Integration of experience feedback into the product lifecycle: an approach to best respond to the bidding process

Bidding process allows a client to choose a bidder to realize an embodiment of work, supply or service. From the bidder point of view, there are several obvious risks when responding because he bets on a future development that hasn’t been yet realized. We propose to assist the bidder with decision support tools based on past experiences to detect, report and minimize these potential risks. In this paper, we present the definition of a conceptual architecture to integrate experience feedback into the product lifecycle taking into account all stages of product lifecycle to best respond new bidding processes

Specification Patterns for Robotic Missions

Mobile and general-purpose robots increasingly support our everyday life, requiring dependable robotics control software. Creating such software mainly amounts to implementing their complex behaviors known as missions. Recognizing the need, a large number of domain-specific specification languages has been proposed. These, in addition to traditional logical languages, allow the use of formally specified missions for synthesis, verification, simulation, or guiding the implementation. For instance, the logical language LTL is commonly used by experts to specify missions, as an input for planners, which synthesize the behavior a robot should have. Unfortunately, domain-specific languages are usually tied to specific robot models, while logical languages such as LTL are difficult to use by non-experts. We present a catalog of 22 mission specification patterns for mobile robots, together with tooling for instantiating, composing, and compiling the patterns to create mission specifications. The patterns provide solutions for recurrent specification problems, each of which detailing the usage intent, known uses, relationships to other patterns, and---most importantly---a template mission specification in temporal logic. Our tooling produces specifications expressed in the LTL and CTL temporal logics to be used by planners, simulators, or model checkers. The patterns originate from 245 realistic textual mission requirements extracted from the robotics literature, and they are evaluated upon a total of 441 real-world mission requirements and 1251 mission specifications. Five of these reflect scenarios we defined with two well-known industrial partners developing human-size robots. We validated our patterns' correctness with simulators and two real robots

Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS - a collection of Technical Notes Part 1

This report provides an introduction and overview of the Technical Topic Notes (TTNs) produced in the Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS (Tigars) project. These notes aim to support the development and evaluation of autonomous vehicles. Part 1 addresses: Assurance-overview and issues, Resilience and Safety Requirements, Open Systems Perspective and Formal Verification and Static Analysis of ML Systems. Part 2: Simulation and Dynamic Testing, Defence in Depth and Diversity, Security-Informed Safety Analysis, Standards and Guidelines

DEVELOPMENT OF PROBLEM-SPECIFIC MODELING LANGUAGE TO SUPPORT SOFTWARE VARIABILITY IN "SMART HOME" SYSTEMS

Building conceptual models for software design, in particular for high-tech applications such as smart home systems, is a complex task that significantly affects the efficiency of their development processes. One of the innovative methods of solving this problem is the use of domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs), which can reduce the time and other project resources required to create such systems. The subject of research in this paper is approaches to the development of DSML for Smart Home systems as a separate class of Internet of Things systems. The purpose of this work is to propose an approach to the development of DSMLs based on a model of variability of the properties of such a system. The following tasks are being solved: analysis of some existing approaches to the creation of DSMLs; construction of a multifaceted classification of requirements for them, application of these requirements to the design of the syntax of a specific DSML-V for the creation of variable software in smart home systems; development of a technological scheme and quantitative metrics for experimental evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The following methods are used: variability modeling based on the property model, formal notations for describing the syntax of the DSML-V language, and the use of the open CASE tool metaDepth. Results: a multifaceted classification of requirements for a broad class of DSML languages is built; the basic syntactic constructions of the DSML-V language are developed to support the properties of software variability of "Smart Home" systems; a formal description of such syntax in the Backus-Naur notation is given; a technological scheme for compiling DSML-V specifications into the syntax of the language of the open CASE tool metaDepth is created; the effectiveness of the proposed approach using quantitative metrics is experimentally investigated. Conclusions: the proposed method of developing a specialized problem-oriented language for smart home systems allows for multilevel modeling of the variability properties of its software components and provides an increase in the efficiency of programming such models by about 14% compared to existing approaches

Accreditation and related regulatory matters in the UK

About the book: This volume presents a rich account of the development of accreditation and evaluation in 20 European countries. The authors are leaders in the field and they have cooperated in this effort by writing richly different, often deep and insightful analyses of the situation in their country. The two editors have added a synopsis detailing the main trends, and sketching commonalities as well as contrasts in the developments across Europe. The book shows how accreditation is becoming a main mechanism in the steering of higher education all over Europe. The book is unique in its analysis of forces driving towards the spread of different models of accreditation in the emerging European Higher Education area. Readers will obtain an up-to-date picture of the state of affairs of accreditation in the framework of evaluation activities in Europe. They will gain an understanding of why accreditation and evaluation systems have evolved the way they have, and subsequently, they will obtain more realistic views on potentialities for European comparability and cooperation in this area. This volume is of interest to researchers and policy-making staff in higher education, especially those involved at the level of national systems for quality assurance, accreditation, internationalization and the Bologna process. It is also of interest to Master/PhD students in (higher) education management

Next generation software environments : principles, problems, and research directions

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research and development in software environments. Conferences have been devoted to the topic of practical environments, journal papers produced, and commercial systems sold. Given all the activity, one might expect a great deal of consensus on issues, approaches, and techniques. This is not the case, however. Indeed, the term "environment" is still used in a variety of conflicting ways. Nevertheless substantial progress has been made and we are at least nearing consensus on many critical issues.The purpose of this paper is to characterize environments, describe several important principles that have emerged in the last decade or so, note current open problems, and describe some approaches to these problems, with particular emphasis on the activities of one large-scale research program, the Arcadia project. Consideration is also given to two related topics: empirical evaluation and technology transition. That is, how can environments and their constituents be evaluated, and how can new developments be moved effectively into the production sector