Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Quantifying Safety in Software Architectural Designs

Incorporating safety in the software architectural design decisions is important for the successful applications in safety-critical systems. However, most of the existing software design rationales do not consider the quantitative aspect of the software architectures with respect to safety. As a result, alternative architectures cannot be compared adequately with respect to safety. In this paper, we present an analytical approach for quantifying safety in software architectural designs. We use the concept of architectural service routes to quantify system safety in terms of software architectural attributes. We show how to make appropriate architectural design decisions based on their impacts on safety. We compare different example architectures with respect to system safety

Tactics From Proofs

Proof guarantees the correctness of a formal specification with respect to formal requirements, and of an implementation with respect to a specification, and so provides valuable verification methods in high integrity system development. However, proof development by hand tends to be an erudite, error-prone and seemingly interminable task. Tactics are programs that drive theorem-provers, thus automating proof development and alleviating some of the problems mentioned above. The development of tactics for a particular application domain also extends the domain of application of the theorem-prover. A LCF-tactic is safe in that if it fails to be applicable to a particular conjecture, then it will not produce an incorrect proof. The current construction of tactics from proofs does not yield sufficiently robust tactics. Proofs tend to be specific to the details of a specification and so are not reusable in general, e.g. the same proof may not work when the definition of a conjecture is changed. The major challenges in proof development are deciding which proof rule and instantiations to apply in order to prove a conjecture. Discerning patterns in formal interactive proof development facilitates the construction of robust tactics that can withstand definitional changes in conjectures. Having developed an interactive proof for a conjecture, we develop the necessary abstractions of the proof steps used, to construct a tactic th at can be applicable to other conjectures in that domain. By so doing we encode human expertise used in the proof development, and make proofs robust and thus generally reusable. We apply our theory on the proofs of conjectures involving some set theory operators, and on the proof obligations that arise in the formal development of numerical specifications using the retrenchment method under the IEEE-854 floating-point standard in the PVS theorem-prover/proof-checker

Outside the school: A review of the non-formal short-term architectural workshops

Over the last fifteen years, apart from compulsory curricular studios, extracurricular intensive studios in architectural design (ISAD) have become a mainstream educational environment worldwide. ISADs cover an actual weight in non-formal architectural education. However, to date, there is no review on the methods, processes, or implementation of extracurricular ISADs. The field needs to enhance the visibility of workshop results with regular reporting of workshop activities to raise awareness among future professionals and the wider public. This review aims to make visible existing learning-teaching-experiencing environments and pedagogical conditions, practices, tendencies, and implementations in ISADs. The study follows three stages. It first conducts a scoping study to examine the research outputs on ISADs indexed in SCOPUS and Web of Science from January 1975 to September 2020. Second, it expands the workshop pool by including past ISADs reached via websites/papers. It codes each workshop with the codes and themes determined through the scoping study. Finally, it creates an interactive mapping detailing the following analysis: (1) Quantitative analysis of ISADs (Geographical distribution; outputs; principles, as elements creating the atmosphere and tactics); (2) Qualitative analysis to reveal the impact of workshop outputs on the interested stakeholders. The review suggests that ISADs, including their processes and outputs, contribute to the knowledge triangle in architecture by serving two fundamental roles: (1) A research-by-design activity to address socio-economic-ecological problems caused by the built environment; (2) A pioneering venture in improving the curriculum and practices of teaching and learning. Within the scope of the exigencies of the education field, this review uncovers the potential of ISADs in overcoming time-related, geographical, economic limitations; providing fresh perspectives on content and methods concerning architectural education; expanding the intellectual resources of students; enabling international collaboration between HEIs; breeding an experimental/flexible learning and research environment in the 1st and 2nd cycles to absorb ever-changing tools/methods promoted in professional/research sides of the field. This review provides the reader with an array of diverse teaching and learning practices on these non/informal grounds. The number of workshops included in this study is relatively small, therefore, researchers are encouraged to expand the number of workshops for further analysis

The Privacy Pillar -- A Conceptual Framework for Foundation Model-based Systems

AI and its relevant technologies, including machine learning, deep learning, chatbots, virtual assistants, and others, are currently undergoing a profound transformation of development and organizational processes within companies. Foundation models present both significant challenges and incredible opportunities. In this context, ensuring the quality attributes of foundation model-based systems is of paramount importance, and with a particular focus on the challenging issue of privacy due to the sensitive nature of the data and information involved. However, there is currently a lack of consensus regarding the comprehensive scope of both technical and non-technical issues that the privacy evaluation process should encompass. Additionally, there is uncertainty about which existing methods are best suited to effectively address these privacy concerns. In response to this challenge, this paper introduces a novel conceptual framework that integrates various responsible AI patterns from multiple perspectives, with the specific aim of safeguarding privacy.Comment: 10 page

Verified ROS-Based Deployment of Platform-Independent Control Systems

The paper considers the problem of model-based deployment of platform-independent control code on a specific platform. The approach is based on automatic generation of platform-specific glue code from an architectural model of the system. We present a tool, ROSGen, that generates the glue code based on a declarative specification of platform interfaces. Our implementation targets the popular Robot Operating System (ROS) platform. We demonstrate that the code generation process is amenable to formal verification. The code generator is implemented in Coq and relies on the infrastructure provided by the CompCert and VST tool. We prove that the generated code always correctly connects the controller function to sensors and actuators in the robot. We use ROSGen to implement a cruise control system on the LandShark robot