A Framework for Evaluating Model-Driven Self-adaptive Software Systems

In the last few years, Model Driven Development (MDD), Component-based Software Development (CBSD), and context-oriented software have become interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the modularity, flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of software systems. An analysis of these technologies shows them all to include the principle of the separation of concerns, and their further integration is a key factor to obtaining high-quality and self-adaptable software systems. Each technology identifies different concerns and deals with them separately in order to specify the design of the self-adaptive applications, and, at the same time, support software with adaptability and context-awareness. This research studies the development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven development in building self-adaptive software systems. To this aim, this article proposes an evaluation framework for analysing and evaluating the features of model-driven approaches and their ability to support software with self-adaptability and dependability in highly dynamic contextual environment. Such evaluation framework can facilitate the software developers on selecting a development methodology that suits their software requirements and reduces the development effort of building self-adaptive software systems. This study highlights the major drawbacks of the propped model-driven approaches in the related works, and emphasise on considering the volatile aspects of self-adaptive software in the analysis, design and implementation phases of the development methodologies. In addition, we argue that the development methodologies should leave the selection of modelling languages and modelling tools to the software developers.Comment: model-driven architecture, COP, AOP, component composition, self-adaptive application, context oriented software developmen

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

A Review on Software Architectures for Heterogeneous Platforms

The increasing demands for computing performance have been a reality regardless of the requirements for smaller and more energy efficient devices. Throughout the years, the strategy adopted by industry was to increase the robustness of a single processor by increasing its clock frequency and mounting more transistors so more calculations could be executed. However, it is known that the physical limits of such processors are being reached, and one way to fulfill such increasing computing demands has been to adopt a strategy based on heterogeneous computing, i.e., using a heterogeneous platform containing more than one type of processor. This way, different types of tasks can be executed by processors that are specialized in them. Heterogeneous computing, however, poses a number of challenges to software engineering, especially in the architecture and deployment phases. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study that aims at discovering the state-of-the-art in software architecture for heterogeneous computing, with focus on deployment. We conduct a systematic mapping study that retrieved 28 studies, which were critically assessed to obtain an overview of the research field. We identified gaps and trends that can be used by both researchers and practitioners as guides to further investigate the topic

A Conceptual Framework for Adapation

This paper presents a white-box conceptual framework for adaptation that promotes a neat separation of the adaptation logic from the application logic through a clear identification of control data and their role in the adaptation logic. The framework provides an original perspective from which we survey archetypal approaches to (self-)adaptation ranging from programming languages and paradigms, to computational models, to engineering solutions

A Conceptual Framework for Adapation

We present a white-box conceptual framework for adaptation. We called it CODA, for COntrol Data Adaptation, since it is based on the notion of control data. CODA promotes a neat separation between application and adaptation logic through a clear identification of the set of data that is relevant for the latter. The framework provides an original perspective from which we survey a representative set of approaches to adaptation ranging from programming languages and paradigms, to computational models and architectural solutions

A Conceptual Framework for Adapation

This paper presents a white-box conceptual framework for adaptation that promotes a neat separation of the adaptation logic from the application logic through a clear identification of control data and their role in the adaptation logic. The framework provides an original perspective from which we survey archetypal approaches to (self-)adaptation ranging from programming languages and paradigms, to computational models, to engineering solutions

Towards a flexible open-source software library for multi-layered scholarly textual studies: An Arabic case study dealing with semi-automatic language processing

This paper presents both the general model and a case study of the Computational and Collaborative Philology Library (CoPhiLib), an ongoing initiative underway at the Institute for Computational Linguistics (ILC) of the National Research Council (CNR), Pisa, Italy. The library, designed and organized as a reusable, abstract and open-source software component, aims at solving the needs of multi-lingual and cross-lingual analysis by exposing common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The core modules, coded by the Java programming language, constitute the groundwork of a Web platform designed to deal with textual scholarly needs. The Web application, implemented according to the Java Enterprise specifications, focuses on multi-layered analysis for the study of literary documents and related multimedia sources. This ambitious challenge seeks to obtain the management of textual resources, on the one hand by abstracting from current language, on the other hand by decoupling from the specific requirements of single projects. This goal is achieved thanks to methodologies declared by the 'agile process', and by putting into effect suitable use case modeling, design patterns, and component-based architectures. The reusability and flexibility of the system have been tested on an Arabic case study: the system allows users to choose the morphological engine (such as AraMorph or Al-Khalil), along with linguistic granularity (i.e. with or without declension). Finally, the application enables the construction of annotated resources for further statistical engines (training set). © 2014 IEEE

Systemic classification of concern-based design methods in the context of enterprise architecture

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a relatively new domain that is rapidly developing. "The primary reason for developing EA is to support business by providing the fundamental technology and process structure for an IT strategy” [TOGAF]. EA models have to model enterprises facets that span from marketing to IT. As a result, EA models tend to become large. Large EA models create a problem for model management. Concern-based design methods (CBDMs) aim to solve this problem by considering EA models as a composition of smaller, manageable parts—concerns. There are dozens of different CBDMs that can be used in the context of EA: from very generic methods to specific methods for business modeling or IT implementations. This variety of methods can cause two problems for those who develop and use innovative CBDMs in the field of Enterprise Architecture (EA). The first problem is to choose specific CBDMs that can be used in a given EA methodology: this is a problem for researchers who develop their own EA methodology. The second problem is to find similar methods (with the same problem domain or with similar frameworks) in order to make a comparative analysis with these methods: this is a problem of researchers who develop their own CBDMs related to a specific problem domain in EA (such as business process modeling or aspect oriented programming). We aim to address both of these problems by means of a definition of generic Requirements for CBDMs based on the system inquiry. We use these requirements to classify twenty CBDMs in the context of EA. We conclude with a short discussion about trends that we have observed in the field of concern-based design and modelin