Developing Unobtrusive Mobile Interactions: a Model Driven Engineering approach

In Ubiquitous computing environments, people are surrounded by a lot of embedded services. With the inclusion of pervasive technologies such as sensors or GPS receivers, mobile devices turn into an effective communication tool between users and the services embedded in their environment. All these services compete for the attentional resources of the user. Thus, it is essential to consider the degree in which each service intrudes the user mind when services are designed. In order to prevent service behavior from becoming overwhelming, this work, based on Model Driven Engineering foundations, is devoted to develop services according to user needs. In this thesis, we provide a systematic method for the development of mobile services that can be adapted in terms of obtrusiveness. That is, services can be developed to provide their functionality at different obtrusiveness levels by minimizing the duplication of efforts. For the system specification, a modeling language is defined to cope with the particular requirements of the context-aware user interface domain. From this specification, following a sequence of well-defined steps, a software solution is obtained.Gil Pascual, M. (2010). Developing Unobtrusive Mobile Interactions: a Model Driven Engineering approach. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/12745Archivo delegad

Rapid development of ICT business services by business engineers independent of computer scientists

Current software development requires computer scientists to create and to adapt services to new or changing needs. In addition development and maintenance of software is time and cost intensive. Customizing of standard software is laborious. Software engineering research approaches as Domain Engineering, Model Driven Software Engineering and Product Line Engineering try to increase the abstraction level of the specification of the models to reduce the required time and money to build applications and services but they still demand the implementation by computer scientists. In two projects supported by the CTI (Commission for Technology and Innovation of the Swiss Confederation) we analysed how to achieve a higher level of abstraction and how to specify database-centric business services in a manner business engineers are able to create and to adapt services completely by themselves. Besides the methodology to specify these services (data structure, business rules, etc.), methods and technologies to hide all technical aspects (infrastructure, software architecture, versioning etc.) entirely from the business engineer had to be developed. In this paper an according graphical notation to specify services or complete applications is discussed

Software service adaptation based on interface localisation

The aim of Web services is the provision of software services to a range of different users in different locations. Service localisation in this context can facilitate the internationalisation and localisation of services by allowing their adaption to different locales. The authors investigate three dimensions: (i) lingual localisation by providing service-level language translation techniques to adopt services to different languages, (ii) regulatory localisation by providing standards-based mappings to achieve regulatory compliance with regionally varying laws, standards and regulations, and (iii) social localisation by taking into account preferences and customs for individuals and the groups or communities in which they participate. The objective is to support and implement an explicit modelling of aspects that are relevant to localisation and runtime support consisting of tools and middleware services to automating the deployment based on models of locales, driven by the two localisation dimensions. The authors focus here on an ontology-based conceptual information model that integrates locale specification into service architectures in a coherent way

A model-driven approach to survivability requirements assessment for critical systems

Survivability is a crucial property for those systems – such as critical infrastructures or military Command and Control Information Systems – that provide essential services, since the latter must be operational even when the system is compromised due to attack or faults. This article proposes a model-driven method and a tool –MASDES– to assess the survivability requirements of critical systems. The method exploits the use of (1) (mis)use case technique and UML profiling for the specification of the survivability requirements and (2) Petri nets and model checking techniques for the requirement assessment. A survivability assessment model is obtained from an improved specification of misuse cases, which encompasses essential services, threats and survivability strategies. The survivability assessment model is then converted into a Petri net model for verifying survivability properties through model checking. The MASDES tool has been developed within the Eclipse workbench and relies on Papyrus tool for UML. It consists of a set of plug-ins that enable (1) to create a survivability system view using UML and profiling techniques and (2) to verify survivability properties. In particular, the tool performs model transformations in two steps. First, a model-to-model transformation generates, from the survivability view, a Petri net model and properties to be checked in a tool-independent format. Second, model-to-text transformations produce the Petri net specifications for the model checkers. A military Command and Control Information Systems has been used as a case study to apply the method and to evaluate the MASDES tool, within an iterative-incremental software development process

EMF-REST: Generation of RESTful APIs from Models

In the last years, RESTful Web services have become more and more popular as a lightweight solution to connect remote systems in distributed and Cloud-based architectures. However, being an architectural style rather than a specification or standard, the proper design of RESTful Web services is not trivial since developers have to deal with a plethora of recommendations and best practices. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) emphasizes the use of models and model transformations to raise the level of abstraction and semi-automate the development of software. In this paper we present an approach that leverages on MDE techniques to generate RESTful services. The approach, called EMF-REST, takes EMF data models as input and generates Web APIs following the REST principles and relying on well-known libraries and standards, thus facilitating its comprehension and maintainability. Additionally, EMF-REST integrates model and Web-specific features to provide model validation and security capabilities, respectively, to the generated API. For Web developers, our approach brings more agility to the Web development process by providing ready-to-run-and-test Web APIs out of data models. Also, our approach provides MDE practitioners the basis to develop Cloud-based modeling solutions as well as enhanced collaborative support

Requirements traceability in model-driven development: Applying model and transformation conformance

The variety of design artifacts (models) produced in a model-driven design process results in an intricate relationship between requirements and the various models. This paper proposes a methodological framework that simplifies management of this relationship, which helps in assessing the quality of models, realizations and transformation specifications. Our framework is a basis for understanding requirements traceability in model-driven development, as well as for the design of tools that support requirements traceability in model-driven development processes. We propose a notion of conformance between application models which reduces the effort needed for assessment activities. We discuss how this notion of conformance can be integrated with model transformations

Model Based Development of Quality-Aware Software Services

Modelling languages and development frameworks give support for functional and structural description of software architectures. But quality-aware applications require languages which allow expressing QoS as a first-class concept during architecture design and service composition, and to extend existing tools and infrastructures adding support for modelling, evaluating, managing and monitoring QoS aspects. In addition to its functional behaviour and internal structure, the developer of each service must consider the fulfilment of its quality requirements. If the service is flexible, the output quality depends both on input quality and available resources (e.g., amounts of CPU execution time and memory). From the software engineering point of view, modelling of quality-aware requirements and architectures require modelling support for the description of quality concepts, support for the analysis of quality properties (e.g. model checking and consistencies of quality constraints, assembly of quality), tool support for the transition from quality requirements to quality-aware architectures, and from quality-aware architecture to service run-time infrastructures. Quality management in run-time service infrastructures must give support for handling quality concepts dynamically. QoS-aware modeling frameworks and QoS-aware runtime management infrastructures require a common evolution to get their integration