A relational approach to defining and implementing transformations between metamodels

The Model-Driven Architecture initiative of the OMG promotes the idea of transformations in the context of mapping from platform independent to platform specific models. Additionally, the popularity of XML and the wide spread use of XSLT has raised the profile of model transformation as an important technique for computing. In fact, computing may well be moving to a new paradigm in which models are considered first class entities and transformations between them are a major function performed on those models. This paper proposes an approach to defining and implementing model transformations which uses metamodelling patterns to capture the essence of mathematical relations. It shows how these patterns can be used to define the relationship between two different metamodels. A goal of the approach is to enable complete specifications from which tools can be generated. The paper describes implementations of the examples, which have been partially generated from the definitions using a tool generation tool. A number of issues emerge which need to be solved in order to achieve the stated goal; these are discussed.     

A formal software development approach using refinement calculus

The advantage of COOZ(Complete Object-Oriented Z) is to specify large scale software,but it does not support refinement calculus.Thus its application is comfined for software development.Including refinement calculus into COOZ overcomes its disadvantage during design and implementation.The separation between the design and implementation for structure and notation is removed as well .Then the software can be developed smoothly in the same frame.The combination of COOZ and refinement calculus can build object-oriented frame,in which the specification in COOZ is refined stepwise to code by calculus.In this paper,the development model is established.which is based on COOZ and refinement calculus.Data refinement is harder to deal with in a refinement tool than ordinary algorithmic refinement,since data refinement usually has to be done on a large program component at once.As to the implementation technology of refinement calculus,the data refinement calculator is constructed and an approach for data refinement which is based on data refinement calculus and program window inference is offered.     

Definitions and approaches to model quality in model-based software development – A review of literature

More attention is paid to the quality of models along with the growing importance of modelling in software development. We performed a systematic review of studies discussing model quality published since 2000 to identify what model quality means and how it can be improved. From forty studies covered in the review, six model quality goals were identified; i.e., correctness, completeness, consistency, comprehensibility, confinement and changeability. We further present six practices proposed for developing high-quality models together with examples of empirical evidence. The contributions of the article are identifying and classifying definitions of model quality and identifying gaps for future research.     

从UML到GSPN的转换和性能分析方法

UML模型一般不能直接进行性能分析,需要利用模型转换的方法将其转换成其他分析模型,比如排队论、随机进程代数或者随机Petri网等模型。利用Eclipse平台上的Papyrus建立3种类型的UML模型(用例图、部署图和活动图)来对系统进行建模,并利用MARTE规范添加一些性能相关的信息;然后利用ATL实现UML模型到广义随机Petri网(GSPN)模型的转换,并使用XStream将上一步得到的GSPN模型转换成分析工具所支持的格式;最后利用基于GSPN的性能分析方法进行系统性能分析。同时给出了一系列性能指标的计算方法,如利用率、吞吐量、平均等待请求的数目以及响应时间等,可以考察系统性能的多个方面,方便系统设计和开发人员对系统性能进行分析和优化。     

A model-driven approach for the derivation of architectural requirements of software product lines

The alignment of the software architecture and the functional requirements of a system is a demanding task because of the difficulty in tracing design elements to requirements. The four-step rule set (4SRS) is a unified modeling language (UML)-based model-driven method for single system development which provides support to the software architect in this task. This paper presents an evolution of the 4SRS method aimed at software product lines. In particular, we describe how to address the transformation of functional requirements (use cases) into component-based requirements for the product line architecture. The result is a UML-based model-driven method that can be applied in combination with metamodeling tools such as the eclipse modeling framework (EMF) to derive the architecture of software product lines. We present our approach in a practical way and illustrate it with an example. We also discuss how our proposals are related to the work of other authors.     

A connectionist approach to rule refinement

A novel approach to rule refinement based upon connectionism is presented. This approach is capable of performing rule deletion, rule addition, changing rule quality, and modification of rule strengths. The fundamental algorithm is referred to as the Consistent-Shift algorithm. Its basis for identifying incorrect connections is that incorrect connections will often undergo larger inconsistent weight shift that correct ones during training with correct samples. By properly adjusting the detection threshold, incorrect connections would be uncovered, which can then be deleted or modified. Deletion of incorrect connections and addition of correct connections then translate into various forms of rule refinement just mentioned. The viability of this approach is demonstrated empirically.     

Model-driven engineering: A survey supported by the unified conceptual model

During the last decade a new trend of approaches has emerged, which considers models not just documentation artefacts, but also central artefacts in the software engineering field, allowing the creation or automatic execution of software systems starting from those models. These proposals have been classified generically as Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) and share common concepts and terms that need to be abstracted, discussed and understood. This paper presents a survey on MDE based on a unified conceptual model that clearly identifies and relates these essential concepts, namely the concepts of system, model, metamodel, modeling language, transformations, software platform, and software product. In addition, this paper discusses the terminologies relating MDE, MDD, MDA and others. This survey is based on earlier work, however, contrary to those, it intends to give a simple, broader and integrated view of the essential concepts and respective terminology commonly involved in the MDE, answering to key questions such as: What is a model? What is the relation between a model and a metamodel? What are the key facets of a modeling language? How can I use models in the context of a software development process? What are the relations between models and source code artefacts and software platforms? and What are the relations between MDE, MDD, MDA and other MD approaches?     

Tool support for the rapid composition, analysis and implementation of reactive services

We present the integrated set of tools Arctis for the rapid development of reactive services. In our method, services are composed of collaborative building blocks that encapsulate behavioral patterns expressed as UML 2.0 collaborations and activities. Due to our underlying semantics in temporal logic, building blocks as well as their compositions can be transformed into formulas and model checked incrementally in order to guarantee that important system properties are kept. The process of model checking is fully automated. Error traces are presented to the users as easily understandable animations, so that no expertise in temporal logic is needed. In addition, the results of model checking are analyzed, so that in some cases automated diagnoses and fixes can be provided as well. The formal semantics also enables the correct, automatic synthesis of the activities to state machines which form the input of our code generators. Thus, the collaborative models can be fully automatically transformed into executable Java code. We present the development of a mobile treasure hunt system to exemplify the method and the tools.     

MMRUC3: A recommendation approach of move method refactoring using coupling,cohesion, and contextual similarity to enhance software design

Placement of methods is one of the most important design activities for any object‐oriented application in terms of coupling and cohesion. Due to method misplacement, the application becomes tightly coupled and loosely cohesive, reflecting inefficient design. Therefore, a feature envy code smell emerges from the application, as many methods use more features of other classes than its current class. Hence, development and maintenance time, cost, and effort are increased. To refactor the code smell and enhance the design quality, move method refactoring plays a significant role through grouping similar behaviors of methods. This is because the manual refactoring process is infeasible due to the necessity of huge time and most of the existing techniques consider only coupling‐based and/or cohesion‐based information of nonstatic entities (methods and attributes) for the recommendation. However, this article proposes an approach that uses contextual information, based on information retrieval techniques, along with dependency (coupling and cohesion)‐based information of the application for the recommendation. In addition, the approach incorporates both static and nonstatic entities in the recommendation process. For validation, the approach is applied on seven well‐known open source projects. The results of the experimental evaluation indicate that the proposed approach provides better results with an average precision of 18.91%, a recall of 69.91%, and an F‐measure of 29.77% than the JDeodorant tool (a widely used eclipse plugin for refactorings). Moreover, this article establishes several relationships between the accuracy of the approach and project standards and sizes.