EVOLVE Publications

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This paper presents an empirical study comparing two alternatives for generating code from aspect-oriented models. In an aspect 'disrupting' process, an object oriented implementation in Java is automatically generated from domain specific models, comprising a mix of UML (for core functionality) and DSLs (for qualities like security and performance). In an aspect 'preserving' process, an aspect oriented implementation in AspectJ is automatically generated from the same models. In both alternatives, a number of subjects are asked to perform several maintenance tasks requiring the addition and improvement of functionality. The results show that, in most of the cases, the AO alternative provides for shorter maintenance cycles.

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In the recent past the authors have conducted two experimental studies concerning the benefits of preserving modularity from design to code. In this paper we report on three key lessons learned in designing those investigations.

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The third ACES-MB workshop brought together researchers and practitioners interested in model-based software engineering for real- time embedded systems, with a particular focus on the use of models for architecture description and domain-specific design, and for capturing non-functional constraints. Twelve presenters proposed contributions on metaheuristic search techniques for UML, modelling languages and map- pings, model based verification and validation, software synthesis, and embedded systems product lines. In addition, a lively group discussion tackled these issues in further detail. This report presents an overview of the presentations and fruitful discussions that took place during the ACES-MB 2010 workshop.

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In applying multi-dimensional separation of concerns, the composition of carefully separated concerns is an important issue. The time at which concern composition is applied can vary depending on the concrete approach at hand. Aspect-oriented techniques have extensively been used to enable variability in software product lines, where features are usually composed at build time. Likewise, run-time composition has been investigated, enabling dynamic aspect weaving, recomposition and reconfiguration. Using context-oriented programming, dynamic feature variation is used to react to environmental changes and events in a way statically controlled by the programming language. This workshop constitutes a forum for researchers working on tools and techniques to support the aforementioned composition stages, potential implementation and optimization approaches as well as formalization and verification techniques. The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners concerned with software variability management and composition techniques, in particular those that improve modularity. The workshop is aimed at fostering cross-fertilization of a variety of areas, always with a view to addressing early and late software variability and composition.

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An inevitable aspect of product development is that the developer needs to be sure what customers and other stakeholders want from the system under development. Plenty of best practices for requirements engineering have been introduced in the scientific literature, as well as studies about the related pitfalls, but requirements engineering still remains a problematic area in product development. Operating in distributed development environment not only emphasizes these problems, but also creates new ones. Typically the biggest challenges for industrial practitioners are the lack of awareness about the existing solutions as well as the difficulty of selecting the right methods for certain kind of situations during the development. In this article, one potential solution for assistance in the selection of requirements validation practices in distributed product development environment is presented. Based on interviews made within the company and solutions found from literature, a proposal for potential improvement actions is presented.

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This paper describes a tool-supported method for the formal verification of timed properties of HTL programs, supported by the automated translation tool HTL2XTA, which extracts from a HTL program (i) an Uppaal model and (ii) a set of properties that state the compliance of the model with certain automatically inferred temporal constraints. These can be manually extended with other temporal properties provided by the user. The paper introduces the details of the proposed mechanisms as well as the results of our experimental validation.

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Abstraction, modularity and composability are considered to be the fundamental properties behind aspect-oriented software development and aspect-oriented modeling (AOM) in particular. The same properties are expected to be supported through the use of domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs). However, little research is done to investigate the symbiosis between the two paradigms. In this position paper we firstly present the key challenges for the successful integration of DSMLs with an AOM approach. Furthermore, we elaborate in detail on the question whether leveraging on aspect-oriented programming languages oㄦs benefits over the use of traditional model composition. We propose an experimental approach to evaluate these alternatives.

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The development of embedded systems with real-time and other critical constraints raises distinctive problems. In particular, development teams have to make very specific architectural choices and handle key non-functional constraints related to, for example, realtime deadlines and to platform parameters like energy consumption or memory footprint. The last few years have seen an increased interest in using model-based engineering (MBE) techniques to capture dedicated architectural and non-functional information in precise (and even formal) domain-specific models in a layered construction of systems. MBE techniques are interesting and promising for the following reasons: They allow to capture dedicated architectural and non-functional information in precise (and even formal) domain-specific models, and they support a layered construction of systems, in which the (platform independent) functional aspects are kept separate from architectural and non-functional (platform specific) aspects, where the final system is obtained by combining these aspects later using model transformations. The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in model-based engineering to explore the frontiers of architecting and construction of embedded systems. We are seeking contributions relating to this subject at different levels, from modelling languages and semantics to concrete application experiments, from model analysis techniques to model-based implementation and deployment. Given the criticality of the application domain, we particularly focus on model-based approaches yielding efficient and provably correct designs. Concerning models and languages, we welcome contributions presenting novel modelling approaches as well as contributions evaluating existing ones.

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Altreonic presents a unified and formalized systems engineering methodology that covers from web based early requirements and specifications capturing over modeling to generating real-time runtime code. A key component is the formally developed network-centric OpenComRTOS. Through its integrated approach, high reliability has become a lot more reachable. Typical applications are distributed control systems and semi-autonomous vehicles. Altreonic will also present its approach towards fault tolerance in such systems.

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Smart environments are dynamic in nature, and the software running in these environments requires quality adaptations in order to function efficiently. The result of these adaptations, i.e., quality variability, must be verified in some way, and visualization can be used to aid this verification process. The research problem in this work was to find suitable visualization techniques to visualize quality variability and implement a visualization tool that encompasses these techniques and provides an interactive visualization of quality variability for the user. As a solution to the research problem, this work presents an interactive quality visualization tool. The requirements specification for the implemented tool was derived from the literature review and the intended usage context of the tool, i.e., smart environments. The literature review explores a set of applicable visualization techniques and compares existing visualization tools with regard to the features required to represent quality variability visually at run-time. The visualization techniques selected for the tool include interactive timelines, charts and meters that enable analysis of the quality attributes and their variability in different time ranges or points in time. Some additional visualization techniques were also included such as treemaps and graphs to visualize the structure of the smart environment. The visualization techniques include open source visualization techniques and self-made techniques designed and implemented from the start to cover the specific requirements set for the tool. The main contribution of this work is the visualization tool that can be used to visualize different quality attributes and their variability. Moreover, the tool can easily be deployed in different environments due to its architecture and the selected implementation technologies that make the solution extensible and portable. The implemented visualization tool was evaluated in the context of a smart environment in which security was adapted at run-time. The case study demonstrated that the implemented tool can be used in the analysis of the variability of different quality attributes. The trend of a single quality attribute can be stud-ied for different time ranges or points in time according to need. The relation-ships between different quality attributes can also be studied with the help of appropriate visualization techniques. In addition, the visualization tool was successfully tested on mobile devices.

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Aspect-Oriented Modeling (AOM) provides support for separating concerns at the design level. Even though most AOM approaches provide means to execute the composition of the modularized concerns to obtain a composed model, it is also possible to keep the concerns modularized at the implementation level by targeting an aspect-oriented platform. Model-driven approaches have emerged to support both alternatives via tools. Clearly, these choices are not equivalent. Rather, they have a direct impact on several dimensions, including maintainability. Hence, the main research problem addressed by this work is to figure out which alternative provides for shorter maintenance time. To answer this question, we have conducted a series of quantitative studies and experiments.

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The B Method; Secure Partitioning Microkernel; Developed Work; Conclusions and Future Work

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Domain-Specific Modelling (DSM) has evidently increased productivity and quality in software development. Although productivity and quality gains are remarkable, the modelled applications still need to be tested prior to release. Although traditional testing approaches can be applied also in the context of DSM for testing generated applications, maintaining a comprehensive test suite for all developed applications is tedious. In this paper, the feasibility of utilizing Model-Based Testing (MBT) to generate a test suite for application models is studied. The MBT is seen as a prominent approach for automatically generating comprehensive test cases from models describing externally visible behaviour of a system under testing (SUT). We study the feasibility by developing a domain-specific modelling language and a code generator for a coffee machine laboratorial case and apply MBT to generate a test suite for the application models. The gathered experiences indicate that there are no technical obstacles but the feasibility of the testing approach in large-scale models and languages is still questionable.

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After conducting explorative user studies in the beginning of product development process, there are often more alternative product concepts than it is possible to develop further. The best ideas for production need to be selected by investigating the technical feasibility and profitability of each product concept, but also by evaluating attractiveness and value of the concept proposals for the target user group. This paper discusses means for and challenges in user experience evaluation in the early phases of product development, when only rough product concept descriptions exist. We investigate two lightweight evaluation methods in more detail: expert evaluation and remote online evaluation, and analyse how they could help in identifying the best concepts from the user experience perspective.

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Runtime application adaptation, reconfiguration and software evolution is concerned with performing application updates while the system keeps on operating to a certain extent. By avoiding a complete application shutdown, runtime software evolution tries to preserve application state and keep service interruption at an absolute minimum. However, runtime software evolution is a very complex issue, and many difficulties are encountered in its realization. The presentation will motivate the need for runtime software evolution, and describe the challenges faced by supporting runtime application adaptation on the issues how and when to perform component updates. Some of our experiments in developing component frameworks supporting runtime application adaptation will be presented. An adaptive runtime component environment enables to replace components at runtime while the application remains in operation. This will create the need for identifying safety criteria for dynamically updating stateful components. These safety criteria allow to detect when an application can be safely updated without breaking application consistency. On top of this component environment, a hierarchical runtime architecture that is capable of monitoring of important timing constraints can enforce application adaptations in order to ensure certain critical constraints. Such adaptations are defined by adaptation policies executed at run-time by reified entities that can activate, replace or deactivate certain components.

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Separation of concerns and levels of abstraction are key software engineering principles that can help master the increasing complexity of software applications. Aspect-oriented modeling (AOM) and domain-specific modeling languages (DSML) are two important and promising approaches in this context. However, little research is done to investigate the synergy between AOM and DSMLs. In this paper we present an asymmetric approach to compose modularized concerns expressed in different DSMLs with an application base model expressed in a general-purpose modeling language (GPML). This allows to specify each concern in the most appropriate modeling language. We introduce the concept of a concern interface, expressed in a GPML, that serves as a common language between a specific concern and the application base. In addition, we use an explicit composition model to specify the syntactic and the semantic links between entities from the different concerns. We explore these concepts using an application where we modularize the user interface modeled inWebML and the access control specified in XACML. The modularized concerns are then composed with an application base that has been specified in UML.

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After more than a decade of research in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice in MDE has significantly progressed. Therefore, during this workshop we raised the question of how to proceed next, and we identified a number of future challenges in the field of MDE. The objective of the workshop was to provide a forum for discussing the future of MDE research and practice. Seven presenters shared their vision on the future challenges in the field of MDE. Four breakout groups discussed scalability, consistency and co-evolution, formal foundations, and industrial adoption, respectively. These themes were identified as major categories of challenges by the participants. This report summarises the different presentations, the MDE challenges identified by the workshop participants, and the discussions of the breakout groups.

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A first IDL to Ada2005 reader has been built, though it is not complete. About now it is an academic project, a publication that include these results has been made. Still expect prospective industrial interest in the look for a future/possible RFC

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This paper proposes a technology for the development of distributed real-time component-based applications, which takes advantage of the features that Ada offers for the development of applications with predictable temporal behaviour, and which can be executed in embedded platforms with limited resources. The technology uses the Deployment and Configuration of Component-based Distributed Applications Specification of the OMG for describing the components, the execution platforms and the applications. The framework defined in the Lightweight CCM standard of the OMG is taken as the basis of the internal architecture of the components and the applications. It has been extended with a number of features to make the temporal behaviour of the applications predictable. Among these extensions, the usage of CORBA has been replaced by special distributed components, called connectors, which implement the interaction between components by means of predictable and customizable communication services. Besides, special mechanisms have been introduced in the environment to make the threading characteristics of the components configurable. The technology fixes the responsibilities and the knowledge required by each actor involved in the component-based development process, and for each of them it defines the input and output artifacts that they have to manage.

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Model Checking Introduction; UML and Model Checking: Methodology, Toolchain, Evaluation; UML and OCL: Methodology and Tools, OCL rules, Results and Evaluation; Future Steps

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Scope; Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery (FDIR); FDIR in the ESA ISVV Guide; FDIR Checklists; Results; Effectiveness; Lessons learnt; Future Work

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MoDELS'08 is already the eleventh conference on UML and Model Driven Engineering, Languages and Systems. After more than a decade, research in MDE has significantly evolved. Model Driven Engineering is about creating, transforming, generating, interpreting, weaving models using modelling languages, tools, etc. After more than a decade of research in MDE, still a lot of fundamental and practical issues remain. Therefore this workshop addresses the question of how to proceed next and aims at identifying future challenges in MDE. The objective of the workshop is to provide a forum for people from academia as well as industry people to identify obstacles to MDE research and practice; facilitate transfer of research ideas to industry; propose 'revolutionary' novel ideas; and proclaim important challenges that are either fundamental or pragmatic. We received 15 submissions from 11 different countries, of which 11 papers were accepted. From these accepted papers, 7 papers have been selected to give a workshop presentation. We hope that input from both research and practice will help to identify the future 'grand challenges' in model driven software engineering and discuss revolutionary ideas or new, original ways of thinking about MDE.

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The proposal is to promote a component based strategy and extend the Deployment and Configuration specification to include the metadata and the tasks required to manage the real-time models along the envisioned development process.

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In this paper we give a brief description of GReCCo, an Aspect-Oriented Modeling based framework to promote and enhance the reuse of concerns. GReCCo supports (1) composition oblivousness by modelling concerns independently from a concrete context in which they are going to be applied, (2) composition symmetry by treating all concerns (including the base concern) uniformly, and (3) interdependency management by a coupling to the Concern Interaction Acquisition (CIA) system. We have developed a prototype composition engine implemented in ATL that can be used to compose concern models specified in UML.

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The increasing complexity of software applications requires improved software development techniques in order to cope with, a.o., software reuse and evolution, the management of heterogeneous concerns, and the retargeting of systems towards new software platforms. The introduction of AOSD(aspect-oriented software development) and the support for MDD (model-driven development) are two important and promising evolutions that can contribute to better control of software complexity. In this paper we present an AOM (Aspect-Oriented Modeling) based framework to promote and enhance the reuse of concerns expressed in UML. We have developed a prototype composition engine implemented in ATL that can be used to compose concern models specified in UML.

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This report presents the GReCCo approach to Aspect Oriented Modeling (AOM) using Generic Reusable Concern Compositions. GReCCo offers an AOM-based framework to promote and enhance the reuse of oblivious concern models. We focus on software design patterns, which represent complete solutions to recurring concern-specific problems. We have developed a prototype generic transformation engine written in ATL that can be used to compose two concern models specified in UML. We first describe the GReCCo approach and the offered composition types. In the second part, we illustrate the GReCCo approach on a case study in the domain of Electronic Health Information and Privacy (EHIP). We start from a description of the base part of the application. On top of this application, we apply several reusable concerns using the GReCCo methodology.