Database Engineering Processes with DB-MAIN

Software engineering needs more and more to be supported by CASE tools. Since databases are at the heart of information systems, they deserve a particular attention. More and more CASE tools allow method engineers to implement their own methodology and they allow users to record all their actions, with their rationales, in order to improve the quality of the design and the quality of the documentation of the design. DBMAIN is such a database oriented tool with a method description and a documentation generation facilities. But it has its particularities like its procedural non-deterministic Method Description Language, its well integrated multilevel histories and its userfriendly methodological engine

The Dag-Brucken ASRS Case Study

In 1996 an agreement was made between a well-known beverage manufacturer, Super-Cola Taiwan, (SCT) and a small Australian electrical engineering company, Dag-Brücken ASRS Pty Ltd, (DB), to provide an automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) facility as part of SCT’s production facilities in Asia. Recognising the potential of their innovative and technically advanced design, DB was awarded a State Premiers Export Award and was a finalist in that year’s National Export Awards. The case tracks the development and subsequent implementation of the SCT ASRS project, setting out to highlight how the lack of appropriate IT development processes contributed to the ultimate failure of the project and the subsequent winding up of DB only one year after being honoured with these prestigious awards. The case provides compelling evidence of the types of project management incompetency that, from the literature, appears to contribute to the high failure rate in IT projects. For confidentiality reasons, the names of the principal parties are changed, but the case covers actual events documented by one of the project team members as part of his postgraduate studies, providing an example of the special mode of evidence collection that Yin (1994) calls ‘participant-observation’

Microservices and Machine Learning Algorithms for Adaptive Green Buildings

In recent years, the use of services for Open Systems development has consolidated and strengthened. Advances in the Service Science and Engineering (SSE) community, promoted by the reinforcement of Web Services and Semantic Web technologies and the presence of new Cloud computing techniques, such as the proliferation of microservices solutions, have allowed software architects to experiment and develop new ways of building open and adaptable computer systems at runtime. Home automation, intelligent buildings, robotics, graphical user interfaces are some of the social atmosphere environments suitable in which to apply certain innovative trends. This paper presents a schema for the adaptation of Dynamic Computer Systems (DCS) using interdisciplinary techniques on model-driven engineering, service engineering and soft computing. The proposal manages an orchestrated microservices schema for adapting component-based software architectural systems at runtime. This schema has been developed as a three-layer adaptive transformation process that is supported on a rule-based decision-making service implemented by means of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. The experimental development was implemented in the Solar Energy Research Center (CIESOL) applying the proposed microservices schema for adapting home architectural atmosphere systems on Green Buildings

Resolving Architectural Mismatches of COTS Through Architectural Reconciliation

The integration of COTS components into a system under development entails architectural mismatches. These have been tackled, so far, at the component level, through component adaptation techniques, but they also must be tackled at an architectural level of abstraction. In this paper we propose an approach for resolving architectural mismatches, with the aid of architectural reconciliation. The approach consists of designing and subsequently reconciling two architectural models, one that is forward-engineered from the requirements and another that is reverse-engineered from the COTS-based implementation. The final reconciled model is optimally adapted both to the requirements and to the actual COTS-based implementation. The contribution of this paper lies in the application of architectural reconciliation in the context of COTS-based software development. Architectural modeling is based upon the UML 2.0 standard, while the reconciliation is performed by transforming the two models, with the help of architectural design decisions.

Performance Testing of Distributed Component Architectures

Performance characteristics, such as response time, throughput andscalability, are key quality attributes of distributed applications. Current practice,however, rarely applies systematic techniques to evaluate performance characteristics.We argue that evaluation of performance is particularly crucial in early developmentstages, when important architectural choices are made. At first glance, thiscontradicts the use of testing techniques, which are usually applied towards the endof a project. In this chapter, we assume that many distributed systems are builtwith middleware technologies, such as the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) or theCommon Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). These provide servicesand facilities whose implementations are available when architectures are defined.We also note that it is the middleware functionality, such as transaction and persistenceservices, remote communication primitives and threading policy primitives,that dominates distributed system performance. Drawing on these observations, thischapter presents a novel approach to performance testing of distributed applications.We propose to derive application-specific test cases from architecture designs so thatthe performance of a distributed application can be tested based on the middlewaresoftware at early stages of a development process. We report empirical results thatsupport the viability of the approach

Extending a multi-set relational algebra to a parallel environment

Parallel database systems will very probably be the future for high-performance data-intensive applications. In the past decade, many parallel database systems have been developed, together with many languages and approaches to specify operations in these systems. A common background is still missing, however. This paper proposes an extended relational algebra for this purpose, based on the well-known standard relational algebra. The extended algebra provides both complete database manipulation language features, and data distribution and process allocation primitives to describe parallelism. It is defined in terms of multi-sets of tuples to allow handling of duplicates and to obtain a close connection to the world of high-performance data processing. Due to its algebraic nature, the language is well suited for optimization and parallelization through expression rewriting. The proposed language can be used as a database manipulation language on its own, as has been done in the PRISMA parallel database project, or as a formal basis for other languages, like SQL