Business success of companies heavily depends on the availability and performance of their client applications. Due to modern development paradigms such as DevOps and microservice architectural styles, applications are decoupled into services with complex interactions and dependencies. Although these paradigms enable individual development cycles with reduced delivery times, they cause several challenges to manage the services in distributed systems. One major challenge is to observe and monitor such distributed systems. This paper provides a qualitative study to understand the challenges and good practices in the field of observability and monitoring of distributed systems. In 28 semi-structured interviews with software professionals we discovered increasing complexity and dynamics in that field. Especially observability becomes an essential prerequisite to ensure stable services and further development of client applications. However, the participants mentioned a discrepancy in the awareness regarding the importance of the topic, both from the management as well as from the developer perspective. Besides technical challenges, we identified a strong need for an organizational concept including strategy, roles and responsibilities. Our results support practitioners in developing and implementing systematic observability and monitoring for distributed systems.
Traffic within cities has increased in the last decades due to increasing mobility, changing mobility behavior and new mobility offerings. These accelerating changes make it increasingly difficult for responsible authorities or other stakeholders to predict mobility behavior, to configure traffic rules or to size roads, bridges and parking lots.
Traffic simulations are a powerful tool for estimating and evaluating current and future mobility, upcoming traffic services and automated functionalities in the domain of traffic management. For being able to simulate a complex real-world traffic environment and traffic incidents, the simulation environment needs to fulfill requirements from real-world scenarios related to sensor-based data processing. In addition, it must be possible to include latest advancements of technology in the simulation environment, for instance, (1) connected intersections that communicate with each other, (2) a complex and flexible set of rules for traffic sign control and traffic management or a well-defined data processing of relevant sensor data. In this paper we therefore define requirements for a traffic simulation based on a complex real-world scenario in Germany. The project addresses major urban challenges and aims at demonstrating the contribution that the upcoming 5G mobile generation can make to solving real-time traffic flow optimization.
In a second step, we investigate in detail if the simulation environment SUMO (Simulation of Urban Mobility) fulfills the postulated requirements. Thirdly, we propose a technical concept to close the gap of the uncovered requirements for later implementation.
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