Software Evolution for Moving into and Moving within Internetware Paradigm

Internetware has been an emerging software paradigm to best support computing in the Internet era. Internetware emphasises accommodating the open, dynamic and uncontrollable natures of Internet, which directly and indirectly relates software evolvability. This paper observes that evolving non-Internetware software into the Internetware paradigm and evolving software within Internetware will be two main research and practical issues, and hence proposes an integrated approach to address these two issues. The proposed framework is based a three-dimension structure, with System Functions, System Quality and System models as dimensions. With this framework, evolving software into internetware paradigm can be viewed mainly as changing the qualities of existing software and evolving software within Internetware paradigm can be viewed mainly as changing software functions. The involved prototype tool, working examples and experiments conducted, are used to illustrate the proposed approach.     

Internet计算环境下的新型软件形态——网构软件(Internetware)综述

软件形态受到应用、平台和技术发展的影响而不断演化。由于Internet这一新的计算环境的普及,传统的软件形态逐渐无法适应Internet环境下的开发和应用,需要研究新的软件形态和软件技术。该文在分析软件发展历史的基础上结合相关研究说明了基于Internet环境的网构软件(Internetware)是未来软件的发展趋势,介绍了网构软件的基本特征,并说明了网构软件领域的研究问题。     

An Agent Based Framework for Internetware Computing

Internetware intends to be a paradigm of Web-based software development. At present, researches on Internetware have gained daily expanding attentions and interests. This paper proposes an agent based framework for Internetware computing. Four principles are presented that are followed by this framework. They are the autonomy principle, the abstract principle, the explicitness principle and the competence principle. Three types of agents with di?erent responsibilities are designed and specified. They are the capability providing agents, the capability planning agents and the capability consuming agents. In this sense, capability decomposition and satisfaction turns to be a key issue for this framework and becomes a communication protocol among these distributed and heterogenous agents. A capability conceptualization is proposed and based on the conceptualization, an agent coalition formation mechanism has been developed. This mechanism features that (1) all the participants make their one decisions on whether or not joining the coalition based on the capability realization pattern generated by the capability planning agents as well as the benefits they can obtain; and (2) the coalition selection is conducted by a negotiation process for satisfying the expectations of all the participants as the complexity of this problem has been proven to be NP-complete.     

Internetware Computing: Issues and Perspective

The Internetware addresses the unique challenges of software development and maintenance in the open and dynamic Internet environment. The project identifies the four major features as the vision of future Internetware including autonomous services, dynamic collaboration, environment-aware evolution and adaptation, and verifiable and justifiable trustworthiness. The paper discusses four key enabling techniques to achieve the above Internetware capabilities. 1) The lifecycle model: it proposes the model-driven and reuse- centric adaptive lifecycle of service software and the mashup approach for composition-based application development. 2) The ontology system: it discusses a wide range of software development ontology systems that can be used at various abstraction levels throughout all the stages of software lifecycle, and the issues with ontology systems such as consistency and completeness, dependency analysis, merging and change management. 3) Modeling and simulation: it identiˉes the necessary characteristics of the modeling language in the new paradigm such as the modeling of environment , system and environment interactions,the environment-system co-engineering process, and the ontology support for modeling and simulation. 4) Social ranking: it points out that social network will play an important role in Internetware development framework. Traditional software activities such as requirements solicitation and testing can be improved following this social approach. From these above four perspectives, the paper gives an outlook to the emerging techniques and their potential power in Internetware software engineering.     

Metamodeling: An Emerging Representation Paradigm for System-Level Design

Editor's note:The use of metamodeling in system design allows abstraction of concepts germane to a number of varying modeling domains, and provides the ability of exploiting meta-information for a variety of system design tasks such as analysis, verification, synthesis, and test generation. This article provides an overview of emerging metamodeling techniques and their applications.—Tim Cheng, IEEE Design & Test editor in chief     

一种基于自主构件的网构软件协作框架

网构软件的协作具有真分布、无全局规划、非强制性等新的特征,这对协作提出了新的要求.在传统构件的基础上,借鉴Agent领域中对自主性的理解,使用自主构件这一概念来对具有自主性的计算资源进行建模,并描述了一种基于自主构件的协作框架.该框架中借助环境改变来引导自主构件间的协作行为,协作过程中没有直接干预其他自主构件的行为,更没有强迫其他自主构件参与,但自主构件却能采取所期望的行动最终实现协作目标.     

一种面向普适计算的适应性软件体系结构风格

普适计算软件需要适应用户需求和运行环境的动态变化.这一特点使得软件复杂度空前增加,迫切需要以软件体系结构为代表的架构/设计层面重用手段来支持其高效开发.在以适应性为中心的普适计算空间抽象模型基础上,提出了一种面向普适计算的软件体系结构风格UbiArch,并从概念视图、运行视图和开发视图这3个维度对该软件体系结构风格进行了阐述.UbiArch支持软件实体按需加入应用、主动适应环境的行为模式,实现了软件适应能力的高层次重用,同时与构件等成熟软件技术的紧密结合也保证了其可实践性.支撑该体系结构风格的软件平台原型系统及其上的应用验证了UbiArch的有效性和通用性.     

基于Agent的网构软件需求监控框架

网构软件所面临的复杂、开放和动态变化的运行环境使其运行时行为常常会偏离需求规约.已有一些研究工作提出基于目标模型和需求推理实现软件需求的运行时监控和自修复,但还缺少实现框架,特别是缺少符合网构软件分布式和社会化特性的需求监控实现方法.针对这一问题,提出一种基于Agent的网构软件需求监控框架.框架中的需求监控Agent通过非侵入的方式实现对作为其宿主系统的网构软件实体的监控和干预,并通过Agent间的通信和协作实现社会化的目标委托和协作监控.为了验证框架的有效性,通过一个案例分析,对框架和工具实现进行了有效性评估.     

Technical framework for Internetware: An architecture centric approach

Being a new software paradigm evolved by the Internet, Internetware brings many challenges to the traditional software methods and techniques. Sponsored by the national basic research program （973）, researchers in China have developed an architecture centric technical framework for the definition, incarnation and engineering of Internetware. First of all, a software model for Internetware is defined for what to be, including that Internetware entities should be packaged as components, behaving as agents, interoperating as services, collaborating in a structured and on demand manner, etc. Secondly, a middleware for Internetware is designed and implemented for how to be, including that Internetware entities are incarnated by runtime containers, structured collaborations are enabled by runtime software architecture, Internetware can be managed in a reflective and autonomic manner, etc. Thirdly, an engineering methodology for Internetware is proposed for how to do, including the way to develop Internetware entities and their collaborations by transforming and refining a set of software architectures which cover all the phases of software lifecycle, the way to identify and organize the disordered software assets by domain modeling, etc.     

CompuP2P: An Architecture for Internet Computing Using Peer-to-Peer Networks

Internet computing is emerging as an important new distributed computing paradigm in which resource intensive computing is integrated over Internet-scale networks. Over these large networks, different users and organizations share their computing resources, and computations take place in a distributed fashion. In such an environment, a framework is needed in which the resource providers are given incentives to share their resources. CompuP2P is a lightweight architecture for enabling Internet computing. It uses peer-to-peer networks for sharing of computing resources. CompuP2P create dynamic markets of network accessible computing resources, such as processing power, memory storage, disk space, etc., in a completely distributed, scalable, and fault-tolerant manner. This paper discusses the system architecture, functionality, and applications of the proposed CompuP2P architecture. We have implemented a Java-based prototype, and our results show that the system is light-weight and can provide almost a perfect speedup for applications that contain several independent compute-intensive tasks     

家庭网络的计算模式及其技术

家庭网络的最初思路是将家庭中的所有电器设备互联以实现设备之间的信息交换,而其发展目标就是人们可以随时随地、透明地获得家庭的数字化服务.在这个发展过程中,家庭网络将会出现不同的计算模式以及技术.本文以计算模式为基点,探讨了家庭网络的发展过程和趋势.     

服务计算模式的耦合性与隔离性

服务计算作为Internet分布式计算的一种高层模式近年受到广泛的关注,但人们对刻画其计算环境特征的耦合性度量的认识仍然停留在词语的层次,针对并发过程正确性的有关隔离性的讨论普遍与服务计算的松耦合性内涵相分离。该文给出了计算模式耦合性的诠释,阐明了聚合服务计算模式的事务处理能力的局限性,探讨了通过在服务计算脚本中拆离或归约并发临界区等途径来寻找保证并发隔离性实现的做法,提出了不期望在松散耦合服务计算环境上得到隔离性保证的聚合原则。     

Cloud Computing: Distributed Internet Computing for IT and Scientific Research

Cloud computing is a disruptive technology with profound implications not only for Internet services but also for the IT sector as a whole. Its emergence promises to streamline the on-demand provisioning of software, hardware, and data as a service, achieving economies of scale in IT solutions' deployment and operation. This issue's articles tackle topics including architecture and management of cloud computing infrastructures, SaaS and IaaS applications, discovery of services and data in cloud computing infrastructures, and cross-platform interoperability. Still, several outstanding issues exist, particularly related to SLAs, security and privacy, and power efficiency. Other open issues include ownership, data transfer bottlenecks, performance unpredictability, reliability, and software licensing issues. Finally, hosted applications' business models must show a clear pathway to monetizing cloud computing. Several companies have already built Internet consumer services such as search, social networking, Web email, and online commerce that use cloud computing infrastructure. Above all, cloud computing's still unknown "killer application" will determine many of the challenges and the solutions we must develop to make this technology work in practice.     

基于组织的网构软件程序设计语言及其实现

作为Internet环境下的一种新的软件形态,网构软件的自主性、协同性、适应性、演化性及柔性体系结构等特点对传统的程序设计模型、语言和支撑平台提出了一系列挑战.本文基于组织抽象和agent技术提出了支持网构软件构造的程序设计语言OragentL.首先,OragentL将软件agent作为网构软件中自主实体的抽象,并在这一层面设计和封装系统的自适应和自演化逻辑.其次,OragentL将组织、角色等组织抽象作为一级编程实体,提供了角色扮演、角色组合、角色演化、基于角色的交互、基于组织的自管理等机制为网构软件的动态性特点提供了显式的语言设施和机制支撑.我们设计了OragentL的语法和形式化操作语义,并开发了Oragentburg作为OragentL网构软件的运行时环境,支持OragentL程序的开发、编译、部署和运行     

Guest Editor's Introduction: Pervasive Computing for Emerging Economies

Ubiquitous computing has the potential to cut across cultures and countries, to be both locally valuable and globally pervasive. To reach this potential, it's important for researchers to recognize the challenges, rewards, goals, and methods of developing these technologies--not just in wealthy IT-saturated environments, but in developing economies and regions as well.     

边缘计算:新型计算范式综述与应用研究

科学技术的快速发展,使万物互联设想不再仅仅停留在人们的概念中。随着接入无线网的智能设备数量的快速增长,边缘数据量已达到ZB级别,给核心网络带宽造成巨大压力;与此同时,无人驾驶、位置识别、增强现实、虚拟现实等众多新兴应用的出现对网络延迟、抖动、数据安全等提出了更高的要求。传统云计算在以上方面表现乏力,于是边缘计算(EC)应运而生。边缘计算能够在网络的边缘提供轻量级的云计算和存储能力。对边缘计算的最新研究成果和应用进行了详尽的回顾。首先综述边缘计算和云计算的概念并对比分析边缘计算的优势,指出边缘计算发展的必然性和时代趋势;然后针对典型边缘计算架构和平台进行了全面的综述,并讨论了网络性能优化、视频缓存、购物车视图刷新和网络视频直播等边缘计算中的典型应用案例。最后,从边缘计算服务管理、应用移动性管理、计算资源管理、数据管理等四方面,展望了边缘计算的开放式研究挑战和未来的发展趋势,希望能给从事边缘计算的科研工作者带来启发。     

Towards Software Architecture and Mechanisms for Improving Runtime Variability of Internetware System

As an emerging software paradigm, Internetware is proposed to handle openness, dynamism of software systems in the context of Internet, which implies that such software systems typically have runtime variability that can be improved dynamically to handle various or even unexpected changes of requirements and open environment. Though many progresses of Internetware software technologies have been made to support the adaptation, evolution, context-awareness, etc. of Internetware, how to construct Internetware systems with the ability to improve their runtime variability is still a great challenge in the literature of software engineering. In this paper, we propose software architecture and mechanisms for Internetware systems to support the improvement of their runtime variability by combining software variability and autonomic computing techniques. The Internetware system is organized as three levels that are consist of variable autonomic elements and Internetware entities, and architecture of these software entities is defined and discussed respectively. Moreover, we put forward a series of runtime mechanisms based on these levels, including module selection, intermediator and horizontal management, to realize operations upon the variation points and variants in software architectures and thus achieve the improvement of runtime variability. We develop a sample of Personal Data Resource Network to depict the requirements and scenario of improving runtime variability, and further study the case based on our proposed approach to show its effectiveness and applicability.     

An Approach to Distributed Computing System Software Design

Distributed computing systems represent a wide variety of computer systems, ranging from a centralized star network to a completely decentralized computer system. The design of software for distributed computing systems is more complicated due to many design constraints and interactions of software components of the system.