Trend Analysis of Belief-State History with Discrete Wavelet Transform for Improved Intention Discovery

Software Product Lines (SPL) have emerged as a new paradigm of software development. By means of mass production of customized software products, SPL has the potential to significantly reduce development time and cost while improving the quality of software systems. Currently, there is still a severe shortage of tools that support the decision-making process for software clients to interactively order software products due to the difficulty of software customization, especially via dialogue in natural language. While most of the existing approaches use POMDP-based dialogue management, this thesis research proposes to introduce historical information of belief states into the POMDP model and to analyze its trend with discrete wavelet transformation (DWT). Accordingly, a new algorithm is developed to improve the accuracy of intention discovery with trend analysis, and to reduce the dialog length by switching POMDP policies between contextual control modes according to the anticipated knowledge of different users. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method are examined by experiments with simulation

An Interactive Approach to Software Visualization for Customization

The Software Product Line (SPL) provides software customization by composing several different web services together. When further supported by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), SPL offers unprecedented advantages for reusing software artifacts in mass customization of software applications, leading to radically reduced time, cost, and effort of software development. A Petri-Net based visualization system for the software customization has been developed in our research group. This thesis works on enhancement of the prior work by introducing an interactive approach of software visualization for software customization. The proposed approach segregates the users based on their interaction with the system and the best suited visualizations are selected and displayed for the users. In this thesis an interactive framework based on Contextual Control Model has been proposed. A usability study has been conducted to validate the improvements in the usability of the proposed system compared to the existing system