Model Driven Development and Maintenance of Business Logic for Information Systems

Since information systems become more and more important in today\''s society, business firms, organizations, and individuals rely on these systems to manage their daily business and social activities. The dependency of possibly critical business processes on complex IT systems requires a strategy that supports IT departments in reducing the time needed to implement changed or new domain requirements of functional departments. In this context, software models help to manage system\''s complexity and provide a tool for communication and documentation purposes. Moreover, software engineers tend to use automated software model processing such as code generation to improve development and maintenance processes. Particularly in the context of web-based information systems, a number of model driven approaches were developed. However, we believe that compared to the user interface layer and the persistency layer, there could be a better support of consistent approaches providing a suitable architecture for the consistent model driven development of business logic. To ameliorate this situation, we developed an architectural blueprint consisting of meta models, tools, and a method support for model driven development and maintenance of business logic from analysis until system maintenance. This blueprint, which we call Amabulo infrastructure, consists of five layers and provides concepts and tools to set up and apply concrete infrastructures for model driven development projects. Modeling languages can be applied as needed. In this thesis we focus on business logic layers of J2EE applications. However, concrete code generation rules can be adapted easily for different target platforms. After providing a high-level overview of our Amabulo infrastructure, we describe its layers in detail: The Visual Model Layer is responsible for all visual modeling tasks. For this purpose, we discuss requirements for visual software models for business logic, analyze several visual modeling languages concerning their usefulness, and provide an UML profile for business logic models. The Abstract Model Layer provides an abstract view on the business logic model in the form of a domain specific model, which we call Amabulo model. An Amabulo model is reduced to pure logical information concerning business logic aspects. It focuses on information that is relevant for the code generation. For this purpose, an Amabulo model integrates model elements for process modeling, state modeling, and structural modeling. It is used as a common interface between visual modeling languages and code generators. Visual models of the Visual Model Layer are automatically transformed into an Amabulo model. The Abstract System Layer provides a formal view onto the system in the form of a Coloured Petri Net (CPN). A Coloured Petri Net representation of the modeled business logic is a formal structure and independent of the actual business logic implementation. After an Amabulo model is automatically transformed into a CPN, it can be analyzed and simulated before any line of code is generated. The Code Generation Layer is responsible for code generation. To support the design and implementation of project-specific code generators, we discuss several aspects of code integration issues and provide object-oriented design approaches to tackle the issues. Then, we provide a conceptual mapping of Amabulo model elements into architectural elements of a J2EE infrastructure. This mapping explicitly considers robustness features, which support a later manual integration of generated critical code artifacts and external systems. The Application Layer is the target layer of an Amabulo infrastructure and comprises generated code artifacts. These artifacts are instances of a specific target platform specification, and they can be modified for integration purposes with development tools. Through the contributions in this thesis, we aim to provide an integrated set of solutions to support an efficient model driven development and maintenance process for the business logic of information systems. Therefore, we provide a consistent infrastructure blueprint that considers modeling tasks, model analysis tasks, and code generation tasks. As a result, we see potential for reducing the development and maintenance efforts for changed domain requirements and simultaneously guaranteeing robustness and maintainability even after several changes

Photonics design tool for advanced CMOS nodes

Recently, the authors have demonstrated large-scale integrated systems with several million transistors and hundreds of photonic elements. Yielding such large-scale integrated systems requires a design-for-manufacture rigour that is embodied in the 10 000 to 50 000 design rules that these designs must comply within advanced complementary metal-oxide semiconductor manufacturing. Here, the authors present a photonic design automation tool which allows automatic generation of layouts without design-rule violations. This tool is written in SKILL, the native language of the mainstream electric design automation software, Cadence. This allows seamless integration of photonic and electronic design in a single environment. The tool leverages intuitive photonic layer definitions, allowing the designer to focus on the physical properties rather than on technology-dependent details. For the first time the authors present an algorithm for removal of design-rule violations from photonic layouts based on Manhattan discretisation, Boolean and sizing operations. This algorithm is not limited to the implementation in SKILL, and can in principle be implemented in any scripting language. Connectivity is achieved with software-defined waveguide ports and low-level procedures that enable auto-routing of waveguide connections.Comment: 5 pages, 10 figure

Towards a service-oriented e-infrastructure for multidisciplinary environmental research

Research e-infrastructures are considered to have generic and thematic parts. The generic part provids high-speed networks, grid (large-scale distributed computing) and database systems (digital repositories and data transfer systems) applicable to all research commnities irrespective of discipline. Thematic parts are specific deployments of e-infrastructures to support diverse virtual research communities. The needs of a virtual community of multidisciplinary envronmental researchers are yet to be investigated. We envisage and argue for an e-infrastructure that will enable environmental researchers to develop environmental models and software entirely out of existing components through loose coupling of diverse digital resources based on the service-oriented achitecture. We discuss four specific aspects for consideration for a future e-infrastructure: 1) provision of digital resources (data, models & tools) as web services, 2) dealing with stateless and non-transactional nature of web services using workflow management systems, 3) enabling web servce discovery, composition and orchestration through semantic registries, and 4) creating synergy with existing grid infrastructures

MDA-based ATL transformation to generate MVC 2 web models

Development and maintenance of Web application is still a complex and error-prone process. We need integrated techniques and tool support for automated generation of Web systems and a ready prescription for easy maintenance. The MDA approach proposes an architecture taking into account the development and maintenance of large and complex software. In this paper, we apply MDA approach for generating PSM from UML design to MVC 2Web implementation. That is why we have developed two meta-models handling UML class diagrams and MVC 2 Web applications, then we have to set up transformation rules. These last are expressed in ATL language. To specify the transformation rules (especially CRUD methods) we used a UML profiles. To clearly illustrate the result generated by this transformation, we converted the XMI file generated in an EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) model.Comment: International Journal of Computer Science & Information Technology-201

Knowledge Discovery in the SCADA Databases Used for the Municipal Power Supply System

This scientific paper delves into the problems related to the develop-ment of intellectual data analysis system that could support decision making to manage municipal power supply services. The management problems of mu-nicipal power supply system have been specified taking into consideration modern tendencies shown by new technologies that allow for an increase in the energy efficiency. The analysis findings of the system problems related to the integrated computer-aided control of the power supply for the city have been given. The consideration was given to the hierarchy-level management decom-position model. The objective task targeted at an increase in the energy effi-ciency to minimize expenditures and energy losses during the generation and transportation of energy carriers to the Consumer, the optimization of power consumption at the prescribed level of the reliability of pipelines and networks and the satisfaction of Consumers has been defined. To optimize the support of the decision making a new approach to the monitoring of engineering systems and technological processes related to the energy consumption and transporta-tion using the technologies of geospatial analysis and Knowledge Discovery in databases (KDD) has been proposed. The data acquisition for analytical prob-lems is realized in the wireless heterogeneous medium, which includes soft-touch VPN segments of ZigBee technology realizing the 6LoWPAN standard over the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and also the segments of the networks of cellu-lar communications. JBoss Application Server is used as a server-based plat-form for the operation of the tools used for the retrieval of data collected from sensor nodes, PLC and energy consumption record devices. The KDD tools are developed using Java Enterprise Edition platform and Spring and ORM Hiber-nate technologies