A Product Line Systems Engineering Process for Variability Identification and Reduction

Software Product Line Engineering has attracted attention in the last two decades due to its promising capabilities to reduce costs and time to market through reuse of requirements and components. In practice, developing system level product lines in a large-scale company is not an easy task as there may be thousands of variants and multiple disciplines involved. The manual reuse of legacy system models at domain engineering to build reusable system libraries and configurations of variants to derive target products can be infeasible. To tackle this challenge, a Product Line Systems Engineering process is proposed. Specifically, the process extends research in the System Orthogonal Variability Model to support hierarchical variability modeling with formal definitions; utilizes Systems Engineering concepts and legacy system models to build the hierarchy for the variability model and to identify essential relations between variants; and finally, analyzes the identified relations to reduce the number of variation points. The process, which is automated by computational algorithms, is demonstrated through an illustrative example on generalized Rolls-Royce aircraft engine control systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of the process in the reduction of variation points, it is further applied to case studies in different engineering domains at different levels of complexity. Subject to system model availability, reduction of 14% to 40% in the number of variation points are demonstrated in the case studies.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables; submitted to the IEEE Systems Journal on 3rd June 201

Improving hardware/software interface management in systems of systems through documentation as code

ContextThe management of Interface Control Documents (ICDs) has shown to be a major pain point in the architecting processes of Systems of Systems (SoS).ObjectiveThis work aims to improve on previously identified ICD management issues using the documentation-as-code philosophy as a potential basis for a treatment, and in collaboration with practitioners.MethodWe conducted a Technical Action Research (TAR) study with a group of engineers at the Netherlands Radio Astronomy Institute (ASTRON), in the context of the LOFAR radio telescope. An additional research instrument, in the form of an expert panel, was used to evaluate the transferability of the proposed treatment to alternative domains.ResultsIn-depth insights on previously identified interface management issues were gained. Based on these insights a functional proof-of-concept was developed aimed at addressing these issues following the documentation-as-code principles. In addition to receiving overall positive reviews from practitioners and experts, further areas of improvement and transferability considerations for future work were identified.ConclusionsThe proposed approach, which to our knowledge has not been explored before in this context, is promising to address some of the recurring interfacing-related issues with directed SoS in multiple engineering domains. This could be done mainly by enforcing consistency and completeness on both text-based and formal elements of the ICDs, and turning ICDs into single sources of truth for the architecting processes of large scale SoS

A posteriori metadata from automated provenance tracking: Integration of AiiDA and TCOD

In order to make results of computational scientific research findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable, it is necessary to decorate them with standardised metadata. However, there are a number of technical and practical challenges that make this process difficult to achieve in practice. Here the implementation of a protocol is presented to tag crystal structures with their computed properties, without the need of human intervention to curate the data. This protocol leverages the capabilities of AiiDA, an open-source platform to manage and automate scientific computational workflows, and TCOD, an open-access database storing computed materials properties using a well-defined and exhaustive ontology. Based on these, the complete procedure to deposit computed data in the TCOD database is automated. All relevant metadata are extracted from the full provenance information that AiiDA tracks and stores automatically while managing the calculations. Such a protocol also enables reproducibility of scientific data in the field of computational materials science. As a proof of concept, the AiiDA-TCOD interface is used to deposit 170 theoretical structures together with their computed properties and their full provenance graphs, consisting in over 4600 AiiDA nodes

Quality-aware model-driven service engineering

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Quality aspects ranging from interoperability to maintainability to performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Architecture models can substantially influence quality attributes of the implemented software systems. Besides the benefits of explicit architectures on maintainability and reuse, architectural constraints such as styles, reference architectures and architectural patterns can influence observable software properties such as performance. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and evaluating the performance of implemented software. We present an approach for addressing the quality of services and service-based systems at the model-level in the context of model-driven service engineering. The focus on architecture-level models is a consequence of the black-box character of services

Strongly possible functional dependencies for SQL

Missing data is a large-scale challenge to research and investigate. It reduces the statistical power and produces negative consequences that may introduce selection bias on the data. Many approaches to handle this problem have been introduced. The main approaches suggested are either missing values to be ignored (removed) or imputed (filled in) with new values. This paper uses the second method. Possible worlds and possible and certain keys were introduced in Köhler et.al., and by Levene et.al. Köhler and Link introduced certain functional dependencies (c-FD) as a natural complement to Lien's class of possible functional dependencies (p-FD). Weak and strong functional dependencies were studied by Levene and Loizou. We introduced the intermediate concept of strongly possible worlds that are obtained by imputing values already existing in the table in a preceding paper. This results in strongly possible keys (spKey's) and strongly possible functional dependencies (spFD's). We give a polynomial algorithm to verify a single spKey and show that in general, it is NP-complete to verify an arbitrary collection of spKeys. We give a graph-theoretical characterization of the validity of a given spFD X →sp Y. We show, that the complexity to verify a single strongly possible functional dependency is NP-complete in general, then we introduce some cases when verifying a single spFD can be done in polynomial time. As a step forward axiomatization of spFD's, the rules given for weak and strong functional dependencies are checked. Appropriate weakenings of those that are not sound for spFD's are listed. The interaction between spFD's and spKey's and certain keys is studied. Furthermore, a graph theoretical characterization of implication between singular attribute spFD's is given

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Group-oriented coordination models for distributed client-server computing

This paper describes group-oriented control models for distributed client-server interactions. These models transparently coordinate requests for services that involve multiple servers, such as queries across distributed databases. Specific capabilities include: decomposing and replicating client requests; dispatching request subtasks or copies to independent, networked servers; and combining server results into a single response for the client. The control models were implemented by combining request broker and process group technologies with an object-oriented communication middleware tool. The models are illustrated in the context of a distributed operations support application for space-based systems