An Evidence-based Roadmap for IoT Software Systems Engineering

Context: The Internet of Things (IoT) has brought expectations for software inclusion in everyday objects. However, it has challenges and requires multidisciplinary technical knowledge involving different areas that should be combined to enable IoT software systems engineering. Goal: To present an evidence-based roadmap for IoT development to support developers in specifying, designing, and implementing IoT systems. Method: An iterative approach based on experimental studies to acquire evidence to define the IoT Roadmap. Next, the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge life cycle was used to organize the roadmap and set temporal dimensions for IoT software systems engineering. Results: The studies revealed seven IoT Facets influencing IoT development. The IoT Roadmap comprises 117 items organized into 29 categories representing different concerns for each Facet. In addition, an experimental study was conducted observing a real case of a healthcare IoT project, indicating the roadmap applicability. Conclusions: The IoT Roadmap can be a feasible instrument to assist IoT software systems engineering because it can (a) support researchers and practitioners in understanding and characterizing the IoT and (b) provide a checklist to identify the applicable recommendations for engineering IoT software systems

Supporting Automatic Interoperability in Model-Driven Development Processes

By analyzing the last years of software development evolution, it is possible to observe that the involved technologies are increasingly focused on the definition of models for the specification of the intended software products. This model-centric development schema is the main ingredient for the Model-Driven Development (MDD) paradigm. In general terms, the MDD approaches propose the automatic generation of software products by means of the transformation of the defined models into the final program code. This transformation process is also known as model compilation process. Thus, MDD is oriented to reduce (or even eliminate) the hand-made programming, which is an error-prone and time-consuming task. Hence, models become the main actors of the MDD processes: the models are the new programming code. In this context, the interoperability can be considered a natural trend for the future of model-driven technologies, where different modeling approaches, tools, and standards can be integrated and coordinated to reduce the implementation and learning time of MDD solutions as well as to improve the quality of the final software products. However, there is a lack of approaches that provide a suitable solution to support the interoperability in MDD processes. Moreover, the proposals that define an interoperability framework for MDD processes are still in a theoretical space and are not aligned with current standards, interoperability approaches, and technologies. Thus, the main objective of this doctoral thesis is to develop an approach to achieve the interoperability in MDD processes. This interoperability approach is based on current metamodeling standards, modeling language customization mechanisms, and model-to-model transformation technologies. To achieve this objective, novel approaches have been defined to improve the integration of modeling languages, to obtain a suitable interchange of modeling information, and to perform automatic interoperability verification.Giachetti Herrera, GA. (2011). Supporting Automatic Interoperability in Model-Driven Development Processes [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/11108Palanci

Exploring ‘events’ as an information systems research methodology

This paper builds upon existing research and commentary from a variety of disciplinary sources including Information Systems, Organisational and Management Studies, and the Social Sciences that focus upon the meaning, significance and impact of ‘events’ in both an organisational and a social sense. The aim of this paper is to define how the examination of the event is an appropriate, viable and useful Information Systems methodology. Our argument is that focusing on the ‘event’ enables the researcher to more clearly observe and capture the complexity, multiplicity and mundaneity of everyday lived experience. The use and notion of ‘event’ has the potential to reduce the methodological dilemmas associated with the micromanagement of the research process – an inherent danger of traditional and ‘virtual' ethnographic approaches. Similarly, this paper addresses the over-emphasis upon managerialist, structured and time-fixated praxis that is currently symptomatic of Information Systems research. All of these concerns are pivotal points of critique found within eventoriented literature. An examination of event-related theory within interpretative disciplines directs the focus of this paper towards the more specific realm of the ‘event scene’. The notion of the ‘event scene’ originated in the action based (and anti-academy) imperatives of the Situationists and emerged in an academic sense as critical situational analysis. Event scenes are a focus for contemporary critical theory where they are utilised as a means of representing theoried inquiry in order to loosen the restrictions that historical and temporally bound analysis imposes upon most interpretative approaches. The use of event scenes as the framework for critiquing established conceptual assumptions is exemplified by their use in CTheory. In this journal's version and articulation of the event scene poetry, commentary, multi-vocal narrative and other techniques are legitimated as academic forms. These various forms of multi-dimensional expression are drawn upon to enrich the understandings of the ‘event’, to extricate its meaning and to provide a sense of the moment from which the point of analysis stems. The objective of this paper is to advocate how Information Systems research can (or should) utilize an event scene oriented methodology

Design, implementation, and evaluation of an ICT-supported collaboration methodology for distributed requirements determination

As information systems development becomes more distributed, information and communication technology (ICT) has become crucial to overcome distance and to enable collaboration between system users and analysts. This study presents the design, implementation, and experimental evaluation of a new technology-supported collaborative methodology for requirements determination. The new ICT-supported methodology enables the elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation of requirements in a distributed environment. Its design follows the theoretical principles of Te’eni’s (2001) cognitiveaffective model of organizational communication for IT design and combines established methods as well as techniques for requirements identification, formulation, dependency determination, prioritization, and selection in a coherent and innovative way. The resulting prototype is professionally implemented and evaluated in an experiment. The experiment is the first to compare the performance of traditional ways of communication via interviews and document exchange with that of communication via an Internet-based collaboration platform for requirements determination. The results show that, both, the efficiency of the overall requirements determination process as well as the overall quality of the resulting requirements, are higher when using the new collaborative methodology. In terms of quality, efficiency, the user and analyst perspectives need to be distinguished. While the effort for requirements elicitation increases for the analysts, this up-front investment pays off in terms of significantly lower effort for the later specification and validation of requirements. In contrast, the users benefit in particular from lower effort during requirements elicitation and analysis

A research roadmap towards achieving scalability in model driven engineering

International audienceAs Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is increasingly applied to larger and more complex systems, the current generation of modelling and model management technologies are being pushed to their limits in terms of capacity and eciency. Additional research and development is imperative in order to enable MDE to remain relevant with industrial practice and to continue delivering its widely recognised productivity , quality, and maintainability benefits. Achieving scalabil-ity in modelling and MDE involves being able to construct large models and domain-specific languages in a systematic manner, enabling teams of modellers to construct and refine large models in a collaborative manner, advancing the state of the art in model querying and transformations tools so that they can cope with large models (of the scale of millions of model elements), and providing an infrastructure for ecient storage, indexing and retrieval of large models. This paper attempts to provide a research roadmap for these aspects of scalability in MDE and outline directions for work in this emerging research area

Using conceptual graphs for clinical guidelines representation and knowledge visualization

The intrinsic complexity of the medical domain requires the building of some tools to assist the clinician and improve the patient’s health care. Clinical practice guidelines and protocols (CGPs) are documents with the aim of guiding decisions and criteria in specific areas of healthcare and they have been represented using several languages, but these are difficult to understand without a formal background. This paper uses conceptual graph formalism to represent CGPs. The originality here is the use of a graph-based approach in which reasoning is based on graph-theory operations to support sound logical reasoning in a visual manner. It allows users to have a maximal understanding and control over each step of the knowledge reasoning process in the CGPs exploitation. The application example concentrates on a protocol for the management of adult patients with hyperosmolar hyperglycemic state in the Intensive Care Unit

HybridMDSD: Multi-Domain Engineering with Model-Driven Software Development using Ontological Foundations

Software development is a complex task. Executable applications comprise a mutlitude of diverse components that are developed with various frameworks, libraries, or communication platforms. The technical complexity in development retains resources, hampers efficient problem solving, and thus increases the overall cost of software production. Another significant challenge in market-driven software engineering is the variety of customer needs. It necessitates a maximum of flexibility in software implementations to facilitate the deployment of different products that are based on one single core. To reduce technical complexity, the paradigm of Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD) facilitates the abstract specification of software based on modeling languages. Corresponding models are used to generate actual programming code without the need for creating manually written, error-prone assets. Modeling languages that are tailored towards a particular domain are called domain-specific languages (DSLs). Domain-specific modeling (DSM) approximates technical solutions with intentional problems and fosters the unfolding of specialized expertise. To cope with feature diversity in applications, the Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) community provides means for the management of variability in software products, such as feature models and appropriate tools for mapping features to implementation assets. Model-driven development, domain-specific modeling, and the dedicated management of variability in SPLE are vital for the success of software enterprises. Yet, these paradigms exist in isolation and need to be integrated in order to exhaust the advantages of every single approach. In this thesis, we propose a way to do so. We introduce the paradigm of Multi-Domain Engineering (MDE) which means model-driven development with multiple domain-specific languages in variability-intensive scenarios. MDE strongly emphasize the advantages of MDSD with multiple DSLs as a neccessity for efficiency in software development and treats the paradigm of SPLE as indispensable means to achieve a maximum degree of reuse and flexibility. We present HybridMDSD as our solution approach to implement the MDE paradigm. The core idea of HybidMDSD is to capture the semantics of particular DSLs based on properly defined semantics for software models contained in a central upper ontology. Then, the resulting semantic foundation can be used to establish references between arbitrary domain-specific models (DSMs) and sophisticated instance level reasoning ensures integrity and allows to handle partiucular change adaptation scenarios. Moreover, we present an approach to automatically generate composition code that integrates generated assets from separate DSLs. All necessary development tasks are arranged in a comprehensive development process. Finally, we validate the introduced approach with a profound prototypical implementation and an industrial-scale case study.Softwareentwicklung ist komplex: ausführbare Anwendungen beinhalten und vereinen eine Vielzahl an Komponenten, die mit unterschiedlichen Frameworks, Bibliotheken oder Kommunikationsplattformen entwickelt werden. Die technische Komplexität in der Entwicklung bindet Ressourcen, verhindert effiziente Problemlösung und führt zu insgesamt hohen Kosten bei der Produktion von Software. Zusätzliche Herausforderungen entstehen durch die Vielfalt und Unterschiedlichkeit an Kundenwünschen, die der Entwicklung ein hohes Maß an Flexibilität in Software-Implementierungen abverlangen und die Auslieferung verschiedener Produkte auf Grundlage einer Basis-Implementierung nötig machen. Zur Reduktion der technischen Komplexität bietet sich das Paradigma der modellgetriebenen Softwareentwicklung (MDSD) an. Software-Spezifikationen in Form abstrakter Modelle werden hier verwendet um Programmcode zu generieren, was die fehleranfällige, manuelle Programmierung ähnlicher Komponenten überflüssig macht. Modellierungssprachen, die auf eine bestimmte Problemdomäne zugeschnitten sind, nennt man domänenspezifische Sprachen (DSLs). Domänenspezifische Modellierung (DSM) vereint technische Lösungen mit intentionalen Problemen und ermöglicht die Entfaltung spezialisierter Expertise. Um der Funktionsvielfalt in Software Herr zu werden, bietet der Forschungszweig der Softwareproduktlinienentwicklung (SPLE) verschiedene Mittel zur Verwaltung von Variabilität in Software-Produkten an. Hierzu zählen Feature-Modelle sowie passende Werkzeuge, um Features auf Implementierungsbestandteile abzubilden. Modellgetriebene Entwicklung, domänenspezifische Modellierung und eine spezielle Handhabung von Variabilität in Softwareproduktlinien sind von entscheidender Bedeutung für den Erfolg von Softwarefirmen. Zur Zeit bestehen diese Paradigmen losgelöst voneinander und müssen integriert werden, damit die Vorteile jedes einzelnen für die Gesamtheit der Softwareentwicklung entfaltet werden können. In dieser Arbeit wird ein Ansatz vorgestellt, der dies ermöglicht. Es wird das Multi-Domain Engineering Paradigma (MDE) eingeführt, welches die modellgetriebene Softwareentwicklung mit mehreren domänenspezifischen Sprachen in variabilitätszentrierten Szenarien beschreibt. MDE stellt die Vorteile modellgetriebener Entwicklung mit mehreren DSLs als eine Notwendigkeit für Effizienz in der Entwicklung heraus und betrachtet das SPLE-Paradigma als unabdingbares Mittel um ein Maximum an Wiederverwendbarkeit und Flexibilität zu erzielen. In der Arbeit wird ein Ansatz zur Implementierung des MDE-Paradigmas, mit dem Namen HybridMDSD, vorgestellt

A model-driven approach to the conceptual modeling of situations : from specification to validation

A modelagem de situações para aplicações sensíveis ao contexto, também chamadas de aplicações sensíveis a situações, é, por um lado, uma tarefa chave para o funcionamento adequado dessas aplicações. Por outro lado, essa também é uma tafera árdua graças à complexidade e à vasta gama de tipos de situações possíveis. Com o intuito de facilitar a representação desses tipos de situações em tempo de projeto, foi criada a Linguagem de Modelagem de Situações (Situation Modeling Language - SML), a qual se baseia parcialmente em ricas teorias ontológicas de modelagem conceitual, além de fornecer uma plataforma de detecção de situação em tempo de execução. Apesar do benefício da existência dessa infraestrutura, a tarefa de definir tipos de situação é ainda não-trivial, podendo carregar problemas que dificilmente são detectados por modeladores via inspeções manuais. Esta dissertação tem o propósito de melhorar e facilitar ainda mais a definição de tipos de situação em SML propondo: (i) uma maior integração da linguagem com as teorias ontológicas de modelagem conceitual pelo uso da linguagem OntoUML, visando aumentar a expressividade dos modelos de situação; e (ii) uma abordagem para validação de tipos de situação usando um método formal, visando garantir que os modelos criados correspondam à intenção do modelador. Tanto a integração quanto a validação são implementadas em uma ferramenta para especificação, verificação e validação de tipos de situação ontologicamente enriquecidos.The modeling of situation types for context-aware applications, also called situationaware applications, is, on the one hand, a key task to the proper functioning of those applications. On the other hand, it is also a hard task given the complexity and the wide range of possible situation types. Aiming at facilitating the representation of those types of situations at design-time, the Situation Modeling Language (SML) was created. This language is based partially on rich ontological theories of conceptual modeling and is accompanied by a platform for situation-detection at runtime. Despite the benefits of the availability of this suitable infrastructure, the definition of situation types, being a non-trivial task, can still pose problems that are hardly detected by modelers by manual model inspection. This thesis aims at improving and facilitating the definition of situation types in SML by proposing: (i) the integration between the language and the ontological theories of conceptual modeling by using the OntoUML language, with the purpose of increasing the expressivity of situation type models; and (ii) an approach for the validation of situation type models using a lightweight formal method, aiming at increasing the correspondence between the created models’ instances and the modeler’s intentions. Both the integration and the validation are implemented in a tool for specification, verification and validation of ontologically-enriched situation types.CAPE

Technology Made Legible: A Cultural Study of Software as a Form of Writing in the Theories and Practices of Software Engineering

My dissertation proposes an analytical framework for the cultural understanding of the group of technologies commonly referred to as 'new' or 'digital'. I aim at dispelling what the philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls the 'deep opacity' that still surrounds new technologies, and that constitutes one of the main obstacles in their conceptualization today. I argue that such a critical intervention is essential if we are to take new technologies seriously, and if we are to engage with them on both the cultural and the political level. I understand new technologies as technologies based on software. I therefore suggest that a complex understanding of technologies, and of their role in contemporary culture and society, requires, as a preliminary step, an investigation of how software works. This involves going beyond studying the intertwined processes of its production, reception and consumption - processes that typically constitute the focus of media and cultural studies. Instead, I propose a way of accessing the ever present but allegedly invisible codes and languages that constitute software. I thus reformulate the problem of understanding software-based technologies as a problem of making software legible. I build my analysis on the concept of software advanced by Software Engineering, a technical discipline born in the late 1960s that defines software development as an advanced writing technique and software as a text. This conception of software enables me to analyse it through a number of reading strategies. I draw on the philosophical framework of deconstruction as formulated by Jacques Derrida in order to identify the conceptual structures underlying software and hence 'demystify' the opacity of new technologies. Ultimately, I argue that a deconstructive reading of software enables us to recognize the constitutive, if unacknowledged, role of technology in the formation of both the human and academic knowledge. This reading leads to a self-reflexive interrogation of the media and cultural studies' approach to technology and enhances our capacity to engage with new technologies without separating our cultural understanding from our political practices

Distributed Technology-Sustained Pervasive Applications

Technology-sustained pervasive games, contrary to technology-supported pervasive games, can be understood as computer games interfacing with the physical world. Pervasive games are known to make use of 'non-standard input devices' and with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), pervasive applications can be expected to move beyond games. This dissertation is requirements- and development-focused Design Science research for distributed technology-sustained pervasive applications, incorporating knowledge from the domains of Distributed Computing, Mixed Reality, Context-Aware Computing, Geographical Information Systems and IoT. Computer video games have existed for decades, with a reusable game engine to drive them. If pervasive games can be understood as computer games interfacing with the physical world, can computer game engines be used to stage pervasive games? Considering the use of non-standard input devices in pervasive games and the rise of IoT, how will this affect the architectures supporting the broader set of pervasive applications? The use of a game engine can be found in some existing pervasive game projects, but general research into how the domain of pervasive games overlaps with that of video games is lacking. When an engine is used, a discussion of, what type of engine is most suitable and what properties are being fulfilled by the engine, is often not part of the discourse. This dissertation uses multiple iterations of the method framework for Design Science for the design and development of three software system architectures. In the face of IoT, the problem of extending pervasive games into a fourth software architecture, accommodating a broader set of pervasive applications, is explicated. The requirements, for technology-sustained pervasive games, are verified through the design, development and demonstration of the three software system architectures. The ...Comment: 64 pages, 13 figure