Software language engineering of architectural viewpoints

A common practice in software architecture design is to apply architectural views to design software architecture for the various stakeholder concerns. Architectural views are usually developed based on architectural viewpoints which define the conventions for constructing, interpreting and analyzing views. So far most architectural viewpoints seem to have been primarily used either to support the communication among stakeholders, or at the best to provide a blueprint for the detailed design. In this paper we provide a software language engineering approach to define viewpoints as domain specific languages. This enhances the formal precision of architectural viewpoints and leads to executable views that can be interpreted and analyzed by tools. We illustrate our approach for defining domain specific languages for the viewpoints of the Views and Beyond approach. © 2011 Springer-Verlag

An RM-ODP Based Ontology and a CAD Tool for Modeling Hierarchical Systems in Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture (EA) requires modeling enterprises across multiple levels (from markets down to IT systems) i.e. modeling hierarchical systems. Our goal is to build a Computer Aided Design (CAD) tool for EA. To be able to build this CAD tool, we need an ontology that can be used to describe hierarchical systems. The Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) was originally defined for describing IT systems and their environment. RM-ODP can also be suited to general, hierarchical, system modeling and, hence, can be used to model enterprises. In this paper, we first give an overview of our CAD tool and we present then how Part 2 and Part3 of RM-ODP were integrated to define a computer-interpretable ontology that is used in the CAD tool. This ontology is formalized using the Alloy declarative language. Last, we illustrate how the CAD tool can render Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams by showing selected aspects of the hierarchical systems

Model-driven engineering of software architecture viewpoints

Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and the Graduate School of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2012.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2012.Includes bibliographical references.A common practice in software architecture design is to apply so-called architectural views to design software architecture for the various stakeholder concerns. Architectural views are usually developed based on architectural viewpoints which define the conventions for constructing, interpreting and analyzing views. So far most architectural viewpoints seem to have been primarily used either to support the communication among stakeholders, or at the best to provide a blueprint for the detailed design. In this thesis, we provide a software language engineering approach to define viewpoints as domain specific languages. This enhances the formal precision of architectural viewpoints and leads to executable views that can be interpreted and analyzed by tools. We illustrate our approach for defining domain specific languages for the viewpoints of the Views and Beyond framework. The approach is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in, SAVE-Bench tool, which can be used to define different views based on the predefined software architecture viewpoints. The tool also supports automatic generation of architecture documentation from view models.Demirli, ElifM.S

A Formal Foundation of the RM-ODP Conceptual Framework

This paper presents an approach for formalizing the RM-ODP (Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing), an ISO and ITU standard. The goal of this formalization is to clarify the RM-ODP modeling framework to make it more accessible to modelers such as system architects, designers and implementers, while opening the way for the formal verification of RM-ODP models, either within an ODP viewpoint or across multiple ODP viewpoints. The result of this work is a consistent formal representation of clauses 5, 6, 8 and 9 of part 2 of RM-ODP in their interrelations, which while being officially declared as one of its goals is currently missing in the standard. Our formalization is based on set theory and the classical predicate logic, and is expressed in the Alloy language

Twenty years of rewriting logic

AbstractRewriting logic is a simple computational logic that can naturally express both concurrent computation and logical deduction with great generality. This paper provides a gentle, intuitive introduction to its main ideas, as well as a survey of the work that many researchers have carried out over the last twenty years in advancing: (i) its foundations; (ii) its semantic framework and logical framework uses; (iii) its language implementations and its formal tools; and (iv) its many applications to automated deduction, software and hardware specification and verification, security, real-time and cyber-physical systems, probabilistic systems, bioinformatics and chemical systems

Designing, Aligning, and Visualizing Service Systems

Service is a concept that separates the concerns of an organization into (1) the value created for users and (2) the way the organization manages its resources to provide this value. The discipline of management of information technology (IT) uses services to coordinate and to optimize the use of IT resources (servers, applications, databases, etc.) in a way that brings value to users. The concrete application of the service concept is challenging due to its abstract, interdependent and recursive nature. We experienced this challenge while collaborating with the IT department of our university (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) when the IT department adopted the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best-practices framework for IT service management. As researchers, we have the goal of improving the understanding of services as a means to structuring what people and organizations do. In the context of the IT department, we studied how to apply the service concept internally within the IT department, and externally (as business services) in the overall organization. In this thesis, we model services by using systems thinking principles. In particular, we use and improve SEAM, the systemic service-modeling method developed in our laboratory. Our main result is an ontology for SEAM service modeling. Our contributions are the heuristics that define how the ontology relates to a perceived reality: for example, the heuristics focus on behavior rather than organization and they put an emphasis on service instances rather than service types. We also define alignment between service systems, based on the properties of the systems¿ behavior. We show how to model an organization by implementing the concept of service as defined by our ontology. This ontology supports the design of service systems that align across both IT and business services. During our work with over one hundred IT services, we developed several visualization prototypes of a service cartography; we use these prototypes to describe and to relate the different views required for managing services. Our results offer a concrete way to implement the abstract concept of services. This way could be of interest for any organization willing to embark on a large-scale service project

Proceedings of The Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organisations Federated Workshops (MALLOW 2010)

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-627/allproceedings.pdfInternational audienceMALLOW-2010 is a third edition of a series initiated in 2007 in Durham, and pursued in 2009 in Turin. The objective, as initially stated, is to "provide a venue where: the cost of participation was minimum; participants were able to attend various workshops, so fostering collaboration and cross-fertilization; there was a friendly atmosphere and plenty of time for networking, by maximizing the time participants spent together"