Contract Aware Components, 10 years after

The notion of contract aware components has been published roughly ten years ago and is now becoming mainstream in several fields where the usage of software components is seen as critical. The goal of this paper is to survey domains such as Embedded Systems or Service Oriented Architecture where the notion of contract aware components has been influential. For each of these domains we briefly describe what has been done with this idea and we discuss the remaining challenges.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

Towards MARTE++ : an enhanced UML-based language to Model and Analyse Real-Time and Embedded Systems for the IoT age

This paper presents requirements for an enhanced version of the UML Profile for MARTE, the current standard of the OMG for the modelling and analysis of real-time embedded systems. Since its adoption by the OMG in 2009 and after the various additions along recent years, MARTE has been essayed in a number of application domains and validation approaches. This paper makes a review of these various efforts describing extensions, additional functionality, and modeling needs that may serve as inputs for the preparation of a formal request for proposals (RFP) at the OMG. Aspects that have been found useful to have in it include modern platforms like Multi-core, Many-core and GPUs, networking for broader domains like the Internet of Things, federation of all modelling artifacts involved in the development process, including tracing mechanisms embedded in the language to link design and run-time artifacts, and more elaborated kinds of quantitative analyses and extra functional properties, like energy and memory consumption, heat dissipation, and temperature distribution. Also methodological aspects like its specification as a profile and/or as a meta-model will need to be discussed. Finally, the standard needs to be reviewed against the new executable UML related specifications; particularly to be in alignment with those semantics of state machines and composite structures.This work receives funding from the Spanish Government under grant number TIN2014-56158-C4-2-P (M2C2), and from the Electronic Component Systems for European Leadership Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 737494 (MegaM@RT2). This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Sweden, France, Spain, Italy, Finland, Czech Republic. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insights and proposals of improvement

Un meta-modèle de composants pour la réalisation d'applications temps-réel flexibles et modulaires

The increase of software complexity along the years has led researchers in the software engineering field to look for approaches for conceiving and designing new systems. For instance, the service-oriented architectures approach is considered nowadays as the most advanced way to develop and integrate fastly modular and flexible applications. One of the software engineering solutions principles is re-usability, and consequently generality, which complicates its appilication in systems where optimizations are often used, like real-time systems. Thus, create real-time systems is expensive, because they must be conceived from scratch. In addition, most real-time systems do not beneficiate of the advantages which comes with software engineering approches, such as modularity and flexibility. This thesis aim to take real time aspects into account on popular and standard SOA solutions, in order to ease the design and development of modular and flexible applications. This will be done by means of a component-based real-time application model, which allows the dynamic reconfiguration of the application architecture. The component model will be an extension to the SCA standard, which integrates quality of service attributs onto the service consumer and provider in order to stablish a real-time specific service level agreement. This model will be executed on the top of a OSGi service platform, the standard de facto for development of modular applications in Java.La croissante complexité du logiciel a mené les chercheurs en génie logiciel à chercher des approcher pour concevoir et projéter des nouveaux systèmes. Par exemple, l'approche des architectures orientées services (SOA) est considérée actuellement comme le moyen le plus avancé pour réaliser et intégrer rapidement des applications modulaires et flexibles. Une des principales préocuppations des solutions en génie logiciel et la réutilisation, et par conséquent, la généralité de la solution, ce qui peut empêcher son application dans des systèmes où des optimisation sont souvent utilisées, tels que les systèmes temps réels. Ainsi, créer un système temps réel est devenu très couteux. De plus, la plupart des systèmes temps réel ne beneficient pas des facilités apportées par le genie logiciel, tels que la modularité et la flexibilité. Le but de cette thèse c'est de prendre en compte ces aspects temps réel dans des solutions populaires et standards SOA pour faciliter la conception et le développement d'applications temps réel flexibles et modulaires. Cela sera fait à l'aide d'un modèle d'applications temps réel orienté composant autorisant des modifications dynamiques dans l'architecture de l'application. Le modèle de composant sera une extension au standard SCA qui intègre des attributs de qualité de service sur le consomateur et le fournisseur de services pour l'établissement d'un accord de niveau de service spécifique au temps réel. Ce modèle sera executé sur une plateforme de services OSGi, le standard de facto pour le developpement d'applications modulaires en Java

The COMPLEX reference framework for HW/SW co-design and power management supporting platform-based design-space exploration

n/

A Framework for Executable Systems Modeling

Systems Modeling Language (SysML), like its parent language, the Unified Modeling Language (UML), consists of a number of independently derived model languages (i.e. state charts, activity models etc.) which have been co-opted into a single modeling framework. This, together with the lack of an overarching meta-model that supports uniform semantics across the various diagram types, has resulted in a large unwieldy and informal language schema. Additionally, SysML does not offer a built in framework for managing time and the scheduling of time based events in a simulation. In response to these challenges, a number of auxiliary standards have been offered by the Object Management Group (OMG); most pertinent here are the foundational UML subset (fUML), Action language for fUML (Alf), and the UML profile for Modeling and Analysis of Real Time and Embedded Systems (MARTE). However, there remains a lack of a similar treatment of SysML tailored towards precise and formal modeling in the systems engineering domain. This work addresses this gap by offering refined semantics for SysML akin to fUML and MARTE standards, aimed at primarily supporting the development of time based simulation models typically applied for model verification and validation in systems engineering. The result of this work offers an Executable Systems Modeling Language (ESysML) and a prototype modeling tool that serves as an implementation test bed for the ESysML language. Additionally a model development process is offered to guide user appropriation of the provided framework for model building

Mega-modeling of complex, distributed, heterogeneous CPS systems

Model-Driven Design (MDD) has proven to be a powerful technology to address the development of increasingly complex embedded systems. Beyond complexity itself, challenges come from the need to deal with parallelism and heterogeneity. System design must target different execution platforms with different OSs and HW resources, even bare-metal, support local and distributed systems, and integrate on top of these heterogeneous platforms multiple functional component coming from different sources (developed from scratch, legacy code and third-party code), with different behaviors operating under different models of computation and communication. Additionally, system optimization to improve performance, power consumption, cost, etc. requires analyzing huge lists of possible design solutions. Addressing these challenges require flexible design technologies able to support from a single-source model its architectural mapping to different computing resources, of different kind and in different platforms. Traditional MDD methods and tools typically rely on fixed elements, which makes difficult their integration under this variability. For example, it is unlikely to integrate in the same system legacy code with a third-party component. Usually some re-coding is required to enable such interconnection. This paper proposes a UML/MARTE system modeling methodology able to address the challenges mentioned above by improving flexibility and scalability. This approach is illustrated and demonstrated on a flight management system. The model is flexible enough to be adapted to different architectural solutions with a minimal effort by changing its underlying Model of Computation and Communication (MoCC). Being completely platform independent, from the same model it is possible to explore various solutions on different execution platforms.This work has been partially funded by the EU and the Spanish MICINN through the ECSEL MegaMart and Comp4Drones projects and the TEC2017-86722-C4-3-R PLATINO project

Metodología dirigida por modelos para las pruebas de un sistema distribuido multiagente de fabricación

Las presiones del mercado han empujado a las empresas de fabricación a reducir costes a la vez que mejoran sus productos, especializándose en las actividades sobre las que pueden añadir valor y colaborando con especialistas de las otras áreas para el resto. Estos sistemas distribuidos de fabricación conllevan nuevos retos, dado que es difícil integrar los distintos sistemas de información y organizarlos de forma coherente. Esto ha llevado a los investigadores a proponer una variedad de abstracciones, arquitecturas y especificaciones que tratan de atacar esta complejidad. Entre ellas, los sistemas de fabricación holónicos han recibido una atención especial: ven las empresas como redes de holones, entidades que a la vez están formados y forman parte de varios otros holones. Hasta ahora, los holones se han implementado para control de fabricación como agentes inteligentes autoconscientes, pero su curva de aprendizaje y las dificultades a la hora de integrarlos con sistemas tradicionales han dificultado su adopción en la industria. Por otro lado, su comportamiento emergente puede que no sea deseable si se necesita que las tareas cumplan ciertas garantías, como ocurren en las relaciones de negocio a negocio o de negocio a cliente y en las operaciones de alto nivel de gestión de planta. Esta tesis propone una visión más flexible del concepto de holón, permitiendo que se sitúe en un espectro más amplio de niveles de inteligencia, y defiende que sea mejor implementar los holones de negocio como servicios, componentes software que pueden ser reutilizados a través de tecnologías estándar desde cualquier parte de la organización. Estos servicios suelen organizarse como catálogos coherentes, conocidos como Arquitecturas Orientadas a Servicios (‘Service Oriented Architectures’ o SOA). Una iniciativa SOA exitosa puede reportar importantes beneficios, pero no es una tarea trivial. Por este motivo, se han propuesto muchas metodologías SOA en la literatura, pero ninguna de ellas cubre explícitamente la necesidad de probar los servicios. Considerando que la meta de las SOA es incrementar la reutilización del software en la organización, es una carencia importante: tener servicios de alta calidad es crucial para una SOA exitosa. Por este motivo, el objetivo principal de la presente Tesis es definir una metodología extendida que ayude a los usuarios a probar los servicios que implementan a sus holones de negocio. Tras considerar las opciones disponibles, se tomó la metodología dirigida por modelos SODM como punto de partida y se reescribió en su mayor parte con el framework Epsilon de código abierto, permitiendo a los usuarios que modelen su conocimiento parcial sobre el rendimiento esperado de los servicios. Este conocimiento parcial es aprovechado por varios nuevos algoritmos de inferencia de requisitos de rendimiento, que extraen los requisitos específicos de cada servicio. Aunque el algoritmo de inferencia de peticiones por segundo es sencillo, el algoritmo de inferencia de tiempos límite pasó por numerosas revisiones hasta obtener el nivel deseado de funcionalidad y rendimiento. Tras una primera formulación basada en programación lineal, se reemplazó con un algoritmo sencillo ad-hoc que recorría el grafo y después con un algoritmo incremental mucho más rápido y avanzado. El algoritmo incremental produce resultados equivalentes y tarda mucho menos, incluso con modelos grandes. Para sacar más partidos de los modelos, esta Tesis también propone un enfoque general para generar artefactos de prueba para múltiples tecnologías a partir de los modelos anotados por los algoritmos. Para evaluar la viabilidad de este enfoque, se implementó para dos posibles usos: reutilizar pruebas unitarias escritas en Java como pruebas de rendimiento, y generar proyectos completos de prueba de rendimiento usando el framework The Grinder para cualquier Servicio Web que esté descrito usando el estándar Web Services Description Language. La metodología completa es finalmente aplicada con éxito a un caso de estudio basado en un área de fabricación de losas cerámicas rectificadas de un grupo de empresas español. En este caso de estudio se parte de una descripción de alto nivel del negocio y se termina con la implementación de parte de uno de los holones y la generación de pruebas de rendimiento para uno de sus Servicios Web. Con su soporte para tanto diseñar como implementar pruebas de rendimiento de los servicios, se puede concluir que SODM+T ayuda a que los usuarios tengan una mayor confianza en sus implementaciones de los holones de negocio observados en sus empresas

Scheduling of a Cyber-Physical System Simulation

The work carried out in this Ph.D. thesis is part of a broader effort to automate industrial simulation systems. In the aeronautics industry, and more especially within Airbus, the historical application of simulation is pilot training. There are also more recent uses in the design of systems, as well as in the integration of these systems. These latter applications require a very high degree of representativeness, where historically the most important factor has been the pilot’s feeling. Systems are now divided into several subsystems that are designed, implemented and validated independently, in order to maintain their control despite the increase in their complexity, and the reduction in time-to-market. Airbus already has expertise in the simulation of these subsystems, as well as their integration into a simulation. This expertise is empirical; simulation specialists use the previous integrations schedulings and adapt it to a new integration. This is a process that can sometimes be time-consuming and can introduce errors. The current trends in the industry are towards flexible production methods, integration of logistics tools for tracking, use of simulation tools in production, as well as resources optimization. Products are increasingly iterations of older, improved products, and tests and simulations are increasingly integrated into their life cycles. Working empirically in an industry that requires flexibility is a constraint, and nowadays it is essential to facilitate the modification of simulations. The problem is, therefore, to set up methods and tools allowing a priori to generate representative simulation schedules. In order to solve this problem, we have developed a method to describe the elements of a simulation, as well as how this simulation can be executed, and functions to generate schedules. Subsequently, we implemented a tool to automate the scheduling search, based on heuristics. Finally, we tested and verified our method and tools in academic and industrial case studies