Extraction of Process Models from Business Process Descriptions

The purpose of my work is to design a method to transform a textual process description (in English) into a business process model. This is of practical relevance, since process models are often designed by business analysts starting from textual documentation. The method to be designed aims at automating the text-to-diagram conversion phase as much as possible. Natural languages are known to be highly complex and ambiguous. Accordingly, for this project we will approach the problem using a best-effort approach, meaning that the method is not intended to work always. Instead, the proposed approach will be able to detect certain sentence structures and extract actors, actions and objects/artifacts from them. Coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, as well as punctuation and other markers, will be used to identify sequencing, parallelism, conditional branching and repetition. The output of the method will be a block-structured process model. The method is being implemented in Java based on open-source Natural-Language Processing (NLP) libraries. Specifically, Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is performed using the Stanford parser and according to the POS tags, corresponding process entities are identified using Tregex and Tsurgeon. The current implementation is already able to identify actors, actions/tasks and artifacts from sentences that abide to certain common structures. Additionally the implementation is able to correctly interpret passive voice construction, avoid articles, parenthesis and other complex structures for the purpose of extracting essential information about the process

A Model-based transformation process to validate and implement high-integrity systems

Despite numerous advances, building High-Integrity Embedded systems remains a complex task. They come with strong requirements to ensure safety, schedulability or security properties; one needs to combine multiple analysis to validate each of them. Model-Based Engineering is an accepted solution to address such complexity: analytical models are derived from an abstraction of the system to be built. Yet, ensuring that all abstractions are semantically consistent, remains an issue, e.g. when performing model checking for assessing safety, and then for schedulability using timed automata, and then when generating code. Complexity stems from the high-level view of the model compared to the low-level mechanisms used. In this paper, we present our approach based on AADL and its behavioral annex to refine iteratively an architecture description. Both application and runtime components are transformed into basic AADL constructs which have a strict counterpart in classical programming languages or patterns for verification. We detail the benefits of this process to enhance analysis and code generation. This work has been integrated to the AADL-tool support OSATE2

Q: Why is a raven like a writing desk? A: They’re both objects

The famous riddle by Lewis Carroll is not really intended to have an answer, but rather to reveal the incomprehension Alice has of the world of adults. This paper is about a team of model-driven software engineers' concepts of "object" coming up against the building design sector's concept of "object", and challenging our assumptions about the clean and clever solutions that we can create with object-oriented metamodels and model transformation and code generation tools. However, the story has a happy ending in which the application of our tools in combination with pragmatic choices of representations of building designs still produces an outcome that meets our users' needs and avoids lots of bespoke programming

A Multi-Criteria Framework to Assist on the Design of Internet-of-Things Systems

The Internet-of-Things (IoT), considered as Internet first real evolution, has become immensely important to society due to revolutionary business models with the potential to radically improve Human life. Manufacturers are engaged in developing embedded systems (IoT Systems) for different purposes to address this new variety of application domains and services. With the capability to agilely respond to a very dynamic market offer of IoT Systems, the design phase of IoT ecosystems can be enhanced. However, select the more suitable IoT System for a certain task is currently based on stakeholder’s knowledge, normally from lived experience or intuition, although it does not mean that a proper decision is being made. Furthermore, the lack of methods to formally describe IoT Systems characteristics, capable of being automatically used by methods is also an issue, reinforced by the growth of available information directly connected to Internet spread. Contributing to improve IoT Ecosystems design phase, this PhD work proposes a framework capable of fully characterise an IoT System and assist stakeholder’s on the decision of which is the proper IoT System for a specific task. This enables decision-makers to perform a better reasoning and more aware analysis of diverse and very often contradicting criteria. It is also intended to provide methods to integrate energy consumptionsimulation tools and address interoperability with standards, methods or systems within the IoT scope. This is addressed using a model-driven based framework supporting a high openness level to use different software languages and decision methods, but also for interoperability with other systems, tools and methods

Web collaboration for software engineering

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Model driven language engineering

Modeling is a most important exercise in software engineering and development and one of the current practices is object-oriented (OO) modeling. The Object Management Group (OMG) has defined a standard object-oriented modeling language the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The OMG is not only interested in modeling languages; its primary aim is to enable easy integration of software systems and components using vendor-neutral technologies. This thesis investigates the possibilities for designing and implementing modeling frameworks and transformation languages that operate on models and to explore the validation of source and target models. Specifically, we will focus on OO models used in OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA), which can be expressed in terms of UML terms (e.g. classes and associations). The thesis presents the Kent Modeling Framework (KMF), a modeling framework that we developed, and describes how this framework can be used to generate a modeling tool from a model. It then proceeds to describe the customization of the generated code, in particular the definition of methods that allows a rapid and repeatable instantiation of a model. Model validation should include not only checking the well-formedness using OCL constraints, but also the evaluation of model quality. Software metrics are useful means for evaluating the quality of both software development processes and software products. As models are used to drive the entire software development process it is unlikely that high quality software will be obtained using low quality models. The thesis presents a methodology supported by KMF that uses the UML specification to compute the design metrics at an early stage of software development. The thesis presents a transformation language called YATL (Yet Another Transformation Language), which was designed and implemented to support the features provided by OMG's Request For Proposal and the future QVT standard. YATL is a hybrid language (a mix of declarative and imperative constructions) designed to answer the Query/Views/Transformations Request For Proposals issued by OMG and to express model transformations as required by the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach. Several examples of model transformations, which have been implemented using YATL and the support provided by KMF, are presented. These experiments investigate different knowledge areas as programming languages, visual diagrams and distributed systems. YATL was used to implement the following transformations: * UML to Java mapping * Spider diagrams to OCL mapping * EDOC to Web ServicesEThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Model driven language engineering

Modeling is a most important exercise in software engineering and development and one of the current practices is object-oriented (OO) modeling. The Object Management Group (OMG) has defined a standard object-oriented modeling language the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The OMG is not only interested in modeling languages; its primary aim is to enable easy integration of software systems and components using vendor-neutral technologies. This thesis investigates the possibilities for designing and implementing modeling frameworks and transformation languages that operate on models and to explore the validation of source and target models. Specifically, we will focus on OO models used in OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA), which can be expressed in terms of UML terms (e.g. classes and associations). The thesis presents the Kent Modeling Framework (KMF), a modeling framework that we developed, and describes how this framework can be used to generate a modeling tool from a model. It then proceeds to describe the customization of the generated code, in particular the definition of methods that allows a rapid and repeatable instantiation of a model. Model validation should include not only checking the well-formedness using OCL constraints, but also the evaluation of model quality. Software metrics are useful means for evaluating the quality of both software development processes and software products. As models are used to drive the entire software development process it is unlikely that high quality software will be obtained using low quality models. The thesis presents a methodology supported by KMF that uses the UML specification to compute the design metrics at an early stage of software development. The thesis presents a transformation language called YATL (Yet Another Transformation Language), which was designed and implemented to support the features provided by OMG's Request For Proposal and the future QVT standard. YATL is a hybrid language (a mix of declarative and imperative constructions) designed to answer the Query/Views/Transformations Request For Proposals issued by OMG and to express model transformations as required by the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach. Several examples of model transformations, which have been implemented using YATL and the support provided by KMF, are presented. These experiments investigate different knowledge areas as programming languages, visual diagrams and distributed systems. YATL was used to implement the following transformations: * UML to Java mapping * Spider diagrams to OCL mapping * EDOC to Web Service