids, and ultimately to...

On-line Distributed Prediction and Control for a Large-scale Traffic Network

Traffic becomes more congested due to the growing demand. As a consequence, improving traffic flow by means of traffic control is a key focus in many countries. However, road traffic is one of the most complex systems to control. In this thesis, a distributed solution for traffic prediction and control is proposed to reduce this complexity and...

Business Process Quality Computation: Computing Non-Functional Requirements to Improve Business Processes

Business process modelling is an important part of system design. When designing or redesigning a business process, stakeholders specify, negotiate, and agree on business requirements to be satisfied, including non-functional requirements that concern the quality of the business process. This thesis addresses the question of how to specify and...

Negotiation and Monitoring in Open Environments

Large scale, distributed, digital environments offer vast potential. Within these environments, software systems will provide unprecedented support for daily life. Offering access to vast amounts of knowledge and resources, these systems will enable wider participation of society, at large. An example is the Smart Energy Grid that increases...

Multi-level Reconfigurable Self-organization in Overlay Services

Large-scale decentralized systems organized in overlay networks are complex to manage. Such systems integrate organizational complexity in the application-level resulting in low abstraction and modularity in their services. This thesis introduces a multi-level conceptual architecture for overlay services. An overlay service is a large-scale...

Towards Use-Case Driven Self-Management of Distributed Systems

The growing complexity of distributed systems makes their management a challenge. Manual management of these systems is costly and time consuming. Autonomic computing has been proposed to reduce the cost of maintaining complex systems by developing computer systems capable of self-management. A self-managed system consists of multiple autonomic...