Software architecture knowledge for intelligent light maintenance

The maintenance management plays an important role in the monitoring of business activities. It ensures a certain level of services in industrial systems by improving the ability to function in accordance with prescribed procedures. This has a decisive impact on the performance of these systems in terms of operational efficiency, reliability and associated intervention costs. To support the maintenance processes of a wide range of industrial services, a knowledge-based component is useful to perform the intelligent monitoring. In this context we propose a generic model for supporting and generating industrial lights maintenance processes. The modeled intelligent approach involves information structuring and knowledge sharing in the industrial setting and the implementation of specialized maintenance management software in the target information system. As a first step we defined computerized procedures from the conceptual structure of industrial data to ensure their interoperability and effective use of information and communication technologies in the software dedicated to the management of maintenance (E-candela). The second step is the implementation of this software architecture with specification of business rules, especially by organizing taxonomical information of the lighting systems, and applying intelligencebased operations and analysis to capitalize knowledge from maintenance experiences. Finally, the third step is the deployment of the software with contextual adaptation of the user interface to allow the management of operations, editions of the balance sheets and real-time location obtained through geolocation data. In practice, these computational intelligence-based modes of reasoning involve an engineering framework that facilitates the continuous improvement of a comprehensive maintenance regime

A holistic semantic based approach to component specification and retrieval

Component-Based Development (CBD) has been broadly used in software development as it enhances the productivity and reduces the costs and risks involved in systems development. It has become a well-understood and widely used technology for developing not only large enterprise applications, but also a whole spectrum of software applications, as it offers fast and flexible development. However, driven by the continuous expansions of software applications, the increase in component varieties and sizes and the evolution from local to global component repositories, the so-called component mismatch problem has become an even more severe hurdle for component specification and retrieval. This problem not only prevents CBD from reaching its full potential, but also hinders the acceptance of many existing component repository. To overcome the above problem, existing approaches engaged a variety of technologies to support better component specification and retrieval. The existing approaches range from the early syntax-based (traditional) approaches to the recent semantic-based approaches. Although the different technologies are proposed to achieve accurate description of the component specification and/or user query in their specification and retrieval, the existing semantic-based approaches still fail to achieve the following goals which are desired for present component reuse: precise, automated, semantic-based and domain capable. This thesis proposes an approach, namely MVICS-based approach, aimed at achieving holistic, semantic-based and adaptation-aware component specification and retrieval. As the foundation, a Multiple-Viewed and Interrelated Component Specification ontology model (MVICS) is first developed for component specification and repository building. The MVICS model provides an ontology-based architecture to specify components from a range of perspectives; it integrates the knowledge of Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE), and supports ontology evolution to reflect the continuous developments in CBD and components. A formal definition of the MVICS model is presented, which ensures the rigorousness of the model and supports the high level of automation of the retrieval. Furthermore, the MVICS model has a smooth mechanism to integrate with domain related software system ontology. Such integration enhances the function and application scope of the MVICS model by bringing more domain semantics into component specification and retrieval. Another improved feature of the proposed approach is that the effect of possible component adaptation is extended to the related components. Finally a comprehensive profile of the result components shows the search results to the user from a summary to satisfied and unsatisfied discrepancy details. The above features of the approach are well integrated, which enables a holistic view in semantic-based component specification and retrieval. A prototype tool was developed to exert the power of the MVICS model in expressing semantics and process automation in component specification and retrieval. The tool implements the complete process of component search. Three case studies have been undertaken to illustrate and evaluate the usability and correctness of the approach, in terms of supporting accurate component specification and retrieval, seamless linkage with a domain ontology, adaptive component suggestion and comprehensive result component profile. A conclusion is drawn based on an analysis of the feedback from the case studies, which shows that the proposed approach can be deployed in real life industrial development. The benefits of MVICS include not only the improvement of the component search precision and recall, reducing the development time and the repository maintenance effort, but also the decrease of human intervention on CBD.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

A holistic semantic based approach to component specification and retrieval

Component-Based Development (CBD) has been broadly used in software development as it enhances the productivity and reduces the costs and risks involved in systems development. It has become a well-understood and widely used technology for developing not only large enterprise applications, but also a whole spectrum of software applications, as it offers fast and flexible development. However, driven by the continuous expansions of software applications, the increase in component varieties and sizes and the evolution from local to global component repositories, the so-called component mismatch problem has become an even more severe hurdle for component specification and retrieval. This problem not only prevents CBD from reaching its full potential, but also hinders the acceptance of many existing component repository. To overcome the above problem, existing approaches engaged a variety of technologies to support better component specification and retrieval. The existing approaches range from the early syntax-based (traditional) approaches to the recent semantic-based approaches. Although the different technologies are proposed to achieve accurate description of the component specification and/or user query in their specification and retrieval, the existing semantic-based approaches still fail to achieve the following goals which are desired for present component reuse: precise, automated, semantic-based and domain capable.This thesis proposes an approach, namely MVICS-based approach, aimed at achieving holistic, semantic-based and adaptation-aware component specification and retrieval. As the foundation, a Multiple-Viewed and Interrelated Component Specification ontology model (MVICS) is first developed for component specification and repository building. The MVICS model provides an ontology-based architecture to specify components from a range of perspectives; it integrates the knowledge of Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE), and supports ontology evolution to reflect the continuous developments in CBD and components. A formal definition of the MVICS model is presented, which ensures the rigorousness of the model and supports the high level of automation of the retrieval. Furthermore, the MVICS model has a smooth mechanism to integrate with domain related software system ontology. Such integration enhances the function and application scope of the MVICS model by bringing more domain semantics into component specification and retrieval. Another improved feature of the proposed approach is that the effect of possible component adaptation is extended to the related components. Finally a comprehensive profile of the result components shows the search results to the user from a summary to satisfied and unsatisfied discrepancy details. The above features of the approach are well integrated, which enables a holistic view in semantic-based component specification and retrieval.A prototype tool was developed to exert the power of the MVICS model in expressing semantics and process automation in component specification and retrieval. The tool implements the complete process of component search. Three case studies have been undertaken to illustrate and evaluate the usability and correctness of the approach, in terms of supporting accurate component specification and retrieval, seamless linkage with a domain ontology, adaptive component suggestion and comprehensive result component profile.A conclusion is drawn based on an analysis of the feedback from the case studies, which shows that the proposed approach can be deployed in real life industrial development. The benefits of MVICS include not only the improvement of the component search precision and recall, reducing the development time and the repository maintenance effort, but also the decrease of human intervention on CBD

Quantitative Verification: Formal Guarantees for Timeliness, Reliability and Performance

Computerised systems appear in almost all aspects of our daily lives, often in safety-critical scenarios such as embedded control systems in cars and aircraft or medical devices such as pacemakers and sensors. We are thus increasingly reliant on these systems working correctly, despite often operating in unpredictable or unreliable environments. Designers of such devices need ways to guarantee that they will operate in a reliable and efficient manner. Quantitative verification is a technique for analysing quantitative aspects of a system's design, such as timeliness, reliability or performance. It applies formal methods, based on a rigorous analysis of a mathematical model of the system, to automatically prove certain precisely specified properties, e.g. ``the airbag will always deploy within 20 milliseconds after a crash'' or ``the probability of both sensors failing simultaneously is less than 0.001''. The ability to formally guarantee quantitative properties of this kind is beneficial across a wide range of application domains. For example, in safety-critical systems, it may be essential to establish credible bounds on the probability with which certain failures or combinations of failures can occur. In embedded control systems, it is often important to comply with strict constraints on timing or resources. More generally, being able to derive guarantees on precisely specified levels of performance or efficiency is a valuable tool in the design of, for example, wireless networking protocols, robotic systems or power management algorithms, to name but a few. This report gives a short introduction to quantitative verification, focusing in particular on a widely used technique called model checking, and its generalisation to the analysis of quantitative aspects of a system such as timing, probabilistic behaviour or resource usage. The intended audience is industrial designers and developers of systems such as those highlighted above who could benefit from the application of quantitative verification,but lack expertise in formal verification or modelling

What Am I Testing and Where? Comparing Testing Procedures based on Lightweight Requirements Annotations

[Context] The testing of software-intensive systems is performed in different test stages each having a large number of test cases. These test cases are commonly derived from requirements. Each test stages exhibits specific demands and constraints with respect to their degree of detail and what can be tested. Therefore, specific test suites are defined for each test stage. In this paper, the focus is on the domain of embedded systems, where, among others, typical test stages are Software- and Hardware-in-the-loop. [Objective] Monitoring and controlling which requirements are verified in which detail and in which test stage is a challenge for engineers. However, this information is necessary to assure a certain test coverage, to minimize redundant testing procedures, and to avoid inconsistencies between test stages. In addition, engineers are reluctant to state their requirements in terms of structured languages or models that would facilitate the relation of requirements to test executions. [Method] With our approach, we close the gap between requirements specifications and test executions. Previously, we have proposed a lightweight markup language for requirements which provides a set of annotations that can be applied to natural language requirements. The annotations are mapped to events and signals in test executions. As a result, meaningful insights from a set of test executions can be directly related to artifacts in the requirements specification. In this paper, we use the markup language to compare different test stages with one another. [Results] We annotate 443 natural language requirements of a driver assistance system with the means of our lightweight markup language. The annotations are then linked to 1300 test executions from a simulation environment and 53 test executions from test drives with human drivers. Based on the annotations, we are able to analyze how similar the test stages are and how well test stages and test cases are aligned with the requirements. Further, we highlight the general applicability of our approach through this extensive experimental evaluation. [Conclusion] With our approach, the results of several test levels are linked to the requirements and enable the evaluation of complex test executions. By this means, practitioners can easily evaluate how well a systems performs with regards to its specification and, additionally, can reason about the expressiveness of the applied test stage.TU Berlin, Open-Access-Mittel - 202