Applying tropos to socio-technical system design and runtime configuration

Recent trends in Software Engineering have introduced the importance of reconsidering the traditional idea of software design as a socio-tecnical problem, where human agents are integral part of the system along with hardware and software components. Design and runtime support for Socio-Technical Systems (STSs) requires appropriate modeling techniques and non-traditional infrastructures. Agent-oriented software methodologies are natural solutions to the development of STSs, both humans and technical components are conceptualized and analyzed as part of the same system. In this paper, we illustrate a number of Tropos features that we believe fundamental to support the development and runtime reconfiguration of STSs. Particularly, we focus on two critical design issues: risk analysis and location variability. We show how they are integrated and used into a planning-based approach to support the designer in evaluating and choosing the best design alternative. Finally, we present a generic framework to develop self-reconfigurable STSs

An Energy Driven Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks

Most wireless sensor networks operate with very limited energy sources-their batteries, and hence their usefulness in real life applications is severely constrained. The challenging issues are how to optimize the use of their energy or to harvest their own energy in order to lengthen their lives for wider classes of application. Tackling these important issues requires a robust architecture that takes into account the energy consumption level of functional constituents and their interdependency. Without such architecture, it would be difficult to formulate and optimize the overall energy consumption of a wireless sensor network. Unlike most current researches that focus on a single energy constituent of WSNs independent from and regardless of other constituents, this paper presents an Energy Driven Architecture (EDA) as a new architecture and indicates a novel approach for minimising the total energy consumption of a WS

Conceptualizing human resilience in the face of the global epidemiology of cyber attacks

Computer security is a complex global phenomenon where different populations interact, and the infection of one person creates risk for another. Given the dynamics and scope of cyber campaigns, studies of local resilience without reference to global populations are inadequate. In this paper we describe a set of minimal requirements for implementing a global epidemiological infrastructure to understand and respond to large-scale computer security outbreaks. We enumerate the relevant dimensions, the applicable measurement tools, and define a systematic approach to evaluate cyber security resilience. From the experience in conceptualizing and designing a cross-national coordinated phishing resilience evaluation we describe the cultural, logistic, and regulatory challenges to this proposed public health approach to global computer assault resilience. We conclude that mechanisms for systematic evaluations of global attacks and the resilience against those attacks exist. Coordinated global science is needed to address organised global ecrime

A model driven approach for software systems reliability

The reliability assurance of software systems from design to deployment level through transformation techniques and model driven approach, is described. Once the reliability mechanisms provided by current component-based development architectures (CBDA) are designed in a platform-independent way, platform-based design and implementation models must be extended. Current CBDAs, such as Enterprise Java Beans, address a considerable range of features to support system reliability. The evaluation aims to test maturity of the approach, its applicability, and the effectiveness of reliability models. The techniques such as process algebras are generally considered time consuming, in regard to software development

A New Approach for Quality Management in Pervasive Computing Environments

This paper provides an extension of MDA called Context-aware Quality Model Driven Architecture (CQ-MDA) which can be used for quality control in pervasive computing environments. The proposed CQ-MDA approach based on ContextualArchRQMM (Contextual ARCHitecture Quality Requirement MetaModel), being an extension to the MDA, allows for considering quality and resources-awareness while conducting the design process. The contributions of this paper are a meta-model for architecture quality control of context-aware applications and a model driven approach to separate architecture concerns from context and quality concerns and to configure reconfigurable software architectures of distributed systems. To demonstrate the utility of our approach, we use a videoconference system.Comment: 10 pages, 10 Figures, Oral Presentation in ECSA 201

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