On consistency of physical and DEVS models in control-targeted DTs: an industrial case study

The DT-based design and control of modern production assets requires simulation models with different viewpoints, purposes, and nature. Most notably, component-level design and control require detailed physical models, while plant-level automation and production management mostly need DEVS-type ones. Inconsistencies among the said models can have significant impacts on decision processes related e.g. to (re-)configuration, diagnostics and maintenance—in one word, on the ultimate outcome of an asset. However, given their heterogeneous nature, making physical and DEVS models consistent requires new methods and tools, in fact starting with the definition itself of what “consistent” has to mean. We here present a methodology to state and address such consistency problems, and support our statements with a case study taken from the cosmetics industry

Adaptable software reuse:binding time aware modelling language to support variations of feature binding time in software product line engineering

Software product line engineering (SPLE) is a paradigm for developing a family of software products from the same reusable assets rather than developing individual products from scratch. In many SPLE approaches, a feature is often used as the key abstraction to distinguish between the members of the product family. Thus, the sets of products in the product line are said to have ’common’ features and differ in ’variable’ features. Consequently, reusable assets are developed with variation points where variant features may be bound for each of the diverse products. Emerging deployment environments and market segments have been fuelling demands for adaptable reusable assets to support additional variations that may be required to increase the usage-context of the products of a product line. Similarly, feature binding time - when a feature is included in a product and made available for use - may vary between the products because of uncertain market conditions or diverse deployment environments. Hence, variations of feature binding time should also be supported to cover the wide-range of usage-contexts. Through the execution of action research, this thesis has established the following: Language-based implementation techniques, that are specifically proposed to implement variations in the form of features, have better modularity but are not better than the existing classical technique in terms of modifiability and do not support variations in feature binding time. Similarly, through a systematic literature review, this thesis has established the following: The different engineering approaches that are proposed to support variations of feature binding time are limited in one of the following ways: a feature may have to be represented/implemented multiple time, each for a specific binding time; The support is only to execution context and therefore limited in scope; The support focuses on too fine-grained model elements or too low-level of abstraction at source-codes. Given the limitations of the existing approaches, this thesis presents binding time aware modelling language that supports variations of feature binding time by design and improves the modifiability of reusable assets of a product line

Type Safe Extensible Programming

Software products evolve over time. Sometimes they evolve by adding new features, and sometimes by either fixing bugs or replacing outdated implementations with new ones. When software engineers fail to anticipate such evolution during development, they will eventually be forced to re-architect or re-build from scratch. Therefore, it has been common practice to prepare for changes so that software products are extensible over their lifetimes. However, making software extensible is challenging because it is difficult to anticipate successive changes and to provide adequate abstraction mechanisms over potential changes. Such extensibility mechanisms, furthermore, should not compromise any existing functionality during extension. Software engineers would benefit from a tool that provides a way to add extensions in a reliable way. It is natural to expect programming languages to serve this role. Extensible programming is one effort to address these issues. In this thesis, we present type safe extensible programming using the MLPolyR language. MLPolyR is an ML-like functional language whose type system provides type-safe extensibility mechanisms at several levels. After presenting the language, we will show how these extensibility mechanisms can be put to good use in the context of product line engineering. Product line engineering is an emerging software engineering paradigm that aims to manage variations, which originate from successive changes in software.Comment: PhD Thesis submitted October, 200

How Do Real Options Concepts Fit in Agile Requirements Engineering?

Agile requirements engineering is driven by creating business value for the client and heavily involves the client in decision-making under uncertainty. Real option thinking seems to be suitable in supporting the client’s decision making process at inter-iteration time. This paper investigates the fit between real option thinking and agile requirements engineering. We first look into previously published experiences in the agile software engineering literature to identify (i) ‘experience clusters’ suggesting the ways in which real option concepts fit into the agile requirements process and (ii) ‘experience gaps’ and under-researched agile requirements decision-making topics which require further empirical studies. Furthermore, we conducted a cross-case study in eight agile development organizations and interviewed 11 practitioners about their decision-making process. The results suggest that options are almost always identified, reasoned about and acted upon. They are not expressed in quantitative terms, however, they are instead explicitly or implicitly taken\ud into account during the decision-making process at interiteration time

Aspect-oriented domain analysis

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaDomain analysis (DA) consists of analyzing properties, concepts and solutions for a given domain of application. Based on that information, decisions are made concerning the software development for future application within that domain. In DA, feature modeling is used to describe common and variable requirements for software systems. Nevertheless, they show a limited view of the domain. In the mean time, requirement approaches can be integrated to specify the domain requirements. Among them, we have viewpoint oriented approaches that stand out by their simplicity, and efficiency organizing requirements. However, none of them deals with modularization of crosscutting subjects. A crosscutting subject can be spread out in several requirement documents. In this work we will use a viewpoint oriented approach to describe the domain requirements extended with aspects. Aspect-oriented domain analysis (AODA) is a growing area of interest as it addresses the problem of specifying crosscutting properties at the domain analysis level. The goal of this area is to obtain a better reuse at this abstraction level through the advantages of aspect orientation. The aim of this work is to propose an approach that extends domain analysis with aspects also using feature modeling and viewpoint

Property Satisfiability Analysis for Product Lines of Modelling Languages

© 2022 IEEE.  Personal use of this material is permitted.  Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Software engineering uses models throughout most phases of the development process. Models are defined using modelling languages. To make these languages applicable to a wider set of scenarios and customizable to specific needs, researchers have proposed using product lines to specify modelling language variants. However, there is currently a lack of efficient techniques for ensuring correctness with respect to properties of the models accepted by a set of language variants. This may prevent detecting problematic combinations of language variants that produce undesired effects at the model level. To attack this problem, we first present a classification of instantiability properties for language product lines. Then, we propose a novel approach to lifting the satisfiability checking of model properties of individual language variants, to the product line level. Finally, we report on an implementation of our proposal in the Merlin tool, and demonstrate the efficiency gains of our lifted analysis method compared to an enumerative analysis of each individual language variantThis work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science (RTI2018-095255-B-I00), the R&D programme of Madrid (P2018/TCS-4314), and by NSERC. We thank the anonymous referees for their useful comment

Software Product Line Engineering via Software Transplantation

For companies producing related products, a Software Product Line (SPL) is a software reuse method that improves time-to-market and software quality, achieving substantial cost reductions.These benefits do not come for free. It often takes years to re-architect and re-engineer a codebase to support SPL and, once adopted, it must be maintained. Current SPL practice relies on a collection of tools, tailored for different reengineering phases, whose output developers must coordinate and integrate. We present Foundry, a general automated approach for leveraging software transplantation to speed conversion to and maintenance of SPL. Foundry facilitates feature extraction and migration. It can efficiently, repeatedly, transplant a sequence of features, implemented in multiple files. We used Foundry to create two valid product lines that integrate features from three real-world systems in an automated way. Moreover, we conducted an experiment comparing Foundry's feature migration with manual effort. We show that Foundry automatically migrated features across codebases 4.8 times faster, on average, than the average time a group of SPL experts took to accomplish the task

Tools to integrate organoleptic quality criteria into breeding programs

This technical booklet provides methodologies and guidance to implement sensory evaluations for organoleptic quality assessment in multi-actor-projects for organic agriculture. It presents five detailed tests that can be used in sensory evaluation, methodologies on how to prepare the samples and a glossary. This booklet has been developed under Solibam project and updated during Diversifood project