Towards agent-oriented model-driven architecture

Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) supports the transformation from reusable models to executable software. Business representations, however, cannot be fully and explicitly represented in such models for direct transformation into running systems. Thus, once business needs change, the language abstractions used by MDA (e.g. object constraint language/action semantics), being low level, have to be edited directly. We therefore describe an agent-oriented MDA (AMDA) that uses a set of business models under continuous maintenance by business people, reflecting the current business needs and being associated with adaptive agents that interpret the captured knowledge to behave dynamically. Three contributions of the AMDA approach are identified: (1) to Agent-oriented Software Engineering, a method of building adaptive Multi-Agent Systems; (2) to MDA, a means of abstracting high-level business-oriented models to align executable systems with their requirements at runtime; (3) to distributed systems, the interoperability of disparate components and services via the agent abstraction.     

View-based model-driven architecture for enhancing maintainability of data access services

In modern service-oriented architectures, database access is done by a special type of services, the so-called data access services (DAS). Though, particularly in data-intensive applications, using and developing DAS are very common today, the link between the DAS and their implementation, e.g. a layer of data access objects (DAOs) encapsulating the database queries, still is not sufficiently elaborated, yet. As a result, as the number of DAS grows, finding the desired DAS for reuse and/or associated documentation can become an impossible task. In this paper we focus on bridging this gap between the DAS and their implementation by presenting a view-based, model-driven data access architecture (VMDA) managing models of the DAS, DAOs and database queries in a queryable manner. Our models support tailored views of different stakeholders and are scalable with all types of DAS implementations. In this paper we show that our view-based and model driven architecture approach can enhance software development productivity and maintainability by improving DAS documentation. Moreover, our VMDA opens a wide range of applications such as evaluating DAS usage for DAS performance optimization. Furthermore, we provide tool support and illustrate the applicability of our VMDA in a large-scale case study. Finally, we quantitatively prove that our approach performs with acceptable response times.     

A model-driven software engineering workflow and tool architecture for servitised manufacturing

Modern manufacturing businesses increasingly engage in servitisation, by offering advanced services along with physical products, and creating “product–service systems”. Information Technology infrastructures, and especially software, are a critical part of modern service provision. However, software development in this context has not been investigated and there are no development methods or tools specifically adapted to the task of creating software for servitised businesses in general, or manufacturing in particular. In this paper, we define the requirements for software engineering in servitised manufacturing. Based on these, we describe a model-driven software engineering workflow for servitised manufacturing, supporting both structural and behavioural modelling of the service system. Furthermore, we elaborate on the architecture of an appropriate model-driven Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The proposed workflow and a prototype implementation of the IDE were evaluated in a set of industrial pilots, demonstrating improved communication and collaboration between participants in the software engineering process.     

Enterprise security pattern: A model-driven architecture instance

To secure their information assets, organizations should seek support from enterprise security architectures. Security patterns are a good way to build and test new security mechanisms, but they have some limitations related to their usability. In previous work, we defined a new type of security pattern called Enterprise Security Pattern. The main objective of these patterns is to provide an instance of model-driven architecture, which offers a solution to recurring problems that have to do with information systems security. In recent years, the hiring of Software as a Service (SaaS) from cloud providers has become very popular. There seem to be many advantages of using these services, but organizations need to be aware of a variety of threats, as well as being prepared to handle them. In another work undertaken previously, we defined an enterprise security pattern called Secure Software as a Service (Secure SaaS), which the organizations could apply to protect their information assets when using SaaS. In this paper, we present different instances of the solution models of the enterprise security pattern Secure SaaS, aiming to verify the risks that an organization would assume if each of the instances were deployed. With this approach, we intend to show how the design decisions adopted when performing the transformations between the solution models can have a direct impact on the security provided by the pattern.     

模型驱动体系结构在信息系统中的应用研究

信息系统是收集、储存、加工、传递、维护和使用信息的重要工具，是相关活动的神经中枢。作为信息化建设的中心环节，信息系统的优劣至关重要。而现有信息系统普遍存在着系统需求分析不到位、可维护性、可扩展性及可重构性差的问题。论文在分析信息系统使用中存在的问题的基础上，提出了在信息系统开发过程中应用模型驱动体系结构的思想，并且详细地分析了模型驱动体系结构在信息系统开发和改造过程中的应用。     

Service-oriented architecture for ontologies supporting multi-agent system negotiations in virtual enterprise

This paper offers a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for ontology-based multi-agent system (MAS) negotiations in the context of virtual enterprises (VEs). The objective of this paper is fourfold. First, it is to design a SOA which utilizes ontology and MAS to provide a distributed and interoperable environment for automated negotiations in VE. In this architecture, individual ontologies for both the VE initiator and its potential partners are constructed to describe and store resources and service knowledge. Second, a series of semantic ontology matching methods are developed to reach agents’ interoperability during the negotiation process. Third, correspondence-based extended contract net protocol is presented, which provides basic guidelines for agents’ reaching mutual understandings and service negotiation. Last, a fuzzy set theory based knowledge reuse approach is proposed to evaluate the current negotiation behaviors of the VE partners. A walkthrough example is presented to illustrate the methodologies and system architecture proposed in this paper.     

Facilitating the migration to the microservice architecture via model-driven reverse engineering and reinforcement learning

The microservice architecture has gained remarkable attention in recent years. Microservices allow developers to implement and deploy independent services, so they are a naturally effective architecture for continuously deployed systems. Because of this, several organizations are undertaking the costly process of manually migrating their traditional software architectures to microservices. The research in this paper aims at facilitating the migration from monolithic software architectures to microservices. We propose a framework which enables software developers/architects to migrate their software systems more efficiently by helping them remodularize the source code of their systems. The framework leverages model-driven reverse engineering to obtain a model of the legacy system and reinforcement learning to propose a mapping of this model toward a set of microservices.

     

Validating a model-driven software architecture evaluation and improvement method: A family of experiments

ContextSoftware architectures should be evaluated during the early stages of software development in order to verify whether the non-functional requirements (NFRs) of the product can be fulfilled. This activity is even more crucial in software product line (SPL) development, since it is also necessary to identify whether the NFRs of a particular product can be achieved by exercising the variation mechanisms provided by the product line architecture or whether additional transformations are required. These issues have motivated us to propose QuaDAI, a method for the derivation, evaluation and improvement of software architectures in model-driven SPL development.ObjectiveWe present in this paper the results of a family of four experiments carried out to empirically validate the evaluation and improvement strategy of QuaDAI.MethodThe family of experiments was carried out by 92 participants: Computer Science Master’s and undergraduate students from Spain and Italy. The goal was to compare the effectiveness, efficiency, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and intention to use with regard to participants using the evaluation and improvement strategy of QuaDAI as opposed to the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM).ResultsThe main result was that the participants produced their best results when applying QuaDAI, signifying that the participants obtained architectures with better values for the NFRs faster, and that they found the method easier to use, more useful and more likely to be used. The results of the meta-analysis carried out to aggregate the results obtained in the individual experiments also confirmed these results.ConclusionsThe results support the hypothesis that QuaDAI would achieve better results than ATAM in the experiments and that QuaDAI can be considered as a promising approach with which to perform architectural evaluations that occur after the product architecture derivation in model-driven SPL development processes when carried out by novice software evaluators.     

Test-driven modeling for model-driven development

A new software development process called test-driven modeling applies the Extreme Programming test-driven paradigm in a model-driven development environment. (The basis of this article is a project in Motorola's iDEN division that is extending and migrating a large legacy telecommunication system to new platforms using TDM.) This process involves automatic testing through simulation and using executable models as living software system architecture documents. In TDM, we use the same message sequence charts (MSCs) for both system analysis (or design documents) and unit test cases. Similarly, we use the same high-level modeling diagrams for both automatic code generation and living software architecture documents to guide the system's detailed implementation in later phases. Practical results show that developers can effectively apply TDM to large projects with high productivity and quality in terms of the number of code defects.     

Fluid ontologies for digital museums

With the advent and accessibility of the Internet, artistic and indigenous communities are beginning to realize how digital technologies can be used as a means for documenting and preserving their histories and cultures. However, it is not yet clear what knowledge architectures are most appropriate for creating a digital museum in order to facilitate an effective collection, organization, conservation, and experience of cultural and artistic heritage. In this paper, we discuss the concept of fluid ontologies, a novel, dynamic structure for organizing and browsing knowledge in a digital museum. Fluid ontologies are flexible knowledge structures that evolve and adapt to communities interest based on contextual information articulated by human contributors, curators, and viewers, as well as artificial bots that are able to track interaction histories and infer relationships among knowledge pieces and preferences of viewers. Fluid ontologies allow for a tighter coupling between communities interests and the browsing structure of a digital museum. We present the key ideas behind the use of fluid ontologies within the context of digital museum design and seminal work in metadata/dynamic ontologies, particularly as it pertains to objects of cultural heritage, and discuss these characteristics in three concrete examples: (1) Village Voice, an online agora that ties together the narratives created by a group of Somali refugees using an iteration of community-designed ontologies, (2) Eventspace, a node-based collaborative archive for design activities, and (3) Tribal Peace, an online digital museum still under construction and evaluation that uses proactive agents to tie distributed Kumeyaay, Luiseno, and Cupeno reservations together in their quest to achieve greater political sovereignty .     

Mining software repositories for model-driven development

One major reason software development projects fail is that the development process is invisible. Managers tend to rely on meetings and reports to understand project status and make decisions, leading to mismanagement due to inaccurate or incomplete information. Software projects typically collect information during development using different tools and store it in repositories. We present a statistical process control (SPC) method of defining, collecting, and analyzing software metrics from software repositories for MDD process control and improvement (PCI). This method, which we call mining software repositories (MSR), can help us change the traditional, static, record-keeping use of software data repositories to a new, active use for predicting and planning various aspects of MDD projects.     

Language support for model-driven software development

This paper is about language technology for facilitating model-driven software development. We argue that two features are important for this purpose: (a) support for explicit meta-representation of programs as an AST-like structure (AST stands for abstract syntax tree) accessible in a programmatic way before and beyond the compilation, and (b) support for user-defined annotations of program elements. That is, we argue for language platforms organized around a Generalized Annotated AST, or GAAST languages for short. We outline the problems with a model-driven development process based on languages without such a support and show how GAAST language technology addresses these problems.     

Requirements-oriented methodology for evaluating ontologies

Many applications benefit from the use of a suitable ontology but it can be difficult to determine which ontology is best suited to a particular application. Although ontology evaluation techniques are improving as more measures and methodologies are proposed, the literature contains few specific examples of cohesive evaluation activity that links ontologies, applications and their requirements, and measures and methodologies. In this paper, we present ROMEO, a requirements-oriented methodology for evaluating ontologies, and apply it to the task of evaluating the suitability of some general ontologies (variants of sub-domains of the Wikipedia category structure) for supporting browsing in Wikipedia. The ROMEO methodology identifies requirements that an ontology must satisfy, and maps these requirements to evaluation measures. We validate part of this mapping with a task-based evaluation method involving users, and report on our findings from this user study.     

Personal ontologies

Corporations can suffer from too much information, and it is often inaccessible, inconsistent, and incomprehensible. The corporate solution entails knowledge management techniques and data warehouses. The paper discusses the use of the personal ontology. The promising approach is an organization scheme based on a model of an office and its information, an ontology, coupled with the proper tools for using it     

Semantics,ontologies and eScience for the geosciences

Semantics, ontologies and eScience are key areas of research that aim to deal with the growing volume, number of sources and heterogeneity of geoscience data, information and knowledge. Following a workshop held at the eScience Institute in Edinburgh on the 7–9th of March 2008, this paper discusses some of the significant research topics and challenges for enhancing geospatial computing using semantic and grid technologies.     

A model-driven runtime environment for Web applications

A large part of software development these days deals with building so-called Web applications. Many of these applications are data-base-powered and exhibit a page layout and navigational structure that is close to the class structure of the entities being managed by the system. Also, there is often only limited application-specific business logic. This makes the usual three-tier architectural approach unappealing, because it results in a lot of unnecessary overhead. One possible solution to this problem is the use of model-driven architecture (MDA). A simple platform-independent domain model describing only the entity structure of interest could be transformed into a platform-specific model that incorporates a persistence mechanism and a user interface. Yet, this raises a number of additional problems caused by the one-way, multi-transformational nature of the MDA process. To cope with these problems, the authors propose the notion of a model-driven runtime (MDR) environment that is able to execute a platform-independent model for a specific purpose instead of transforming it. The paper explains the concepts of an MDR that interprets OCL-annotated class diagrams and state machines to realize Web applications. It shows the authors' implementation of the approach, the Infolayer system, which is already used by a number of applications. Experiences from these applications are described, and the approach is compared to others. This is an extended and revised version of a paper originally presented at the UML 2003 conference in San Francisco [1]. The second author has been supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), grant 08NM098.