The pros and cons of using SDL for creation of distributed services

In a competitive market for the creation of complex distributed services, time to market, development cost, maintenance and flexibility are key issues. Optimizing the development process is very much a matter of optimizing the technologies used during service creation. This paper reports on the experience gained in the Service Creation projects SCREEN and TOSCA on use of the language SDL for efficient service creation

Model-Based Systems Engineering Approach to Distributed and Hybrid Simulation Systems

INCOSE defines Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) as the formalized application of modeling to support system requirements, design, analysis, verification, and validation activities beginning in the conceptual design phase and continuing throughout development and later life cycle phases. One very important development is the utilization of MBSE to develop distributed and hybrid (discrete-continuous) simulation modeling systems. MBSE can help to describe the systems to be modeled and help make the right decisions and partitions to tame complexity. The ability to embrace conceptual modeling and interoperability techniques during systems specification and design presents a great advantage in distributed and hybrid simulation systems development efforts. Our research is aimed at the definition of a methodological framework that uses MBSE languages, methods and tools for the development of these simulation systems. A model-based composition approach is defined at the initial steps to identify distributed systems interoperability requirements and hybrid simulation systems characteristics. Guidelines are developed to adopt simulation interoperability standards and conceptual modeling techniques using MBSE methods and tools. Domain specific system complexity and behavior can be captured with model-based approaches during the system architecture and functional design requirements definition. MBSE can allow simulation engineers to formally model different aspects of a problem ranging from architectures to corresponding behavioral analysis, to functional decompositions and user requirements (Jobe, 2008)

Formal Methods for Communication Services

We survey formal methods as they are applied to the development of communication services. We report on industrial and academic projects, consider different communication architectures and work related to the feature interaction problem. Based on our survey, the results reported in the literature and most importantly, on extensive discussions with industry, we investigate important industrial concerns and criticisms about the use of formal methods for the development of communication services. We report on a collaborative project between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Swisscom, Alcatel and Thomson in which these industrial concerns have been taken into account from the very beginning. The results of this project are currently being integrated into an industrial software development platform

Component-based control system development for agile manufacturing machine systems

It is now a common sense that manufactures including machine suppliers and system integrators of the 21 st century will need to compete on global marketplaces, which are frequently shifting and fragmenting, with new technologies continuously emerging. Future production machines and manufacturing systems need to offer the "agility" required in providing responsiveness to product changes and the ability to reconfigure. The primary aim for this research is to advance studies in machine control system design, in the context of the European project VIR-ENG - "Integrated Design, Simulation and Distributed Control of Agile Modular Machinery"

Designing precise and flexible graphical modelling languages for software development

Model-driven approaches to software development involve building computerized models of software and the environment in which it is intended to operate. This thesis offers a selection of the author’s work over the last three decades that addresses the design of precise and flexible graphical modelling languages for use in model-driven software development. The primary contributions of this work are: • Syntropy: the first published object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) method to fully integrate formal and graphical modelling techniques. • The creation of the Object Constraint Language (OCL) and its integration into the Unified Modeling Language (UML) specification. • The identification of requirements and mechanisms for increasing the flexibility of the UML specification. • The design and implementation of tools for implementing graphical Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). The starting point was the author’s experience with formal specification techniques contrasted with the lack of precision of published object-oriented analysis and design methods. This led to a desire to fully integrate these two topics – formal specification and object-orientation - into a coherent discipline. The Syntropy approach, created in 1994 by this author and John Daniels, was the first published complete attempt to do this. Much of the author’s subsequent published work concerns the Unified Modeling Language (UML). UML represented a welcome unification of earlier OOAD approaches, but suffered badly from inflexibility and lack of precision. A significant part of the work included in this thesis addresses the drawbacks of the UML and proposes improvements to the precision of its definition, including through the invention of Object Constraint Language (OCL) and its incorporation into the UML specification, and the consideration of UML as source material for the definition of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Several of the author’s published works in this thesis concern mechanisms for the creation of DSLs, both within a UML framework and separately

UML as a system level design methodology with application to software radio

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC