Processo e evolução dos métodos formais na engenharia de requisitos

Requirements Engineering is considered the most important phase of the life cycle of software products because it specifies the needs of the customers, and it is also the basis for the execution of the other phases of software engineering. The models currently used to perform the requirements elicitation have been proposed and widely documented, but they are focused only on the techniques to collect information, disregarding the activity of properly documenting this information. Moreover, to structure the requirements specification, natural language continues to be used as a means of communication and understanding with the customer. Due to the ambiguities caused by this language, its interpretation becomes difficult, and this leads to reprocesses in the later stages of the software life cycle. According to the above, it is necessary for software development organizations to consider formalizing the process of requirements elicitation if they wish to make their development process more efficient. A literature review is carried out in this paper to determine the process and evolution of the formal methods from the requirements engineering perspective.La ingeniería de requisitos se considera la fase más importante del ciclo de vida de los productos de software, porque en ella se especifican las necesidades de los clientes y es la base para la ejecución de las demás fases de la ingeniería de software. Los modelos que actualmente se utilizan para realizar la elicitación de requisitos se han propuesto y documentado de forma amplia, pero se centran solo en las técnicas para colectar información y descuidan la actividad de documentarla de manera adecuada. Además, para estructurar la especificación de requisitos sigue en uso el lenguaje natural como forma de comunicación y comprensión con el cliente. Debido a las ambigüedades que este causa, se dificulta la interpretación; esto conlleva reprocesos en las etapas posteriores del ciclo de vida del software. De acuerdo con ello, es necesario que las organizaciones desarrolladoras de software consideren formalizar el proceso de elicitación de requisitos si desean hacer más eficiente su proceso de desarrollo. En este artículo se hace una revisión de literatura para determinar el proceso y evolución de los métodos formales desde la perspectiva de la ingeniería de requisitos. De acuerdo a lo anterior, es necesario que las organizaciones que desarrollan software consideren formalizar el proceso de elicitación de requisitos si desean hacer más eficiente su proceso de desarrollo. En este artículo se hace una revisión de literatura para determinar el proceso y evolución de los métodos formales desde la perspectiva de la Ingeniería de Requisitos. A engenharia de requisitos é considerada a fase mais importante do ciclo de vida dos produtos de software, porque nela se especificam as necessidades dos clientes e é a base para a execução das demais fases da engenharia de software. Os modelos que atualmente são utilizados para realizar a elicitação de requisitos foram propostos e documentados de forma ampla, mas se centram só nas técnicas para coletar informação e descuidam a atividade de documentar de maneira adequada. Além disso, para estruturar a especificação de requisitos segue em uso a linguagem natural como forma de comunicação e entendimento com o cliente. Devido às ambiguidades que este causa, dificulta-se a interpretação; isso implica reprocessos nas etapas posteriores do ciclo de vida do software. De acordo com isso, é necessário que as organizações desenvolvedoras de software considerem formalizar o processo de elicitação de requisitos se desejam tornar mais eficiente seu processo de desenvolvimento. Neste artigo, faz-se uma revisão de literatura para determinar o processo e a evolução dos métodos formais a partir da perspectiva da engenharia de requisitos

High assurance on cyber-physical interactive systems

Cyber-Physical Systems, as distributed systems of computational elements interacting with the physical world, are highly complex systems. They can, in many instances, be considered safety critical interactive systems, as errors in interaction can have disastrous consequences (consider the case of autonomous vehicles or integrated clinical environments). High assurance is, then, an underlying requirement, also at their user interface. In this position paper we identify five challenges to be solved both in the short and in the long term, regarding the modelling of (1) distributed and (2) heterogeneous interactive systems, (3) the analysis and relation between the different abstraction layers of Cyber-Physical Systems, (4) the modelling of real time/hybrid systems, and (5) the modelling of the dynamic nature of such systems. Solutions for these challenges are not presented, but possible directions are discussed.This work was financed by National Funds through the Portuguese fundingagency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project: UID/EEA/50014/201

Gene expression for simulation of biological tissue

BioDynaMo is a biological processes simulator developed by an international community of researchers and software engineers working closely with neuroscientists. The authors have been working on gene expression, i.e. the process by which the heritable information in a gene - the sequence of DNA base pairs - is made into a functional gene product, such as protein or RNA. Typically, gene regulatory models employ either statistical or analytical approaches, being the former already well understood and broadly used. In this paper, we utilize analytical approaches representing the regulatory networks by means of differential equations, such as Euler and Runge-Kutta methods. The two solutions are implemented and have been submitted for inclusion in the BioDynaMo project and are compared for accuracy and performance

Hikester - the event management application

Today social networks and services are one of the most important part of our everyday life. Most of the daily activities, such as communicating with friends, reading news or dating is usually done using social networks. However, there are activities for which social networks do not yet provide adequate support. This paper focuses on event management and introduces "Hikester". The main objective of this service is to provide users with the possibility to create any event they desire and to invite other users. "Hikester" supports the creation and management of events like attendance of football matches, quest rooms, shared train rides or visit of museums in foreign countries. Here we discuss the project architecture as well as the detailed implementation of the system components: the recommender system, the spam recognition service and the parameters optimizer

An architecture for distributed ledger-based M2M auditing for Electric Autonomous Vehicles

Electric Autonomous Vehicles (EAVs) promise to be an effective way to solve transportation issues such as accidents, emissions and congestion, and aim at establishing the foundation of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) economy. For this to be possible, the market should be able to offer appropriate charging services without involving humans. The state-of-the-art mechanisms of charging and billing do not meet this requirement, and often impose service fees for value transactions that may also endanger users and their location privacy. This paper aims at filling this gap and envisions a new charging architecture and a billing framework for EAV which would enable M2M transactions via the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)

THE CHOICE OF TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTIONS FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FOR DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION SYSTEMS

The choice of tools and programming technologies for creating information systems is a current trend. Each projected system needs you to define a set of criteria for the development environment used by li- braries and technologies. This article considers a choice of technological solutions using an example of the developed digital computing web platform of the Russian Academy of Education to provide information support to the activities of psychologists doing research, including population and longitudinal studies. The peculiarity of the system are: magnitude and significant development time requiring the implementa- tion and assurance of the guaranteed computing reliability of a wide range of digital tools used in psycho- logical research; maintenance of functioning in various conditions, in particular when carrying out mass research in schools with different characteristics of computing resources and communication channels; the possibility of scaling services; security and data privacy, as well as the use of technologies and pro- gramming tools that would ensure the compatibility and conversion of data with other means of process- ing psychological research. For the developed system, criteria were introduced for evaluating software technologies that take into account the features of the functioning and life cycle of a product, a specific example shows the selection of appropriate technological solutions. An important component in the de- velopment is the training of the development team for the technologies used. A system that implements the training program for selected technologies is given. The developed training system is used to reduce the time of inclusion in the development of new software developers, as the tasks are expanded

A UTP semantics for communicating processes with shared variables and its formal encoding in PVS

CSP# (communicating sequential programs) is a modelling language designed for specifying concurrent systems by integrating CSP-like compositional operators with sequential programs updating shared variables. In this work, we define an observation-oriented denotational semantics in an open environment for the CSP# language based on the UTP framework. To deal with shared variables, we lift traditional event-based traces into mixed traces which consist of state-event pairs for recording process behaviours. To capture all possible concurrency behaviours between action/channel-based communications and global shared variables, we construct a comprehensive set of rules on merging traces from processes which run in parallel/interleaving. We also define refinement to check process equivalence and present a set of algebraic laws which are established based on our denotational semantics. We further encode our proposed denotational semantics into the PVS theorem prover. The encoding not only ensures the semantic consistency, but also builds up a theoretic foundation for machine-assisted verification of CSP# specifications.Full Tex

UTP, Circus, and Isabelle

We dedicate this paper with great respect and friendship to He Jifeng on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Our research group owes much to him. The authors have over 150 publications on unifying theories of programming (UTP), a research topic Jifeng created with Tony Hoare. Our objective is to recount the history of Circus (a combination of Z, CSP, Dijkstra’s guarded command language, and Morgan’s refinement calculus) and the development of Isabelle/UTP. Our paper is in two parts. (1) We first discuss the activities needed to model systems: we need to formalise data models and their behaviours. We survey our work on these two aspects in the context of Circus. (2) Secondly, we describe our practical implementation of UTP in Isabelle/HOL. Mechanising UTP theories is the basis of novel verification tools. We also discuss ongoing and future work related to (1) and (2). Many colleagues have contributed to these works, and we acknowledge their support