Executable Specs: What Makes One, and How are They Used?

Model-based systems development relies upon the concept of an executable specification. A survey of published literature shows a wide range of definitions for executable specifications [1-10]. In this paper, we attempt to codify the essential starting elements for a complete executable specification-based design flow. A complete executable specification that includes a functional model as well as test cases, in addition to a traditional prose document, is needed to transfer requirements from a customer to a supplier, or from a systems engineer to electrical hardware and software engineers. In the complete form demonstrated here, sub-components of a functionally-decomposed system manifest as modular reuse blocks suitable for publication in functional libraries. The overarching definition provided by product architecture and by software architecture must also be harmoniously integrated with design and implementation. Using seven specific automotive examples, we illustrate effective ways in which executable specifications have been used in production-ready applications. Benefits of model-based development are captured, including earlier and more thorough testing, automatic document generation, and autocode generation

Model and Integrate Medical Resource Available Times and Relationships in Verifiably Correct Executable Medical Best Practice Guideline Models (Extended Version)

Improving patient care safety is an ultimate objective for medical cyber-physical systems. A recent study shows that the patients' death rate is significantly reduced by computerizing medical best practice guidelines. Recent data also show that some morbidity and mortality in emergency care are directly caused by delayed or interrupted treatment due to lack of medical resources. However, medical guidelines usually do not provide guidance on medical resource demands and how to manage potential unexpected delays in resource availability. If medical resources are temporarily unavailable, safety properties in existing executable medical guideline models may fail which may cause increased risk to patients under care. The paper presents a separately model and jointly verify (SMJV) architecture to separately model medical resource available times and relationships and jointly verify safety properties of existing medical best practice guideline models with resource models being integrated in. The SMJV architecture allows medical staff to effectively manage medical resource demands and unexpected resource availability delays during emergency care. The separated modeling approach also allows different domain professionals to make independent model modifications, facilitates the management of frequent resource availability changes, and enables resource statechart reuse in multiple medical guideline models. A simplified stroke scenario is used as a case study to investigate the effectiveness and validity of the SMJV architecture. The case study indicates that the SMJV architecture is able to identify unsafe properties caused by unexpected resource delays.Comment: full version, 12 page

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

Transparently Mixing Undo Logs and Software Reversibility for State Recovery in Optimistic PDES

The rollback operation is a fundamental building block to support the correct execution of a speculative Time Warp-based Parallel Discrete Event Simulation. In the literature, several solutions to reduce the execution cost of this operation have been proposed, either based on the creation of a checkpoint of previous simulation state images, or on the execution of negative copies of simulation events which are able to undo the updates on the state. In this paper, we explore the practical design and implementation of a state recoverability technique which allows to restore a previous simulation state either relying on checkpointing or on the reverse execution of the state updates occurred while processing events in forward mode. Differently from other proposals, we address the issue of executing backward updates in a fully-transparent and event granularity-independent way, by relying on static software instrumentation (targeting the x86 architecture and Linux systems) to generate at runtime reverse update code blocks (not to be confused with reverse events, proper of the reverse computing approach). These are able to undo the effects of a forward execution while minimizing the cost of the undo operation. We also present experimental results related to our implementation, which is released as free software and fully integrated into the open source ROOT-Sim (ROme OpTimistic Simulator) package. The experimental data support the viability and effectiveness of our proposal