The Role of Computers in Research and Development at Langley Research Center

This document is a compilation of presentations given at a workshop on the role cf computers in research and development at the Langley Research Center. The objectives of the workshop were to inform the Langley Research Center community of the current software systems and software practices in use at Langley. The workshop was organized in 10 sessions: Software Engineering; Software Engineering Standards, methods, and CASE tools; Solutions of Equations; Automatic Differentiation; Mosaic and the World Wide Web; Graphics and Image Processing; System Design Integration; CAE Tools; Languages; and Advanced Topics

Towards Jacamo-rest: A Resource-Oriented Abstraction for Managing Multi-Agent Systems

The Multi-Agent Oriented Programming (MAOP) paradigm provides abstractions to model and implements entities of agents, as well as of their organisations and environments. In recent years, researchers have started to explore the integration of MAOP and the resource-oriented web architecture (REST). This paper further advances this line of research by presenting an ongoing work on jacamo-rest, a resource-oriented web-based abstraction for the multi-agent programming platform JaCaMo. Jacamo-rest takes Multi-Agent System (MAS) interoperability to a new level, enabling MAS to not only interact with services or applications of the World Wide Web but also to be managed and updated in their specifications by other applications. To add a developer interface to JaCaMo that is suitable for the Web, we provide a novel conceptual perspective on the management of MAOP specification entities as web resources. We tested jacamo-rest using it as a middleware of a programming interface application that provides modern software engineering facilities such as continuous deployments and iterative software development for MAS.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, Accepted to present on 14th Workshop-School on Agents, Environments, and Applications (WESAAC 2020

A flexible service selection for executing virtual services

[EN] With the adoption of a service-oriented paradigm on the Web, many software services are likely to fulfil similar functional needs for end-users. We propose to aggregate functionally equivalent software services within one single virtual service, that is, to associate a functionality, a graphical user interface (GUI), and a set of selection rules. When an end user invokes such a virtual service through its GUI to answer his/her functional need, the software service that best responds to the end-user s selection policy is selected and executed and the result is then rendered to the end-user through the GUI of the virtual service. A key innovation in this paper is the flexibility of our proposed service selection policy. First, each selection policy can refer to heterogeneous parameters (e.g., service price, end-user location, and QoS). Second, additional parameters can be added to an existing or new policy with little investment. Third, the end users themselves define a selection policy to apply during the selection process, thanks to the GUI element added as part of the virtual service design. This approach was validated though the design, implementation, and testing of an end-to-end architecture, including the implementation of several virtual services and utilizing several software services available today on the Web.This work was partially supported in part by SERVERY (Service Platform for Innovative Communication Environment), a CELTIC project that aims to create a Service Marketplace that bridges the Internet and Telco worlds by merging the flexibility and openness of the former with the trustworthiness and reliability of the latter, enabling effective and profitable cooperation among actors.Laga, N.; Bertin, E.; Crespi, N.; Bedini, I.; Molina Moreno, B.; Zhao, Z. (2013). A flexible service selection for executing virtual services. 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A., Verheecke, B., Vanderperren, W., Suvée, D., and Jonckers, V.: “Aspect-oriented Programming for Dynamic Web Service Selection, Integration and Management.” In Proc. World Wide Web 2007, pp. 211–242.Crespi, N., Boussard, M. Fodor, S.: Converging Web 2.0 with telecommunications. eStrategies Projects, Vol. 10, 108–109. British Publishers, ISSN 1758–2369, June 2009.Dey, A.K., Salber, D., Abowd, G.D.: A conceptual framework and a toolkit for supporting the rapid prototyping of context-aware applications. Hum. Comput. Interact. 16, 1–67 (2001)Ding, Q., Li, X., and Zhou, X.: Reputation Based Service Selection in Grid Environment. In Proceedings of the 2008 international Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering - Volume 03 (December. 2008). CSSE. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 58–61.Fielding, R.T.: Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. 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UMI Order Number: UIUCDCS-R-2001-2212., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Laga, N., Bertin, E., and Crespi, N.: Building a User Friendly Service Dashboard: Automatic and Non-intrusive Chaining between Widgets. In Proceedings of the 2009 Congress on Services - I (July 06–10, 2009). SERVICES. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 484–491.Laga, N., Bertin, E., and Crespi, N.: Business Process Personalization Through Web Widgets. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE international Conference on Web Services (July 05–10, 2010). ICWS. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 551–558.Liu, Y., Ngu, A. H., and Zeng, L. Z.: QoS computation and policing in dynamic web service selection. In Proceedings of the 13th international World Wide Web Conference on Alternate Track Papers &Amp; Posters (New York, NY, USA, May 19–21, 2004). WWW Alt. ’04. ACM, New York, NY, 66–73.Malik, Z., Bouguettaya, A.: Rater credibility assessment in Web services interactions. 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Usability Inspection in Model-Driven Web Development: Empirical Validation in WebML

There is a lack of empirically validated usability evaluation methods that can be applied to models in model-driven Web development. Evaluation of these models allows an early detection of usability problems perceived by the end-user. This motivated us to propose WUEP, a usability inspection method which can be integrated into different model-driven Web development processes. We previously demonstrated how WUEP can effectively be used when following the Object-Oriented Hypermedia method. In order to provide evidences about WUEP’s generalizability, this paper presents the operationalization and empirical validation of WUEP into another well-known method: WebML. The effectiveness, efficiency, perceived ease of use, and satisfaction of WUEP were evaluated in comparison to Heuristic Evaluation (HE) from the viewpoint of novice inspectors. The results show that WUEP was more effective and efficient than HE when detecting usability problems on models. 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Semantic-based policy engineering for autonomic systems

This paper presents some important directions in the use of ontology-based semantics in achieving the vision of Autonomic Communications. We examine the requirements of Autonomic Communication with a focus on the demanding needs of ubiquitous computing environments, with an emphasis on the requirements shared with Autonomic Computing. We observe that ontologies provide a strong mechanism for addressing the heterogeneity in user task requirements, managed resources, services and context. We then present two complimentary approaches that exploit ontology-based knowledge in support of autonomic communications: service-oriented models for policy engineering and dynamic semantic queries using content-based networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major research challenges such approaches raise

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

On the sustainability of web systems evolution

In the last twenty years, the evolution of web systems has been driven along three dimensions: the processes used to develop, evolve, maintain and re-engineer the systems themselves; the end products (the pages, content and links) of such processes; and finally the people dimension, with the extraordinary shift in how developers and users shape, interact and maintain the code and content that they put online. This paper reviews the questions that each of these dimensions has addressed in the past, and indicates which ones will need to be addressed in the future, in order for web system evolution to be sustainable. We show that the study on websites evolution has shifted from server- to client-side, focusing on better technologies and processes, and that the users becoming creators of content open several open questions, in particular the issue of credibility of the content created and the sustainability of such resources in the long term