Industrialising Software Development in Systems Integration

Compared to other disciplines, software engineering as of today is still dependent on craftsmanship of highly-skilled workers. However, with constantly increasing complexity and efforts, existing software engineering approaches appear more and more inefficient. A paradigm shift towards industrial production methods seems inevitable. Recent advances in academia and practice have lead to the availability of industrial key principles in software development as well. Specialization is represented in software product lines, standardization and systematic reuse are available with component-based development, and automation has become accessible through model-driven engineering. While each of the above is well researched in theory, only few cases of successful implementation in the industry are known. This becomes even more evident in specialized areas of software engineering such as systems integration. Today’s IT systems need to quickly adapt to new business requirements due to mergers and acquisitions and cooperations between enterprises. This certainly leads to integration efforts, i.e. joining different subsystems into a cohesive whole in order to provide new functionality. In such an environment. the application of industrial methods for software development seems even more important. Unfortunately, software development in this field is a highly complex and heterogeneous undertaking, as IT environments differ from customer to customer. In such settings, existing industrialization concepts would never break even due to one-time projects and thus insufficient economies of scale and scope. This present thesis, therefore, describes a novel approach for a more efficient implementation of prior key principles while considering the characteristics of software development for systems integration. After identifying the characteristics of the field and their affects on currently-known industrialization concepts, an organizational model for industrialized systems integration has thus been developed. It takes software product lines and adapts them in a way feasible for a systems integrator active in several business domains. The result is a three-tiered model consolidating recurring activities and reducing the efforts for individual product lines. For the implementation of component-based development, the present thesis assesses current component approaches and applies an integration metamodel to the most suitable one. This ensures a common understanding of systems integration across different product lines and thus alleviates component reuse, even across product line boundaries. The approach is furthermore aligned with the organizational model to depict in which way component-based development may be applied in industrialized systems integration. Automating software development in systems integration with model-driven engineering was found to be insufficient in its current state. The reason herefore lies in insufficient tool chains and a lack of modelling standards. As an alternative, an XML-based configuration of products within a software product line has been developed. It models a product line and its products with the help of a domain-specific language and utilizes stylesheet transformations to generate compliable artefacts. The approach has been tested for its feasibility within an exemplarily implementation following a real-world scenario. As not all aspects of industrialized systems integration could be simulated in a laboratory environment, the concept was furthermore validated during several expert interviews with industry representatives. Here, it was also possible to assess cultural and economic aspects. The thesis concludes with a detailed summary of the contributions to the field and suggests further areas of research in the context of industrialized systems integration

Achieving Autonomic Computing through the Use of Variability Models at Run-time

Increasingly, software needs to dynamically adapt its behavior at run-time in response to changing conditions in the supporting computing infrastructure and in the surrounding physical environment. Adaptability is emerging as a necessary underlying capability, particularly for highly dynamic systems such as context-aware or ubiquitous systems. By automating tasks such as installation, adaptation, or healing, Autonomic Computing envisions computing environments that evolve without the need for human intervention. Even though there is a fair amount of work on architectures and their theoretical design, Autonomic Computing was criticised as being a \hype topic" because very little of it has been implemented fully. Furthermore, given that the autonomic system must change states at runtime and that some of those states may emerge and are much less deterministic, there is a great challenge to provide new guidelines, techniques and tools to help autonomic system development. This thesis shows that building up on the central ideas of Model Driven Development (Models as rst-order citizens) and Software Product Lines (Variability Management) can play a signi cant role as we move towards implementing the key self-management properties associated with autonomic computing. The presented approach encompass systems that are capable of modifying their own behavior with respect to changes in their operating environment, by using variability models as if they were the policies that drive the system's autonomic recon guration at runtime. Under a set of recon guration commands, the components that make up the architecture dynamically cooperate to change the con guration of the architecture to a new con guration. This work also provides the implementation of a Model-Based Recon guration Engine (MoRE) to blend the above ideas. Given a context event, MoRE queries the variability models to determine how the system should evolve, and then it provides the mechanisms for modifying the system.Cetina Englada, C. (2010). Achieving Autonomic Computing through the Use of Variability Models at Run-time [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/7484Palanci

Model-Based Engineering of Collaborative Embedded Systems

This Open Access book presents the results of the "Collaborative Embedded Systems" (CrESt) project, aimed at adapting and complementing the methodology underlying modeling techniques developed to cope with the challenges of the dynamic structures of collaborative embedded systems (CESs) based on the SPES development methodology. In order to manage the high complexity of the individual systems and the dynamically formed interaction structures at runtime, advanced and powerful development methods are required that extend the current state of the art in the development of embedded systems and cyber-physical systems. The methodological contributions of the project support the effective and efficient development of CESs in dynamic and uncertain contexts, with special emphasis on the reliability and variability of individual systems and the creation of networks of such systems at runtime. The project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the case studies are therefore selected from areas that are highly relevant for Germany’s economy (automotive, industrial production, power generation, and robotics). It also supports the digitalization of complex and transformable industrial plants in the context of the German government's "Industry 4.0" initiative, and the project results provide a solid foundation for implementing the German government's high-tech strategy "Innovations for Germany" in the coming years

Interdisziplinäre Variabilitätsmodellierung und Performance Analyse für langlebige Systeme in der Automatisierungstechnik

In this day and age, automation systems have to deal with differing customer needs, environmental requirements and multiple application contexts. Automation systems have to be variable enough to satisfy all of these demands. The development and maintenance of such highly-customizable systems is a challenging task and becomes increasingly more difficult considering multiple involved engineering disciplines and long lifetimes, which is characteristic for industrial systems of the automation domain. Software product line engineering provides developers with fundamental concepts to manage the variability of such systems. However, these concepts are not established in the domain of automation systems. In addition, the involvement of multiple engineering disciplines poses a threat to existing SPL techniques. This thesis contributes novel approaches to improve the development and maintenance of software-intensive automation product lines. In total, three major contributions are made, spanning across the complete design phase of an automation system. (1) The feature modeling process is improved by detecting hidden dependencies between interrelated feature models from separate engineering disciplines. Furthermore, hidden dependencies and occurring defects in the feature models are explained in a user-friendly manner. (2) A model-driven development approach is introduced consisting of UML models, which are extended with delta modeling to manage variability in the automation product line. The models encompass information that is needed to automatically derive and analyze a performance model. (3) Subsequently, an efficient family-product-based performance analysis is proposed for the previously derived UML models that is vastly superior compared to common product-based approaches. All of these techniques have been evaluated using multiple case studies, with one being a real-world automation system.In der heutigen Zeit sehen sich Automatisierungssysteme mit einer steigenden Komplexität konfrontiert. Einzelne Kunden haben unterschiedliche Ansprüche an das System und ebenso müssen Umweltbedingungen der verschiedenen Betriebsumgebungen sowie abweichende Anwendungsgebiete bei der Entwicklung eines Automatisierungssystems berücksichtigt werden. Diese Komplexitätsaspekte werden unter dem Stichwort Variabilität zusammengefasst. Ein Automatisierungssystem muss in der Lage sein, sämtliche Anforderungen zu erfüllen. Die Entwicklung und Wartung dieser Systeme wird jedoch durch die stetig wachsende Variabilität und eine potentiell lange Lebensdauer immer schwieriger. Zusätzlich sind an dem Entwicklungsprozess eines Automatisierungssystems mehrere Ingenieursdisziplinen beteiligt. Die Techniken aus dem Bereich der Software-Produktlinienentwicklung bilden Lösungen, um die Variabilität beherrschbar zu machen. In der Automatisierungstechnik sind diese Techniken weitgehend unbekannt und durch den interdisziplinären Charakter oft nicht ausreichend. Daher werden in dieser Dissertation neue Ansätze entwickelt und vorgestellt, die auf die Domäne der Automatisierungstechnik zugeschnitten sind. Insgesamt leistet diese Dissertation folgende drei wissenschaftlichen Beiträge: (1) Die Entwicklung von Feature-Modellen wird durch die Detektion von verborgenen Abhängigkeiten, die zwischen Feature-Modellen der unterschiedlichen Ingenieursdisziplinen existieren, verbessert. Gleichzeitig liefert der vorgestellte Algorithmus die Erklärung für die Existenz dieser Abhängigkeiten. Dieses Konzept wird auf weitere Defekte in Feature-Modellen ausgeweitet. (2) Einen modell-basierten Ansatz zur Entwicklung eines Automatisierungssystems. Der Ansatz basiert auf Modellen aus der UML, die mit Hilfe der Delta Modellierung Variabilität abbilden können. Zusätzlich sind die Modelle mit Informationen über Performance Eigenschaften angereichert und erlauben die automatische Ableitung eines Performance-Modells. (3) Eine effiziente Performance Analyse von allen Varianten des Automatisierungssystems, die auf den zuvor abgeleiteten Performance-Modellen basiert. Alle Beiträge wurden mit Fallstudien evaluiert. Eine Fallstudie repräsentiert ein reales Automatisierungssystem

The Essence of Software Engineering

Software Engineering; Software Development; Software Processes; Software Architectures; Software Managemen

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Fujaba days 2009 : proceedings of the 7th international Fujaba days, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, November 16-17, 2009

Fujaba is an Open Source UML CASE tool project started at the software engineering group of Paderborn University in 1997. In 2002 Fujaba has been redesigned and became the Fujaba Tool Suite with a plug-in architecture allowing developers to add functionality easily while retaining full control over their contributions. Multiple Application Domains Fujaba followed the model-driven development philosophy right from its beginning in 1997. At the early days, Fujaba had a special focus on code generation from UML diagrams resulting in a visual programming language with a special emphasis on object structure manipulating rules. Today, at least six rather independent tool versions are under development in Paderborn, Kassel, and Darmstadt for supporting (1) reengineering, (2) embedded real-time systems, (3) education, (4) specification of distributed control systems, (5) integration with the ECLIPSE platform, and (6) MOF-based integration of system (re-) engineering tools. International Community According to our knowledge, quite a number of research groups have also chosen Fujaba as a platform for UML and MDA related research activities. In addition, quite a number of Fujaba users send requests for more functionality and extensions. Therefore, the 7th International Fujaba Days aimed at bringing together Fujaba developers and Fujaba users from all over the world to present their ideas and projects and to discuss them with each other and with the Fujaba core development team

Fujaba days 2009 : proceedings of the 7th international Fujaba days, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, November 16-17, 2009

Fujaba is an Open Source UML CASE tool project started at the software engineering group of Paderborn University in 1997. In 2002 Fujaba has been redesigned and became the Fujaba Tool Suite with a plug-in architecture allowing developers to add functionality easily while retaining full control over their contributions. Multiple Application Domains Fujaba followed the model-driven development philosophy right from its beginning in 1997. At the early days, Fujaba had a special focus on code generation from UML diagrams resulting in a visual programming language with a special emphasis on object structure manipulating rules. Today, at least six rather independent tool versions are under development in Paderborn, Kassel, and Darmstadt for supporting (1) reengineering, (2) embedded real-time systems, (3) education, (4) specification of distributed control systems, (5) integration with the ECLIPSE platform, and (6) MOF-based integration of system (re-) engineering tools. International Community According to our knowledge, quite a number of research groups have also chosen Fujaba as a platform for UML and MDA related research activities. In addition, quite a number of Fujaba users send requests for more functionality and extensions. Therefore, the 7th International Fujaba Days aimed at bringing together Fujaba developers and Fujaba users from all over the world to present their ideas and projects and to discuss them with each other and with the Fujaba core development team