A software process for the construction of predictable on‐board embedded real‐time systems

The rise of the ‘cheaper, faster, better’ mission paradigm increasingly challenges the industrial development of satellite systems. The novel paradigm will have a profound impact on the production of the real‐time software embedded on board new‐generation systems. This paper contends that a large proportion of the ensuing demands can be satisfied by an iterative and incremental development model revolving around two evolutionary enhancements to the present engineering approach, namely (1) static real‐time analysis as a key ingredient of the software verification process, and (2) an architectural paradigm centred on fixed priority preemptive scheduling. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

自适应多Agent系统的面向Agent软件开发方法学ODAM

面向Agent软件工程被视为是一种可有效支持复杂系统开发的新颖软件开发范型.为支持复杂多Agent系统的开发,面向Agent软件工程的研究需发挥Agent技术的潜力和灵活性,借鉴软件工程领域已取得的成果,提出了一个面向Agent软件开发方法学ODAM以支持自适应多Agent系统的开发.ODAM以动态绑定机制作为自适应多Agent系统的核心机制,借助于组织学的概念和思想对自适应多Agent系统进行高层抽象和自然建模,以管理和控制系统的复杂度;集成了迭代开发和MDA方法以适应Agent技术平台的多样性,简化复杂自适应系统的开发.介绍了ODAM的方法学框架和具体的技术细节,包括动态绑定机制、基于组织抽象的元模型和建模语言、基于迭代开发和MDA的软件开发过程,并进行了案例分析.     

Integral: Petri-net approach to distributed software development

As the architecture of modern software systems continues to evolve in a distributed fashion, the development of such systems becomes increasingly complex, which requires the integration of more sophisticated specification techniques, tools, and procedures into the conventional methodology. An essential capability of an integrated software development environment is a formal specification method to capture effectively the system's functional requirements as well as its performance requirements. A validation and verification (V&V) system based on a formal specification method is of paramount importance to the development and maintenance of distributed systems.

There has been recent interest in integrating software techniques and tools at the specification level. It is also noted that an effective way of achieving such integration is by using wide-spectrum specification techniques. In view of these points, an integrated V&V system, called Integral, is presented that provides comprehensive and homogeneous analysis capabilities to both specification and testing phases of the life-cycle of distributed software systems. The underlying software model that supports various V&V activities in Integral is primarily based on Petri nets and is intended to be wide spectrum. The ultimate goal of this research is to demonstrate to the software industry, domestic or foreign, the availability and applicability of a new Petri-net-based software development paradigm. Integral is a prototype V&V system to support such a paradigm.     

Requirements model driven adaption and evolution of Internetware

Today’s software systems need to support complex business operations and processes.The development of the web-based software systems has been pushing up the limits of traditional software engineering methodologies and technologies as they are required to be used and updated almost real-time,so that users can interact and share the same applications over the internet as needed.These applications have to adapt quickly to the diversified and dynamic changing requirements in the physical,technological,economical and social environments.As a consequence,we are expecting a major paradigm shift in software engineering to reflect such changes in computing environment in order to better address the fundamental needs of organisations in this new era.Existing software technologies,such as model driven development,business process engineering,online(re-)configuration,composition and adaptation of managerial functionalities are being repurposed to reduce the time taken for software development by reusing software codes.The ability to dynamically combine contents from numerous web sites and local resources,and the ability to instantly publish services worldwide have opened up entirely new possibilities for software development.In retrospect to the ten years applied research on Internetware,we have witnessed such a paradigm shift,which brings about many changes to the developmental experience of conventional web applications.Several related technologies,such as cloud computing,service computing,cyber-physical systems and social computing,have converged to address this emerging issue with emphasis on different aspects.In this paper,we first outline the requirements that the Internetware software paradigm should meet to excel at web application adaptation;we then propose a requirement model driven method for adaptive and evolutionary applications;and we report our experiences and case studies of applying it to an enterprise information system.Our goal is to provide high-level guidelines to researchers and practitioners to meet the challenges of building adaptive industrial-strength applications with the spectrum of processes,techniques and facilities provided within the Internetware paradigm.     

Composition as a Service

Understanding reusable software and assets within and among multiple organizations' system infrastructures can be challenging. IT systems might be widely distributed, and interconnections can be complicated. Ever-evolving computing technologies reduce an organization's in-house expertise for reusing software, even when leveraging software systems within its own firewalls. As such, the on-demand integration of software and capabilities might benefit from an outsourcing paradigm — described here as composition as a service.     

FeatureIDE: An extensible framework for feature-oriented software development

FeatureIDE is an open-source framework for feature-oriented software development (FOSD) based on Eclipse. FOSD is a paradigm for the construction, customization, and synthesis of software systems. Code artifacts are mapped to features, and a customized software system can be generated given a selection of features. The set of software systems that can be generated is called a software product line (SPL). FeatureIDE supports several FOSD implementation techniques such as feature-oriented programming, aspect-oriented programming, delta-oriented programming, and preprocessors. All phases of FOSD are supported in FeatureIDE, namely domain analysis, requirements analysis, domain implementation, and software generation.     

Towards a new standard for allowing concurrency and ensuring consistency in revision control systems

Version control systems play a very important role in maintaining the revision history of software and facilitating software evolution. As the software development process is gradually taking the form of a collaborative effort among several teams hosted over widely dispersed sites, centralized version control systems are gradually giving way to multi-sited version control systems. Ensuring the integrity and consistency of versioned objects in a environment that supports concurrent access, is a difficult problem. The paradigm of transactions has been successfully used in database systems to ensure integrity of objects. In this paper, we look into the transaction management requirements of version control systems and propose a new transaction model of revision control.     

Context-oriented programming: A software engineering perspective

The implementation of context-aware systems can be supported through the adoption of techniques at the architectural level such as middlewares or component-oriented architectures. It can also be supported by suitable constructs at the programming language level. Context-oriented programming (COP) is emerging as a novel paradigm for the implementation of this kind of software, in particular in the field of mobile and ubiquitous computing. The COP paradigm tackles the issue of developing context-aware systems at the language-level, introducing ad hoc language abstractions to manage adaptations modularization and their dynamic activation. In this paper we review the state of the art in the field of COP in the perspective of the benefits that this technique can provide to software engineers in the design and implementation of context-aware applications.     

Building the software radio

People have been working on software radio for about few years. Software radio is just what it sounds like - a radio that uses software to perform many of the signal processing tasks that analog circuits traditionally handle. Software radio could turn out to be a paradigm shift for communication systems. The US Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) kicked off research into software radios to solve military problems, but software radios can help solve some important problems in commercial communication systems as well. Software radio offers the advantage of putting many traditionally hard functions in modules whose characteristics can be changed while the radio is running.     

Does OO sync with how we think?

Is object orientation an imperfect paradigm for reliable coding? Worse, does it focus on the wrong part of the life cycle? The author thinks so and explains why. Given that corrective-maintenance costs already dominate the software life cycle and look set to increase significantly, the author argues that reliability in the form of reducing such costs is the most important software improvement goal. Yet, the results are not promising when we review recent corrective-maintenance data for big systems in general and for OO systems, in this case written in C++. The author asserts that any paradigm that is capable of decomposing a system into large numbers of small components-as frequently occurs in both OO and conventional systems-is fundamentally wrong. Thus, because both paradigms suffer from this flaw, we should expect no particular benefits to accrue from an OO system over a non-OO system. Further, a detailed comparison of OO programming and the human thought processes involved in short and long term memory suggests that OO aligns with human thinking limitations indifferently at best. In the case studies described, OO is no more than a different paradigm, and emphatically not a better one, although it is not possible to apportion blame between the OO paradigm itself and its C++ implementation     

FAME: A UML-based framework for modeling fuzzy self-adaptive software

Context: Software Fuzzy Self-Adaptation (SFSA) is a fuzzy control-based software self-adaptation paradigm proposed to deal with the fuzzy uncertainty existing in self-adaptive software. However, as many software engineers lack fuzzy control knowledge, it is difficult for them to design and model this kind of fuzzy self-adaptive software (F-SAS). Therefore, efficient and effective modeling technologies and tools are needed for the SFSA framework.Objective: This paper aims to identify modeling requirements of F-SAS and to provide a modeling framework to specify, design and model F-SAS systems. Such a framework can simplify modeling process of F-SAS and improve the accessibility of software engineers to the SFSA paradigm.Method: This study proposes a modeling framework called Fuzzy self-Adaptation ModEling (FAME). By extending UML, FAME creates three types of modeling views. An analysis view called Fuzzy Case Diagram is created to specify the fuzzy self-adaptation goal and the realization processes of this goal. A structure view called Fuzzy Class Diagram is created to describe the fuzzy concepts and structural characteristics of F-SAS. A behavior view called Fuzzy Sequence Diagram is created to depict the dynamic behaviors of the F-SAS systems. The framework is implemented as a plug-in of Enterprise Architect.Results: We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach by carrying out a subject-based empirical evaluation. The results show that FAME framework can improve modeling quality of F-SAS systems by 44.38% and shorten modeling time of F-SAS systems by 38.41% in comparison with traditional UML. Thus, FAME can considerably ease the modeling process of F-SAS systems.Conclusion: FAME framework incorporates the SFSA concepts into standard UML. Therefore, it provides a direct support to model SFSA characteristics and improves the accessibility of software engineers to the SFSA paradigm. Furthermore, it behaves a good example and provides good references for modeling domain-specific software systems.     

基于抽象-验证-细化范例的软件模型检测

如何保证软件系统的正确性和可靠性是当前软件开发面临的主要问题之一。模型检测作为一种重要的自动化验证技术在软件的分析与验证中正取得越来越多的成功。本文以微软的SLAM和加州大学伯克利分校的BLAST为例综述性地介绍了基于抽象-验证-细化范例的软件模型检测。     

ProMiner:系统性质驱动的双向一致性检验框架

在模型驱动软件开发过程中,基于模型的测试方法往往用于检验软件代码针对软件模型的一致性以确保软件质量.然而,随着当今软件系统规模的不断扩大,相应的软件开发过程也变得越来越灵活,代码有时会先于模型被修改,以更忠实地体现系统功能和实现机制.传统的基于模型的测试方法只能检测代码之于模型的一致性而不能反作用于模型层面,模型的修改者只能人为地评估修改的正确性,大大降低了效率并增加了系统的潜在隐患.为此,对传统基于模型的测试方法的一致性检验进行了扩展,实现了一致性检验框架ProMiner,通过抽取表达模型与代码的不一致的系统性质来自动定位模型中与实际运行系统不匹配的部分,并将其表示为可直接用于模型检测的线性时序逻辑(LTL)表达式,以支持软件模型和代码间双向的一致性检验.实验结果表明,ProMiner可有效查找软件模型和代码间的不一致并生成可直接检测模型的系统性质,从而实现了自动化的模型与代码间的双向一致性检测,不仅提高了一致性检测的有效性,而且大大减少了人力开销.     

Model-driven architecture for embedded software: A synopsis and an example

MDA proposes a new paradigm for software development in general. We claim that MDA could be beneficial for embedded software development, especially if it is extended to address the special needs of embedded systems. The paper consists of two sections: the first is a brief synopsis on how MDA ought to be extended to handle embedded software development, while the second illustrates the concepts in practice using a prototype modeling language and tool chain designed for developing mission computing software.     

MUPPIT: a method for using proper patterns in model transformations

Software and Systems Modeling - Model transformation plays an important role in developing software systems using the model-driven engineering paradigm. Examples of applications of model...     

THE APPLICATION REVOLUTION

It is the year 2010. The results of the application revolution have pretty well settled down In the world of systems and software engineering, and the application-focused paradigm is the way almost everyone is working. What was the application revolution? It was the realization—and the actions necessitated by it—that the construction of software was more application-dependent than we had previously understood.     

On environment-driven software model for Internetware

Internetware is envisioned as a general software paradigm for the application style of resources integration and sharing in the open, dynamic and uncertain platforms such as the Internet. Continuing the agent-based Internetware model presented in a previous paper, in this paper, after an analysis of the behavioral patterns and the technical challenges of environment-driven applications, a software-structuring model is proposed for environment-driven Internetware applications. A series of explorations on the enabling techniques for the model, especially the modeling, management and utilization of context information are presented. Several proto-typical systems have also been built to prove the concepts and evaluate the techniques. These research efforts make a further step toward the Internetware paradigm by providing an initial framework for the construction of context-aware and self-adaptive software application systems in the open network environment.     

The SDL pattern approach – a reuse-driven SDL design methodology

There are several SDL methodologies that offer full system life-cycle support. Only few of them consider software reuse, not to mention high-level reuse of architecture and design. However, software reuse is a proven software engineering paradigm leading to high quality and reduced development effort. Experience made it apparent that – beyond the more traditional reuse of code – especially high-level reuse of architecture and design (as in the case of design patterns or frameworks) has the potential of achieving more systematic and widespread reuse. This paper presents the SDL pattern approach, a design methodology for distributed systems which integrates SDL-based system development with the pattern paradigm. It supports reuse of design knowledge modeled as SDL patterns and concentrates on the design phase of SDL-based system development. In order to get full life-cycle support, the pattern-based design process can be integrated within existing SDL methodologies.