A Review on Present State-of-the-Art of Self Adaptive Dynamic Software Architecture

Enterprises across the world are increasingly depending on software to drive their businesses. It is more so with distributing computing technologies in place that pave way for realization of seamless business integration. On the other hand those complex software systems are expected to adapt changes dynamically without causing administrative overhead. Moreover software systems should exhibit fault tolerance, location transparency, availability, scalability self-adaptive capabilities to fit into present enterprise business use cases. To cope with such expectations software systems are to be built with a dynamic and self-adaptive software architecture which drives home quality of services perfectly. The point made here is that software systems are facing unprecedented level of complexity and aware of self-adaptation. Therefore it is essential to have technical knowhow pertaining to self adaptive dynamic software architecture. Towards this end, we explore present state-of-the-art of this area in software engineering domain. It throws light into dynamic software architectures, distributed component technologies for realizing such architectures, besides dynamic software composition and metrics to evaluate the quality of dynamic adaptation

A Reasoning Framework for Dependability in Software Architectures

The degree to which a software system possesses specified levels of software quality attributes, such as performance and modifiability, often have more influence on the success and failure of those systems than the functional requirements. One method of improving the level of a software quality that a product possesses is to reason about the structure of the software architecture in terms of how well the structure supports the quality. This is accomplished by reasoning through software quality attribute scenarios while designing the software architecture of the system. As society relies more heavily on software systems, the dependability of those systems becomes critical. In this study, a framework for reasoning about the dependability of a software system is presented. Dependability is a multi-faceted software quality attribute that encompasses reliability, availability, confidentiality, integrity, maintainability and safety. This makes dependability more complex to reason about than other quality attributes. The goal of this reasoning framework is to help software architects build dependable software systems by using quantitative and qualitative techniques to reason about dependability in software architectures

Development of a personalization model for web applications in a context of model-driven development

ABSTRACT: This dissertation develops and validates a maintainable approach to improve the modifiability of personalized web applications and to reduce the technical complexity to integrate personalization strategies in a short time in a business environment. The Software Reference Architecture to face the maintainability problem was proposed and the MAMPA framework (Model-driven Approach to enhance the Modifiability of Personalized Web Applications) was implemented

An Ontology Centric Architecture For Mediating Interactions In Semantic Web-Based E-Commerce Environments

Information freely generated, widely distributed and openly interpreted is a rich source of creative energy in the digital age that we live in. As we move further into this irrevocable relationship with self-growing and actively proliferating information spaces, we are also finding ourselves overwhelmed, disheartened and powerless in the presence of so much information. We are at a point where, without domain familiarity or expert guidance, sifting through the copious volumes of information to find relevance quickly turns into a mundane task often requiring enormous patience. The realization of accomplishment soon turns into a matter of extensive cognitive load, serendipity or just plain luck. This dissertation describes a theoretical framework to analyze user interactions based on mental representations in a medium where the nature of the problem-solving task emphasizes the interaction between internal task representation and the external problem domain. The framework is established by relating to work in behavioral science, sociology, cognitive science and knowledge engineering, particularly Herbert Simon’s (1957; 1989) notion of satisficing on bounded rationality and Schön’s (1983) reflective model. Mental representations mediate situated actions in our constrained digital environment and provide the opportunity for completing a task. Since assistive aids to guide situated actions reduce complexity in the task environment (Vessey 1991; Pirolli et al. 1999), the framework is used as the foundation for developing mediating structures to express the internal, external and mental representations. Interaction aids superimposed on mediating structures that model thought and action will help to guide the “perpetual novice” (Borgman 1996) through the vast digital information spaces by orchestrating better cognitive fit between the task environment and the task solution. This dissertation presents an ontology centric architecture for mediating interactions is presented in a semantic web based e-commerce environment. The Design Science approach is applied for this purpose. The potential of the framework is illustrated as a functional model by using it to model the hierarchy of tasks in a consumer decision-making process as it applies in an e-commerce setting. Ontologies are used to express the perceptual operations on the external task environment, the intuitive operations on the internal task representation, and the constraint satisfaction and situated actions conforming to reasoning from the cognitive fit. It is maintained that actions themselves cannot be enforced, but when the meaning from mental imagery and the task environment are brought into coordination, it leads to situated actions that change the present situation into one closer to what is desired. To test the usability of the ontologies we use the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to express the semantics of the three representations. We also use OWL to validate the knowledge representations and to make rule-based logical inferences on the ontological semantics. An e-commerce application was also developed to show how effective guidance can be provided by constructing semantically rich target pages from the knowledge manifested in the ontologies

Architecture-level Dependence Analysis for Software Systems

Software architecture description languages provide a means to formally describe software systems at a high level of abstraction. They capture the high-level structure and/or behavior of the system, thus providing a basis for course-grain static analyses. Dependence analysis has been used as a basis for program optimization, debugging, and testing. We are developing a dependence analysis technique, called chaining, for use with formal architectural descriptions, and implementing the technique in a tool called Aladdin