Engineering Automation for Reliable Software Interim Progress Report (10/01/2000 - 09/30/2001)

Prepared for: U.S. Army Research Office P.O. Box 12211 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2211The objective of our effort is to develop a scientific basis for producing reliable software that is also flexible and cost effective for the DoD distributed software domain. This objective addresses the long term goals of increasing the quality of service provided by complex systems while reducing development risks, costs, and time. Our work focuses on "wrap and glue" technology based on a domain specific distributed prototype model. The key to making the proposed approach reliable, flexible, and cost-effective is the automatic generation of glue and wrappers based on a designer's specification. The "wrap and glue" approach allows system designers to concentrate on the difficult interoperability problems and defines solutions in terms of deeper and more difficult interoperability issues, while freeing designers from implementation details. Specific research areas for the proposed effort include technology enabling rapid prototyping, inference for design checking, automatic program generation, distributed real-time scheduling, wrapper and glue technology, and reliability assessment and improvement. The proposed technology will be integrated with past research results to enable a quantum leap forward in the state of the art for rapid prototyping.U. S. Army Research Office P.O. Box 12211 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-22110473-MA-SPApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Dynamic Healthcare Connectivity and Collaboration with Multi-Agent Systems

With the growth of international healthcare operations, methods to improve connectivity are sought, along with a reduction in major barriers of electronic connectivity between global trading partners. To address these barriers, a conceptual agent-based framework following a proposed methodology for the analysis and design stages is developed to allow for improved ease of connectivity and interpretability between international trading partners. This framework is comprised of agents and is applied to connectivity between healthcare entities such as payers and providers. While many healthcare entities exchange information electronically, few do so without some form of manual intervention. Information systems may be engaged to further enhance the healthcare industry. Given the increases in costs and international presence, it is vital to make use of electronic systems that improve overall quality and cost of healthcare

System engineering and evolution decision support, Final Progress Report (05/01/1998 - 09-30-2001)

The objective of our effort is to develop a scientific basis for system engineering automation and decision support. This objective addresses the long term goals of increasing the quality of service provided complex systems while reducing development risks, costs, and time. Our work focused on decision support for designing operations of complex modular systems that can include embedded software. Emphasis areas included engineering automation capabilities in the areas of design modifications, design records, reuse, and automatic generation of design representations such as real-time schedules and software.U.S. Army Research OfficeFunding number(s): DSAM 90387, DWAM 80013, DWAM 90215

Derivation of the required elements for a definition of the term middleware

Thirteen contemporary definitions of Middleware were analyzed. The definitions agree that any software that can do the following should be classified as Middleware (1) provide service that provides transparent application-to-application interaction across the network, (2) act as a service provider for distributed applications, and (3) provide services that are primarily used by distributed applications (e.g., RPCs, ORBs, Directories, name-resolution services, etc.) Most definitions agree that Middleware is that level of software required to achieve platform, location, and network transparency. There is some discrepancy about the OSI levels at which middleware operates. The majority of definitions limit it to levels 5, 6, and 7. Additionally, almost half of the definitions do not include database transparency as something achieved by Middleware, perhaps due to the ambiguous classification of ODBC and JDBC as software. Assuming that the number of times a service is mentioned, the majority of the definitions rank services associated with legal access to an application as core to Middleware, along with valid, standardized APIs for application development as core to the definition of middleware

Architecture for Provenance Systems

This document covers the logical and process architectures of provenance systems. The logical architecture identifies key roles and their interactions, whereas the process architecture discusses distribution and security. A fundamental aspect of our presentation is its technology-independent nature, which makes it reusable: the principles that are exposed in this document may be applied to different technologies

Proceedings of Monterey Workshop 2001 Engineering Automation for Sofware Intensive System Integration

The 2001 Monterey Workshop on Engineering Automation for Software Intensive System Integration was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Office and the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. It is our pleasure to thank the workshop advisory and sponsors for their vision of a principled engineering solution for software and for their many-year tireless effort in supporting a series of workshops to bring everyone together.This workshop is the 8 in a series of International workshops. The workshop was held in Monterey Beach Hotel, Monterey, California during June 18-22, 2001. The general theme of the workshop has been to present and discuss research works that aims at increasing the practical impact of formal methods for software and systems engineering. The particular focus of this workshop was "Engineering Automation for Software Intensive System Integration". Previous workshops have been focused on issues including, "Real-time & Concurrent Systems", "Software Merging and Slicing", "Software Evolution", "Software Architecture", "Requirements Targeting Software" and "Modeling Software System Structures in a fastly moving scenario".Office of Naval ResearchAir Force Office of Scientific Research Army Research OfficeDefense Advanced Research Projects AgencyApproved for public release, distribution unlimite