A NASA initiative: Software engineering for reliable complex systems

The objective is the development of methods, technology, and skills that will enable NASA to cost-effectively specify, build, and manage reliable software which can evolve and be maintained over an extended period. The need for such software is rooted in the increasing integration of software and computing components into NASA systems. Current NASA Software Engineering expertise was applied toward some of the largest reliable systems including: shuttle launch; ground support; shuttle simulation; minor control; satellite tracking; and scientific data systems. Unfortunately, no theory exists for reliable complex software systems. NASA is seeking to fill this theoretical gap through a number of approaches. One such approach is to conduct research on theoretical foundations for managing complex software systems. It includes: communication models, new and modified paradigms, and life-cycle models. Another approach is research in the theoretical foundations for reliable software development and validation. It focuses upon formal specifications, programming languages, software engineering systems, software reuse, formal verification, and software safety. Further approaches involve benchmarking a NASA software environment, experimentation within the NASA context, evolution of present NASA methodology, and transfer of technology to the space station software support environment

Disaster Response System

With integration of geospatial information system into a conventional information system a basic disaster response information system is implemented. The result is a report on various useful technologies and software engineering methodologies that could be utilized to implement a preliminary system, which in turn clarifies many uncertainties and surprises that are typical of many such systems. The foundations of my project include the Unified Process of software development, the relational data models, the decision tree technique, class design principles such as the MVC pattern

Disaster Response System

With integration of geospatial information system into a conventional information system a basic disaster response information system is implemented. The result is a report on various useful technologies and software engineering methodologies that could be utilized to implement a preliminary system, which in turn clarifies many uncertainties and surprises that are typical of many such systems. The foundations of my project include the Unified Process of software development, the relational data models, the decision tree technique, class design principles such as the MVC pattern

Self-Organizing Software Models for the Internet of Things:Complex Software Structures that Emerge without a Central Controller

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions the integration of physical objects into software systems for automating crucial aspects of our lives, such as health care, security, agriculture, and city management. Although the vision is promising, with the rapid advancement of hardware and communication technologies, IoT systems are becoming increasingly dynamic, large, and complex to the extent that manual management becomes infeasible. Thus, it is of paramount importance to provide software engineering foundations for constructing autonomic IoT systems

eNegotiations: Towards Engineering of Technology Based Social Processes

Traditionally, negotiation support was based on normative and prescriptive research; its users were analysts and experts. The purpose of the recently developed e-negotiation systems is to provide negotiators with services and to satisfy their requirements rather than direct their activities so that they conform to rationality and optimality principles. This orientation is typical to software engineering. Due to the difficulties in reconciling results of prescriptive and descriptive studies the e-negotiation design specifications are often based on selected descriptive approaches at the expense of the prescriptive support. This paper presents selected results from negotiation and e-negotiation research and discusses methodological foundations for e-negotiation system design and development. Based on review of methodological foundations and the scientific and engineering perspectives on negotiations, an e-negotiation view integration model is proposed. The purpose of the model is to allow for the integration of behavioural, scientific and engineering views on e-negotiations

Why Modern Open Source Projects Fail

Open source is experiencing a renaissance period, due to the appearance of modern platforms and workflows for developing and maintaining public code. As a result, developers are creating open source software at speeds never seen before. Consequently, these projects are also facing unprecedented mortality rates. To better understand the reasons for the failure of modern open source projects, this paper describes the results of a survey with the maintainers of 104 popular GitHub systems that have been deprecated. We provide a set of nine reasons for the failure of these open source projects. We also show that some maintenance practices -- specifically the adoption of contributing guidelines and continuous integration -- have an important association with a project failure or success. Finally, we discuss and reveal the principal strategies developers have tried to overcome the failure of the studied projects.Comment: Paper accepted at 25th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), pages 1-11, 201

No Trust without regulation!

The explosion in the performance of Machine Learning (ML) and the potential of its applications are strongly encouraging us to consider its use in industrial systems, including for critical functions such as decision-making in autonomous systems. While the AI community is well aware of the need to ensure the trustworthiness of AI-based applications, it is still leaving too much to one side the issue of safety and its corollary, regulation and standards, without which it is not possible to certify any level of safety, whether the systems are slightly or very critical.The process of developing and qualifying safety-critical software and systems in regulated industries such as aerospace, nuclear power stations, railways or automotive industry has long been well rationalized and mastered. They use well-defined standards, regulatory frameworks and processes, as well as formal techniques to assess and demonstrate the quality and safety of the systems and software they develop. However, the low level of formalization of specifications and the uncertainties and opacity of machine learning-based components make it difficult to validate and verify them using most traditional critical systems engineering methods. This raises the question of qualification standards, and therefore of regulations adapted to AI. With the AI Act, the European Commission has laid the foundations for moving forward and building solid approaches to the integration of AI-based applications that are safe, trustworthy and respect European ethical values. The question then becomes "How can we rise to the challenge of certification and propose methods and tools for trusted artificial intelligence?

Semantic model-driven development of service-centric software architectures

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a recent architectural paradigm that has received much attention. The prevalent focus on platforms such as Web services, however, needs to be complemented by appropriate software engineering methods. We propose the model-driven development of service-centric software systems. We present in particular an investigation into the role of enriched semantic modelling for a modeldriven development framework for service-centric software systems. Ontologies as the foundations of semantic modelling and its enhancement through architectural pattern modelling are at the core of the proposed approach. We introduce foundations and discuss the benefits and also the challenges in this context