Ontological support for managing non-functional requirements in pervasive healthcare

We designed and implemented an ontological solution which makes provisions for choosing adequate devices/sensors for remote monitoring of patients who are suffering from post-stroke health complications. We argue that non-functional requirements in pervasive healthcare systems can be elicited and managed through semantics stored in ontological models and reasoning created upon them. Our contribution is twofold: we enrich the elicitation process and specification of non-functional requirements within the requirements engineering discipline and we address the pervasiveness of healthcare software systems through the way of choosing devices embedded in them and users expectations in terms of having access to pervasive services personalized to their needs

Towards an Ontology-Based Approach for Reusing Non-Functional Requirements Knowledge

Requirements Engineering play a crucial role during the software development process. Many works have pointed out that Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) are currently more important than Functional Requirements. NFRs can be very complicated to understand due to its diversity and subjective nature. The NDR Framework has been proposed to fill some of the existing gaps to facilitate NFR elicitation and modeling. In this thesis, we introduce a tool that plays a major role in the NDR Framework allowing software engineers to store and reuse NFR knowledge. The NDR Tool converts the knowledge contained in Softgoal Interdependency Graphs (SIGs) into a machine-readable format that follows the NFR and Design Rationale (NDR) Ontology. It also provides mechanisms to query the knowledge base and produces graphical representation for the results obtained. To evaluate whether our approach aids eliciting NFRs, we conducted an experiment performing a software development scenario

Service-oriented design of environmental information systems

Service-orientation has an increasing impact upon the design process and the architecture of environmental information systems. This thesis specifies the SERVUS design methodology for geospatial applications based upon standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium. SERVUS guides the system architect to rephrase use case requirements as a network of semantically-annotated requested resources and to iteratively match them with offered resources that mirror the capabilities of existing services

Semantic Component Selection Based on Non-Functional Requirements

Reusing existing software components in place of requiring the implementation of new components can reduce the complexity of the software development process. However, for a software component to be effectively identified and selected for reuse, we need a good understanding of both the functional and non-functional requirements of the component needed, and the components available. Functional requirements specify what a software component does and non-functional requirements specify how a software component achieves its goals. Non-functional requirements are typically complex, and difficult to both understand and effectively articulate. Requirements engineering provides a solution to easing this process, and involves performing the following reasoning steps: elicitation, analysis and description. However, the output of these steps is based on reasoning that requires manual, expensive and error-prone techniques. To solve such drawbacks, this thesis describes a framework that provides the necessary tools and techniques for automating reasoning including: an ontology for non-functional requirements as a conceptual model for reasoning; and a search algorithm that matches the best component according to the reasoning process outputs. To validate our framework, we develop an implementation that supports semantic search within a repository to locate matches based on a user query, validated with experimental findings on a repository consisting of 50 individual component descriptions. Our findings demonstrate the benefit obtained from using an ontology, by minimizing the cost and complexity of analysing non-functional requirements. Our algorithm is capable of running a complex query, for example, supporting 5 non-functional requirements with total 16 prerequisites against a repository of 1000 components can run in 1750 second. It would be impossible for a field expert to compute a complex query in this time frame.Thesis (MCompSc) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 201

Service recommendation and selection in centralized and decentralized environments.

With the increasing use of web services in everyday tasks we are entering an era of Internet of Services (IoS). Service discovery and selection in both centralized and decentralized environments have become a critical issue in the area of web services, in particular when services having similar functionality but different Quality of Service (QoS). As a result, selecting a high quality service that best suits consumer requirements from a large list of functionally equivalent services is a challenging task. In response to increasing numbers of services in the discovery and selection process, there is a corresponding increase of service consumers and a consequent diversity in Quality of Service (QoS) available. Increases in both sides leads to a diversity in the demand and supply of services, which would result in the partial match of the requirements and offers. Furthermore, it is challenging for customers to select suitable services from a large number of services that satisfy consumer functional requirements. Therefore, web service recommendation becomes an attractive solution to provide recommended services to consumers which can satisfy their requirements.In this thesis, first a service ranking and selection algorithm is proposed by considering multiple QoS requirements and allowing partially matched services to be counted as a candidate for the selection process. With the initial list of available services the approach considers those services with a partial match of consumer requirements and ranks them based on the QoS parameters, this allows the consumer to select suitable service. In addition, providing weight value for QoS parameters might not be an easy and understandable task for consumers, as a result an automatic weight calculation method has been included for consumer requirements by utilizing distance correlation between QoS parameters. The second aspect of the work in the thesis is the process of QoS based web service recommendation. With an increasing number of web services having similar functionality, it is challenging for service consumers to find out suitable web services that meet their requirements. We propose a personalised service recommendation method using the LDA topic model, which extracts latent interests of consumers and latent topics of services in the form of probability distribution. In addition, the proposed method is able to improve the accuracy of prediction of QoS properties by considering the correlation between neighbouring services and return a list of recommended services that best satisfy consumer requirements. The third part of the thesis concerns providing service discovery and selection in a decentralized environment. Service discovery approaches are often supported by centralized repositories that could suffer from single point failure, performance bottleneck, and scalability issues in large scale systems. To address these issues, we propose a context-aware service discovery and selection approach in a decentralized peer-to-peer environment. In the approach homophily similarity was used for bootstrapping and distribution of nodes. The discovery process is based on the similarity of nodes and previous interaction and behaviour of the nodes, which will help the discovery process in a dynamic environment. Our approach is not only considering service discovery, but also the selection of suitable web service by taking into account the QoS properties of the web services. The major contribution of the thesis is providing a comprehensive QoS based service recommendation and selection in centralized and decentralized environments. With the proposed approach consumers will be able to select suitable service based on their requirements. Experimental results on real world service datasets showed that proposed approaches achieved better performance and efficiency in recommendation and selection process.N/

Contextual governance for service oriented architecture composition

Currently, business requirements for rapid operational efficiency, customer responsiveness as well as rapid adaptability are driving the need for ever increasing communication and integration capabilities ofthe software assets. Functional decomposition into re-usable software entities, loose coupling, and distribution of resources are all perceived benefits of the investment on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This malleability can also bring about the risk of a more difficult oversight. The same service is ideally used in different applications and contexts. This situation forces a supporting infrastructure to allow and manage the adaptability to these different contexts of use. In this thesis, the author proposes to govern such variations in a cost efficient way by composing the core business function offered by a service with other services implementing infrastructure capabilities that fulfil varying non-functional requirements. However, as the number of services increases and their use in different contexts proliferates, it becomes necessary to automate policy enforcement and compliance monitoring. Furthermore, the composition of services into different business applications over a common infrastructure intensifies the need for end-to-end monitoring and analysis in order to assess the business performance impact. Managing the full life-cycle of service definition, deployment, exposure and operation requires management processes that take into account their composition with the infrastructure capabilities that take of non-functional requirements. In addition, policies may change during the life-time of a service. Policy updates may be the result of various reasons including business optimisation, of reaction to new business opportunities, of risk / threat mitigation, of operational emergencies, etc. It becomes therefore clear that a well-designed governance architecture is a prerequisite to implementing a SOA capable of dealing with a complex and dynamic environment.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Ontology based semantic engineering framework and tool for reconfigurable automation systems integration

Digital factory modelling based on virtual design and simulation is now emerging as a part of mainstream engineering activities, and it is typically geared towards reducing the product design cycle time. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems can benefit from reusing the existing knowledge in order to decrease the required skills and design time to launch new product generations. The various industrial simulation systems are currently integrating product design, matching processes and resource requirements to decrease the required skills and design time to launch new products. However, the main focus of current reconfigurable manufacturing systems has been modular production lines to support different manufacturing tasks. Additionally, the design data is not transferrable from various domain-specific software to a collaborative and intelligent platform, which is required to capture and reuse design knowledge. Product design is still dependent on the knowledge of designers and does not link to the existing knowledge on processes and resources, which are in separate domains. To address these issues, this research developed an integration method based on semantic technologies and product, process, resource and requirements (PPRR) ontologies called semantic-ontology engineering framework (SOEF). SOEF transferred original databases to an ontology-based automation data structure with a semantic analysis engine. A pre-defined semantic model is developed to recognise custom requirement and map existing knowledge with processing data in the automation assembly aspect. The main research contribution is using semantic technology to process automation documentation and map semantic data to the PPRR ontology structure. Furthermore, this research also contributes to the automatic modification of system simulation based on custom requirements. The SOEF uses a JAVA-based command-line user interface to present semantic analysis results and import ontology outputs to the vueOne system simulation tool for system evaluation

GQ-BPAOntoSOA: A goal- and object- based semantic framework for deriving software services from an organisation’s goals and riva business process architecture

Understanding a business organisation is a primary activity that is required for deriving service-oriented systems that assist in carrying out the business activities of an organisation. Business IT alignment is one of the hot topics that concerns with aligning business needs and system needs in order to keep a business organisation competitive in a market. One example in this area is the BPAOntoSOA framework that aligned business process architecture and the service-oriented model of computing. The BPAOntoSOA framework is a semantically enriched framework for deriving service oriented architecture candidate software services from a Riva-based business process architecture. The BPAOntoSOA framework was recently proposed in order to align the candidate software services to the business processes presented in a Riva business process architecture. The activities of the BPAOntoSOA framework are structured into two-semantic-based layers that are formed in a top-down manner. The top layer, the BPAOnt ontology instantiation layer, concerned with conceptualising the Riva business process architecture and the associated business process models. The bottom layer, which is the software service identification layer, concerned with the semantic identification of the service-oriented architecture candidate software services and their associated capabilities. In this layer, RPA clusters were used to describe the derived candidate software service. Ontologies were used in order to support addressing the semantic representation. However, the BPAOntoSOA framework has two limitations. First, the derived candidate software services are identified without considering the business goals. Second, the desired quality of service requirements that constrain the functionality of the software services are absent. This research is concerned with resolving these two limitations within the BPAOntoSOA framework. In this research, the original BPAOntoSOA framework has been extended into the GQ-BPAOntoSOA framework. A new semantic-based layer has been added into the two original layers. The new layer is concerned with conceptualising the goal- and quality- oriented models in order to address their absence in the original BPAOntoSOA framework. The new layer is called the GQOnt ontology instantiation layer. This extension has highlighted the need for aligning the models within the original BPAOnt intonation layer with the ones in the new layer. This is because the BPAOnt was the base for the identification of the candidate software services and capabilities. Therefore, a novel alignment approach has been proposed in order to address this need. Also, the original service identification approach is refined in order to adapt with the integration of goals and quality requirements.The GQ-BPAOntoSOA framework, which is a goal-based and quality-linked extended BPAOntoSOA framework, has been evaluated using the Cancer Care Registration process. This is the same case study used in the evaluation of the BPAOntoSOA framework. And this is required in order to investigate the implication of integrating goals and quality requirements into the pre-existing BPAOntoSOA framework-driven candidate software services. This has shown that: (1) the GQOnt ontology does not only contribute to the extension of the BPAOntoSOA framework, yet it also contributes to providing a semantic representation of a business strategy view for an organisation. The GQOnt ontology acts as an independent repository of knowledge in order to have an early agreement between stakeholders with regard to business goals and quality requirements. The semantic representation could be reused for different purposes with respect to the needs. (2) the alignment approach has bridged the gap between goal-oriented models and Riva-based business process architectures. (3) the Riva business process architecture modelling method and business process models have been enriched with the integration of goals and quality requirements in order to provide a rich representation of business process architecture and process models that reflect an important information for the given organisation. (4) The service identification approach used in the original BPAOntoSOA framework has been enriched with goals and quality requirements. This has affected the identification of candidate software services (clusters) and their capabilities. Also, the derived candidate software services have conformed to service-oriented architecture principles. Accordingly, This research has bridged the gap between the BPAOntoSOA framework and the business goals and quality requirements. This is anticipated to lead to highly consistent, correct and complete software service specifications

Formalising non-functional requirements embedded in user requirements notation (URN) models

The growing need for computer software in different sectors of activity, (health, agriculture, industries, education, aeronautic, science and telecommunication) together with the increasing reliance of the society as a whole on information technology, is placing a heavy and fast growing demand on complex and high quality software systems. In this regard, the anticipation has been on non-functional requirements (NFRs) engineering and formal methods. Despite their common objective, these techniques have in most cases evolved separately. NFRs engineering proceeds firstly, by deriving measures to evaluate the quality of the constructed software (product-oriented approach), and secondarily by improving the engineering process (process-oriented approach). With the ability to combine the analysis of both functional and non-functional requirements, Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) approaches have become de facto leading requirements engineering methods. They propose through refinement/operationalisation, means to satisfy NFRs encoded in softgoals at an early phase of software development. On the other side, formal methods have kept, so far, their promise to eliminate errors in software artefacts to produce high quality software products and are therefore particularly solicited for safety and mission critical systems for which a single error may cause great loss including human life. This thesis introduces the concept of Complementary Non-functional action (CNF-action) to extend the analysis and development of NFRs beyond the traditional goals/softgoals analysis, based on refinement/operationalisation, and to propagate the influence of NFRs to other software construction phases. Mechanisms are also developed to integrate the formal technique Z/Object-Z into the standardised User Requirements Notation (URN) to formalise GRL models describing functional and non-functional requirements, to propagate CNF-actions of the formalised NFRs to UCMs maps, to facilitate URN construction process and the quality of URN models.School of ComputingD. Phil (Computer Science

A Domain-Independent Ontology for Non-Functional Requirements

Despite considerable research on ontologies for representing requirements models (and metamodels), little progress has been made in using ontologies to represent non-functional requirements. Non-functional requirements define the overall qualities of the resulting system. Because they are restrictions on system services, non-functional requirements are often of critical importance, and functional requirements may need to be sacrificed to meet them. However, because of their diverse nature, non-functional requirements are often expressed in non-standard domain-specific ways. This paper describes a nonfunctional requirements ontology that can be used to structure and express constraints as part of quality of service specification. The approach is illustrated using a small case-study