A survey of self-management in dynamic software architecture specifications

As dynamic software architecture use becomes more widespread, a variety of formal specification languages have been developed to gain a better understanding of the foundations of this type of software evolutionary change. In this paper we survey 14 formal specification approaches based on graphs, process algebras, logic, and other formalisms. Our survey will evaluate the ability of each approach to specify self-managing systems as well as the ability to address issues regarding expressiveness and scalability. Based on the results of our survey we will provide recommendations on future directions for improving the specification of dynamic software architectures, specifically self-managed architectures

The SAE Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) A Standard for Engineering Performance Critical Systems

International audienceThe Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Architecture Analysis & Design Language, AS5506, provides a means for the formal specification of the hardware and software architecture of embedded computer systems and system of systems. It was designed to support a full Model Based Development lifecycle including system specification, analysis, system tuning, integration, and upgrade over the lifecycle. It was designed to support the integration of multiple forms of analyses and to be extensible in a standard way for additional analysis approaches. A system can be automatically integrated from AADL models when fully specified and when source code is provided for the software components. Analysis of large complex systems has been demonstrated in the avionics domain

Verification of model transformations

Model transformations are a central element of model-driven development (MDD) approaches such as the model-driven architecture (MDA). The correctness of model transformations is critical to their effective use in practical software development, since users must be able to rely upon the transformations correctly preserving the semantics of models. In this paper we define a formal semantics for model transformations, and provide techniques for proving the termination, confluence and correctness of model transformations

Detecting Inconsistencies in Software Architecture Documentation Using Traceability Link Recovery

Documenting software architecture is important for a system’s success. Software architecture documentation (SAD) makes information about the system available and eases comprehensibility. There are different forms of SADs like natural language texts and formal models with different benefits and different purposes. However, there can be inconsistent information in different SADs for the same system. Inconsistent documentation then can cause flaws in development and maintenance. To tackle this, we present an approach for inconsistency detection in natural language SAD and formal architecture models. We make use of traceability link recovery (TLR) and extend an existing approach. We utilize the results from TLR to detect unmentioned (i.e., model elements without natural language documentation) and missing model elements (i.e., described but not modeled elements). In our evaluation, we measure how the adaptations on TLR affected its performance. Moreover, we evaluate the inconsistency detection. We use a benchmark with multiple open source projects and compare the results with existing and baseline approaches. For TLR, we achieve an excellent F1-score of 0.81, significantly outperforming the other approaches by at least 0.24. Our approach also achieves excellent results (accuracy: 0.93) for detecting unmentioned model elements and good results for detecting missing model elements (accuracy: 0.75). These results also significantly outperform competing baselines. Although we see room for improvements, the results show that detecting inconsistencies using TLR is promising

Model-As-A-Service (MaaS) Using the Cloud Services Innovation Platform (CSIP)

Cloud infrastructures for modelling activities such as data processing, performing environmental simulations, or conducting model calibrations/optimizations provide a cost effective alternative to traditional high performance computing approaches. Cloud - based modelling examples emerged into the m ore formal notion: \u27Model - as - a - Service\u27 (MaaS). This paper presents the Cloud Services Innovation Platform (CSIP) as a software framework offering MaaS. It describes both the internal CSIP infrastructure and software architecture that manages cloud resources for typical modelling tasks, and the use of CSIP\u27s \u27 ModelServices API \u27 for a modelling application . CSIP\u27s architecture supports fast and resource aware auto - scaling of computational resources. An example model service is presented: the USDA hydrograph model EFH2 used in the desktop - based \u27engineering field tools\u27 is deployed as a CSIP service. This and other MaaS CSIP examples benefit from the use of cloud resources to enable straightforward scalable model deployment into cloud environments

The CommUnity Workbench

CommUnity is a formal approach to Software Architecture with a strict separation of the computation, coordination, and distribution aspects. The approach is based on a parallel design language with state, which facilitates the specification of computations compared to the process calculi used by other formal approaches, and on category theory, which provides an intuitive yet precise graph-based semantics for the configuration of components and connectors. The CommUnity Workbench is being developed as a proof of concept of the CommUnity framework, providing a graphical integrated development environment to write components, draw configurations, and execute the resulting system. The CommUnity Workbench is being developed as a proof of concept of the CommUnity framework, providing a graphical integrated development environment to write components, draw configurations, and execute the resulting system

Ontological Map of Service Oriented Architecture Based on Zachman

Service orientation is an approach in the field of enterprise architecture, business information systems and software application that its main element is the service. Shared services is an organization model of sharing, across an organization. It enables collaboration among the functions/departments. Main motivations for shared services are sharing, promote efficiency, reduce cost, and support scalability. Despite of the widespread use of these two approaches in information technology, there is no tool to optimize the management of them. The aim of this study is Ontological map of service oriented architecture based on zachman framework to adapt it in the reference enterprise architecture framework through implementation ontology views on system architect software and as well as equivalent ontology component with UML diagrams. After the implementation of the suggested model, the results showed that ontology is a formal description and explicit display of objects, concepts and other entities in the relationship between them. In other words, there is a model that describe all that is in fact in to understandable language for the system. Thus the proposed establishes have association between all aspects of zachman framework, also to create a clear description of business concepts in the management of shared services and is effective to provide a unified platform for enterprise modeling

Constraint-based protocols for distributed problem solving

AbstractDistributed Problem Solving (DPS) approaches decompose problems into subproblems to be solved by interacting, cooperative software agents. Thus, DPS is suitable for solving problems characterized by many interdependencies among subproblems in the context of parallel and distributed architectures. Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) provides a powerful execution framework for DPS where constraints define local problem solving and the exchange of information among agents declaratively. To optimize DPS, the protocol for constraint communication must be tuned to the specific kind of DPS problem and the characteristics of the underlying system architecture. In this paper, we provide a formal framework for modeling different problems and we show how the framework applies to simple yet generalizable examples

Representing Variability in Software Architecture: A Systematic Literature Review

Variability in software - intensive systems is the ability of a software artefact (e.g., a system, subsystem, or component) to be extended, customised or configured for deployment in a specific context. Software Architecture is a high - level description of a software - intensive system that abstracts the system implementation details allowing the architect to view the system as a whole. Although variability in software architecture is recognised as a challenge in multiple domains, there has been no formal consensus on how variability should be captured or represented. The objective of this research was to provide a snapshot of the state - of - the - art on representing variability in software architecture while assessing the nature of the different approaches. To achieve this objective, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted covering literature produced from January 1991 until June 2016. Then, grounded theory was used to conduct the analysis and draw conclusions from data, mini mising threats to validity. In this paper , we report on the findings from the study