A Model Driven Approach to Model Transformations

The OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative has been the focus of much attention in both academia and industry, due to its promise of more rapid and consistent software development through the increased use of models. In order for MDA to reach its full potential, the ability to manipulate and transform models { most obviously from the Platform Independent Model (PIM) to the Platform Specific Models (PSM) { is vital. Recognizing this need, the OMG issued a Request For Proposals (RFP) largely concerned with finding a suitable mechanism for trans- forming models. This paper outlines the relevant background material, summarizes the approach taken by the QVT-Partners (to whom the authors belong), presents a non-trivial example using the QVT-Partners approach, and finally sketches out what the future holds for model transformations

Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

Composition and Self-Adaptation of Service-Based Systems with Feature Models

The adoption of mechanisms for reusing software in pervasive systems has not yet become standard practice. This is because the use of pre-existing software requires the selection, composition and adaptation of prefabricated software parts, as well as the management of some complex problems such as guaranteeing high levels of efficiency and safety in critical domains. In addition to the wide variety of services, pervasive systems are composed of many networked heterogeneous devices with embedded software. In this work, we promote the safe reuse of services in service-based systems using two complementary technologies, Service-Oriented Architecture and Software Product Lines. In order to do this, we extend both the service discovery and composition processes defined in the DAMASCo framework, which currently does not deal with the service variability that constitutes pervasive systems. We use feature models to represent the variability and to self-adapt the services during the composition in a safe way taking context changes into consideration. We illustrate our proposal with a case study related to the driving domain of an Intelligent Transportation System, handling the context information of the environment.Work partially supported by the projects TIN2008-05932, TIN2008-01942, TIN2012-35669, TIN2012-34840 and CSD2007-0004 funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER; P09-TIC-05231 and P11-TIC-7659 funded by Andalusian Government; and FP7-317731 funded by EU. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Web service control of component-based agile manufacturing systems

Current global business competition has resulted in significant challenges for manufacturing and production sectors focused on shorter product lifecyc1es, more diverse and customized products as well as cost pressures from competitors and customers. To remain competitive, manufacturers, particularly in automotive industry, require the next generation of manufacturing paradigms supporting flexible and reconfigurable production systems that allow quick system changeovers for various types of products. In addition, closer integration of shop floor and business systems is required as indicated by the research efforts in investigating "Agile and Collaborative Manufacturing Systems" in supporting the production unit throughout the manufacturing lifecycles. The integration of a business enterprise with its shop-floor and lifecycle supply partners is currently only achieved through complex proprietary solutions due to differences in technology, particularly between automation and business systems. The situation is further complicated by the diverse types of automation control devices employed. Recently, the emerging technology of Service Oriented Architecture's (SOA's) and Web Services (WS) has been demonstrated and proved successful in linking business applications. The adoption of this Web Services approach at the automation level, that would enable a seamless integration of business enterprise and a shop-floor system, is an active research topic within the automotive domain. If successful, reconfigurable automation systems formed by a network of collaborative autonomous and open control platform in distributed, loosely coupled manufacturing environment can be realized through a unifying platform of WS interfaces for devices communication. The adoption of SOA- Web Services on embedded automation devices can be achieved employing Device Profile for Web Services (DPWS) protocols which encapsulate device control functionality as provided services (e.g. device I/O operation, device state notification, device discovery) and business application interfaces into physical control components of machining automation. This novel approach supports the possibility of integrating pervasive enterprise applications through unifying Web Services interfaces and neutral Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) message communication between control systems and business applications over standard Ethernet-Local Area Networks (LAN's). In addition, the re-configurability of the automation system is enhanced via the utilisation of Web Services throughout an automated control, build, installation, test, maintenance and reuse system lifecycle via device self-discovery provided by the DPWS protocol...cont'd

Ontology based semantic-predictive model for reconfigurable automation systems

Due to increasing product variety and complexity, capability to support reconfiguration is a key competitiveness indicator for current automation system within large enterprises. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems could efficiently reuse existing knowledge in order to decrease the required skills and design time to launch new products. However, most of the software tools developed to support design of reconfigurable manufacturing system lack integration of product, process and resource knowledge, and the design data is not transferred from domain-specific engineering tools to a collaborative and intelligent platform to capture and reuse design knowledge. The focus of this research study is to enable integrated automation systems design to support a knowledge reuse approach to predict process and resource changes when product requirements change. The proposed methodology is based on a robust semantic-predictive model supported by ontology representations and predictive algorithms for the integration of Product, Process, Resource and Requirement (PPRR) data, so that future automation system changes can be identified at early design stages

A knowledge based approach to integration of products, processes and reconfigurable automation resources

The success of next generation automotive companies will depend upon their ability to adapt to ever changing market trends thus becoming highly responsive. In the automotive sector, the assembly line design and reconfiguration is an especially critical and extremely complex job. The current research addresses some of the aspects of this activity under the umbrella of a larger ongoing research project called Business Driven Automation (BDA) project. The BDA project aims to carry out complete virtual 3D modeling-based verifications of the assembly line for new or revised products in contrast to the prevalent practice of manual evaluation of effects of product change on physical resources. [Continues.

Kinesthetics eXtreme: An External Infrastructure for Monitoring Distributed Legacy Systems

Autonomic computing - self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing applications, systems and networks - is widely believed to be a promising solution to ever-increasing system complexity and the spiraling costs of human system management as systems scale to global proportions. Most results to date, however, suggest ways to architect new software constructed from the ground up as autonomic systems, whereas in the real world organizations continue to use stovepipe legacy systems and/or build 'systems of systems' that draw from a gamut of new and legacy components involving disparate technologies from numerous vendors. Our goal is to retrofit autonomic computing onto such systems, externally, without any need to understand or modify the code, and in many cases even when it is impossible to recompile. We present a meta-architecture implemented as active middleware infrastructure to explicitly add autonomic services via an attached feedback loop that provides continual monitoring and, as needed, reconfiguration and/or repair. Our lightweight design and separation of concerns enables easy adoption of individual components, as well as the full infrastructure, for use with a large variety of legacy, new systems, and systems of systems. We summarize several experiments spanning multiple domains

Uma solução de implantação auto-adaptativa para plataformas Android

Orientador: Cecília Mary Fischer RubiraDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Os dispositivos móveis, hoje em dia, fornecem recursos semelhantes aos de um computador pessoal de uma década atrás, permitindo o desenvolvimento de aplicações complexas. Consequentemente, essas aplicações móveis podem exigir tolerar falhas em tempo de execução. No entanto, a maioria das aplicações móveis de hoje são implantados usando configurações estáticas, tornando difícil tolerar falhas durante a sua execução. Nós propomos uma infraestrutura de implantação auto-adaptativa para lidar com este problema. A nossa solução oferece um circuito autônomo que administra o modelo de configuração atual da aplicação usando um modelo de características dinâmico associado com o modelo arquitetônico da mesma. Em tempo de execução, de acordo com a seleção dinâmica de características, o modelo arquitetônico implantado na plataforma se re-configura para fornecer uma nova solução. Uma aplicação Android foi implementada utilizando a solução proposta, e durante sua execução, a disponibilidade de serviços foi alterada, de tal forma que sua configuração corrente foi dinamicamente alterada para tolerar a indisponibilidade dos serviçosAbstract: Mobile devices, nowadays, provide similar capabilities as a personal computer of a decade ago, allowing the development of complex applications. Consequently, these mobile applications may require tolerating failures at runtime. However, most of the today¿s mobile applications are deployed using static configurations, making difficult to tolerate failure during their execution. We propose an adaptive deployment infrastructure to deal with this problem. Our solution offers an autonomic loop that manages the current configuration model of the application using a dynamic feature model associated with the architectural model. During runtime, according to the dynamic feature selection, the deployed architectural model can be modified to provide a new deployment solution. An Android application was implemented using the proposed solution, and during its execution, the services availability was altered so that its current configuration was changed dynamically in order to tolerate the unavailability of servicesMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computação131830/2013-9CNP

A model-based approach for supporting flexible automation production systems and an agent-based implementaction

158 p.En esta Tesis Doctoral se plantea una arquitectura de gestión genérica y personalizable, capaz de asegurar el cumplimiento de los requisitos de calidad de servicio (QoS) de un sistema de control industrial. Esta arquitectura permite la modificación de los mecanismos de detección y recuperación de los requisitos de QoS en función de diversos tipos de ésta. Como prueba de concepto, la arquitectura de gestión ha sido implementada mediante un middleware basado en sistemas multi-agente. Este middleware proporciona una serie de agentes distribuidos, los cuales se encargan de la monitorización y recuperación de las QoS en caso de su perdida.La incorporación de los mecanismos de reconfiguración incrementa la complejidad de los sistemas de control. Con el fin de facilitar el diseño de estos sistemas, se ha presentado un framework basado en modelos que guía y facilita el diseño de los sistemas de control reconfigurables. Este framework proporciona una serie de herramientas basadas en modelos que permiten la generación automática del código de control del sistema, así como de los mecanismos de monitorización y reconfiguración de los agentes del middleware.La implementación de la arquitectura ha sido validada mediante una serie de escenarios basados en una célula de montaje real