Ensuring Cyber-Security in Smart Railway Surveillance with SHIELD

Modern railways feature increasingly complex embedded computing systems for surveillance, that are moving towards fully wireless smart-sensors. Those systems are aimed at monitoring system status from a physical-security viewpoint, in order to detect intrusions and other environmental anomalies. However, the same systems used for physical-security surveillance are vulnerable to cyber-security threats, since they feature distributed hardware and software architectures often interconnected by ‘open networks’, like wireless channels and the Internet. In this paper, we show how the integrated approach to Security, Privacy and Dependability (SPD) in embedded systems provided by the SHIELD framework (developed within the EU funded pSHIELD and nSHIELD research projects) can be applied to railway surveillance systems in order to measure and improve their SPD level. SHIELD implements a layered architecture (node, network, middleware and overlay) and orchestrates SPD mechanisms based on ontology models, appropriate metrics and composability. The results of prototypical application to a real-world demonstrator show the effectiveness of SHIELD and justify its practical applicability in industrial settings

Integrated management of hierarchical levels: towards a CAPE tool

The integration of decision-making procedures usually assigned to different hierarchical production systems requires the use of complex mathematical models and high computational efforts, in addition to the need of an extensive management of data and knowledge within the production systems. This work addresses this integration problem and proposes a comprehensive solution approach, as well as guidelines for Computer Aided Process Engineering (CAPE) tools managing the corresponding cyberinfrastructure. This study presents a methodology based on a domain ontology which is used as the connector between the introduced data, the different available formulations developed to solve the decision-making problem, and the necessary information to build the finally required problem instance. The methodology has demonstrated its capability to help exploiting different available decision-making problem formulations in complex cases, leading to new applications and/or extensions of these available formulations in a robust and flexible way.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Grid-enabled Workflows for Industrial Product Design

This paper presents a generic approach for developing and using Grid-based workflow technology for enabling cross-organizational engineering applications. Using industrial product design examples from the automotive and aerospace industries we highlight the main requirements and challenges addressed by our approach and describe how it can be used for enabling interoperability between heterogeneous workflow engines

Ontology technology for the development and deployment of learning technology systems - a survey

The World-Wide Web is undergoing dramatic changes at the moment. The Semantic Web is an initiative to bring meaning to the Web. The Semantic Web is based on ontology technology – a knowledge representation framework – at its core. We illustrate the importance of this evolutionary development. We survey five scenarios demonstrating different forms of applications of ontology technologies in the development and deployment of learning technology systems. Ontology technologies are highly useful to organise, personalise, and publish learning content and to discover, generate, and compose learning objects

Systematic development of courseware systems

Various difficulties have been reported in relation to the development of courseware systems. A central problem is to address the needs of not only the learner, but also instructor, developer, and other stakeholders, and to integrate these different needs. Another problem area is courseware architectures, to which much work has been dedicated recently. We present a systematic approach to courseware development – a methodology for courseware engineering – that addresses these problems. This methodology is rooted in the educational domain and is based on methods for software development in this context. We illustrate how this methodology can improve the quality of courseware systems and the development process

Metamodel for Tracing Concerns across the Life Cycle

Several aspect-oriented approaches have been proposed to specify aspects at different phases in the software life cycle. Aspects can appear within a phase, be refined or mapped to other aspects in later phases, or even disappear.\ud Tracing aspects is necessary to support understandability and maintainability of software systems. Although several approaches have been introduced to address traceability of aspects, two important limitations can be observed. First, tracing is not yet tackled for the entire life cycle. Second, the traceability model that is applied usually refers to elements of specific aspect languages, thereby limiting the reusability of the adopted traceability model.We propose the concern traceability metamodel (CTM) that enables traceability of concerns throughout the life cycle, and which is independent from the aspect languages that are used. CTM can be enhanced to provide additional properties for tracing, and be instantiated to define\ud customized traceability models with respect to the required aspect languages. We have implemented CTM in the tool M-Trace, that uses XML-based representations of the models and XQuery queries to represent tracing information. CTM and M-Trace are illustrated for a Concurrent Versioning System to trace aspects from the requirements level to architecture design level and the implementation

Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework