An overview of very high level software design methods

Very High Level design methods emphasize automatic transfer of requirements to formal design specifications, and/or may concentrate on automatic transformation of formal design specifications that include some semantic information of the system into machine executable form. Very high level design methods range from general domain independent methods to approaches implementable for specific applications or domains. Applying AI techniques, abstract programming methods, domain heuristics, software engineering tools, library-based programming and other methods different approaches for higher level software design are being developed. Though one finds that a given approach does not always fall exactly in any specific class, this paper provides a classification for very high level design methods including examples for each class. These methods are analyzed and compared based on their basic approaches, strengths and feasibility for future expansion toward automatic development of software systems

Conceptual graph-based knowledge representation for supporting reasoning in African traditional medicine

Although African patients use both conventional or modern and traditional healthcare simultaneously, it has been proven that 80% of people rely on African traditional medicine (ATM). ATM includes medical activities stemming from practices, customs and traditions which were integral to the distinctive African cultures. It is based mainly on the oral transfer of knowledge, with the risk of losing critical knowledge. Moreover, practices differ according to the regions and the availability of medicinal plants. Therefore, it is necessary to compile tacit, disseminated and complex knowledge from various Tradi-Practitioners (TP) in order to determine interesting patterns for treating a given disease. Knowledge engineering methods for traditional medicine are useful to model suitably complex information needs, formalize knowledge of domain experts and highlight the effective practices for their integration to conventional medicine. The work described in this paper presents an approach which addresses two issues. First it aims at proposing a formal representation model of ATM knowledge and practices to facilitate their sharing and reusing. Then, it aims at providing a visual reasoning mechanism for selecting best available procedures and medicinal plants to treat diseases. The approach is based on the use of the Delphi method for capturing knowledge from various experts which necessitate reaching a consensus. Conceptual graph formalism is used to model ATM knowledge with visual reasoning capabilities and processes. The nested conceptual graphs are used to visually express the semantic meaning of Computational Tree Logic (CTL) constructs that are useful for formal specification of temporal properties of ATM domain knowledge. Our approach presents the advantage of mitigating knowledge loss with conceptual development assistance to improve the quality of ATM care (medical diagnosis and therapeutics), but also patient safety (drug monitoring)

Characterizing the Identity of Model-based Safety Assessment: A Systematic Analysis

Model-based safety assessment has been one of the leading research thrusts of the System Safety Engineering community for over two decades. However, there is still a lack of consensus on what MBSA is. The ambiguity in the identity of MBSA impedes the advancement of MBSA as an active research area. For this reason, this paper aims to investigate the identity of MBSA to help achieve a consensus across the community. Towards this end, we first reason about the core activities that an MBSA approach must conduct. Second, we characterize the core patterns in which the core activities must be conducted for an approach to be considered MBSA. Finally, a recently published MBSA paper is reviewed to test the effectiveness of our characterization of MBSA

Designing Normative Theories for Ethical and Legal Reasoning: LogiKEy Framework, Methodology, and Tool Support

A framework and methodology---termed LogiKEy---for the design and engineering of ethical reasoners, normative theories and deontic logics is presented. The overall motivation is the development of suitable means for the control and governance of intelligent autonomous systems. LogiKEy's unifying formal framework is based on semantical embeddings of deontic logics, logic combinations and ethico-legal domain theories in expressive classic higher-order logic (HOL). This meta-logical approach enables the provision of powerful tool support in LogiKEy: off-the-shelf theorem provers and model finders for HOL are assisting the LogiKEy designer of ethical intelligent agents to flexibly experiment with underlying logics and their combinations, with ethico-legal domain theories, and with concrete examples---all at the same time. Continuous improvements of these off-the-shelf provers, without further ado, leverage the reasoning performance in LogiKEy. Case studies, in which the LogiKEy framework and methodology has been applied and tested, give evidence that HOL's undecidability often does not hinder efficient experimentation.Comment: 50 pages; 10 figure

Current Trends in Digital Twin Development, Maintenance, and Operation: An Interview Study

Digital twins (DT) are often defined as a pairing of a physical entity and a corresponding virtual entity mimicking certain aspects of the former depending on the use-case. In recent years, this concept has facilitated numerous use-cases ranging from design to validation and predictive maintenance of large and small high-tech systems. Although growing in popularity in both industry and academia, digital twins and the methodologies for developing and maintaining them differ vastly. To better understand these differences and similarities, we performed a semi-structured interview research study with 19 professionals from industry and academia who are closely associated with different lifecycle stages of the corresponding digital twins. In this paper, we present our analysis and findings from this study, which is based on eight research questions (RQ). We present our findings per research question. In general, we identified an overall lack of uniformity in terms of the understanding of digital twins and used tools, techniques, and methodologies for their development and maintenance. Furthermore, considering that digital twins are software intensive systems, we recognize a significant growth potential for adopting more software engineering practices, processes, and expertise in various stages of a digital twin's lifecycle

Current Trends in Digital Twin Development, Maintenance, and Operation:An Interview Study

Digital twins (DT) are often defined as a pairing of a physical entity and a corresponding virtual entity mimicking certain aspects of the former depending on the use-case. In recent years, this concept has facilitated numerous use-cases ranging from design to validation and predictive maintenance of large and small high-tech systems. Although growing in popularity in both industry and academia, digital twins and the methodologies for developing and maintaining them differ vastly. To better understand these differences and similarities, we performed a semi-structured interview research study with 19 professionals from industry and academia who are closely associated with different lifecycle stages of the corresponding digital twins. In this paper, we present our analysis and findings from this study, which is based on eight research questions (RQ). We present our findings per research question. In general, we identified an overall lack of uniformity in terms of the understanding of digital twins and used tools, techniques, and methodologies for their development and maintenance. Furthermore, considering that digital twins are software intensive systems, we recognize a significant growth potential for adopting more software engineering practices, processes, and expertise in various stages of a digital twin's lifecycle

Towards Compliance of Cross-Organizational Processes and their Changes

Businesses require the ability to rapidly implement new processes and to quickly adapt existing ones to environmental changes including the optimization of their interactions with partners and customers. However, changes of either intra- or cross-organizational processes must not be done in an uncontrolled manner. In particular, processes are increasingly subject to compliance rules that usually stem from security constraints, corporate guidelines, standards, and laws. These compliance rules have to be considered when modeling business processes and changing existing ones. While change and compliance have been extensively discussed for intra-organizational business processes, albeit only in an isolated manner, their combination in the context of cross-organizational processes remains an open issue. In this paper, we discuss requirements and challenges to be tackled in order to ensure that changes of cross-organizational business processes preserve compliance with imposed regulations, standards and laws

Incremental bounded model checking for embedded software

Program analysis is on the brink of mainstream usage in embedded systems development. Formal verification of behavioural requirements, finding runtime errors and test case generation are some of the most common applications of automated verification tools based on bounded model checking (BMC). Existing industrial tools for embedded software use an off-the-shelf bounded model checker and apply it iteratively to verify the program with an increasing number of unwindings. This approach unnecessarily wastes time repeating work that has already been done and fails to exploit the power of incremental SAT solving. This article reports on the extension of the software model checker CBMC to support incremental BMC and its successful integration with the industrial embedded software verification tool BTC EMBEDDED TESTER. We present an extensive evaluation over large industrial embedded programs, mainly from the automotive industry. We show that incremental BMC cuts runtimes by one order of magnitude in comparison to the standard non-incremental approach, enabling the application of formal verification to large and complex embedded software. We furthermore report promising results on analysing programs with arbitrary loop structure using incremental BMC, demonstrating its applicability and potential to verify general software beyond the embedded domain