A framework for developing engineering design ontologies within the aerospace industry

This paper presents a framework for developing engineering design ontologies within the aerospace industry. The aim of this approach is to strengthen the modularity and reuse of engineering design ontologies to support knowledge management initiatives within the aerospace industry. Successful development and effective utilisation of engineering ontologies strongly depends on the method/framework used to develop them. Ensuring modularity in ontology design is essential for engineering design activities due to the complexity of knowledge that is required to be brought together to support the product design decision-making process. The proposed approach adopts best practices from previous ontology development methods, but focuses on encouraging modular architectural ontology design. The framework is comprised of three phases namely: (1) Ontology design and development; (2) Ontology validation and (3) Implementation of ontology structure. A qualitative research methodology is employed which is composed of four phases. The first phase defines the capture of knowledge required for the framework development, followed by the ontology framework development, iterative refinement of engineering ontologies and ontology validation through case studies and experts’ opinion. The ontology-based framework is applied in the combustor and casing aerospace engineering domain. The modular ontologies developed as a result of applying the framework and are used in a case study to restructure and improve the accessibility of information on a product design information-sharing platform. Additionally, domain experts within the aerospace industry validated the strengths, benefits and limitations of the framework. Due to the modular nature of the developed ontologies, they were also employed to support other project initiatives within the case study company such as role-based computing (RBC), IT modernisation activity and knowledge management implementation across the sponsoring organisation. The major benefit of this approach is in the reduction of man-hours required for maintaining engineering design ontologies. Furthermore, this approach strengthens reuse of ontology knowledge and encourages modularity in the design and development of engineering ontologies

Service-oriented design of environmental information systems

Service-orientation has an increasing impact upon the design process and the architecture of environmental information systems. This thesis specifies the SERVUS design methodology for geospatial applications based upon standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium. SERVUS guides the system architect to rephrase use case requirements as a network of semantically-annotated requested resources and to iteratively match them with offered resources that mirror the capabilities of existing services

Security-Driven Software Evolution Using A Model Driven Approach

High security level must be guaranteed in applications in order to mitigate risks during the deployment of information systems in open network environments. However, a significant number of legacy systems remain in use which poses security risks to the enterprise’ assets due to the poor technologies used and lack of security concerns when they were in design. Software reengineering is a way out to improve their security levels in a systematic way. Model driven is an approach in which model as defined by its type directs the execution of the process. The aim of this research is to explore how model driven approach can facilitate the software reengineering driven by security demand. The research in this thesis involves the following three phases. Firstly, legacy system understanding is performed using reverse engineering techniques. Task of this phase is to reverse engineer legacy system into UML models, partition the legacy system into subsystems with the help of model slicing technique and detect existing security mechanisms to determine whether or not the provided security in the legacy system satisfies the user’s security objectives. Secondly, security requirements are elicited using risk analysis method. It is the process of analysing key aspects of the legacy systems in terms of security. A new risk assessment method, taking consideration of asset, threat and vulnerability, is proposed and used to elicit the security requirements which will generate the detailed security requirements in the specific format to direct the subsequent security enhancement. Finally, security enhancement for the system is performed using the proposed ontology based security pattern approach. It is the stage that security patterns derived from security expertise and fulfilling the elicited security requirements are selected and integrated in the legacy system models with the help of the proposed security ontology. The proposed approach is evaluated by the selected case study. Based on the analysis, conclusions are drawn and future research is discussed at the end of this thesis. The results show this thesis contributes an effective, reusable and suitable evolution approach for software security

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.In modern organisations business process modelling has become fundamental due to the increasing rate of organisational change. As a consequence, an organisation needs to continuously redesign its business processes on a regular basis. One major problem associated with the way business process modelling (BPM) is carried out today is the lack of explicit and systematic reuse of previously developed models. Enabling the reuse of previously modelled behaviour can have a beneficial impact on the quality and efficiency of the overall information systems development process and also improve the effectiveness of an organisation’s business processes. In related disciplines, like software engineering, patterns have emerged as a widely accepted architectural mechanism for reusing solutions. In business process modelling the use of patterns is quite limited apart from few sporadic attempts proposed by the literature. Thus, pattern-based BPM is not commonplace. Business process patterns should ideally be discovered from the empirical analysis of organisational processes. Empiricism is currently not the basis for the discovery of patterns for business process modelling and no systematic methodology for collecting and analysing process models of business organisations currently exists. The purpose of the presented research project is to develop a methodological framework for achieving reuse in BPM via the discovery and adoption of patterns. The framework is called Semantic Discovery and Reuse of Business Process Patterns (SDR). SDR provides a systematic method for identifying patterns among organisational data assets representing business behaviour. The framework adopts ontologies (i.e., formalised conceptual models of real-world domains) in order to facilitate such discovery. The research has also produced an ontology of business processes that provides the underlying semantic definitions of processes and their constituent parts. The use of ontologies to model business processes represents a novel approach and combines advances achieved by the Semantic Web and BPM communities. The methodological framework also relates to a new line of research in BPM on declarative business processes in which the models specify what should be done rather than how to ‘prescriptively’ do it. The research follows a design science method for designing and evaluating SDR. Evaluation is carried out using real world sources and reuse scenarios taken from both the financial and educational domains

Model driven validation approach for enterprise architecture and motivation extensions

As the endorsement of Enterprise Architecture (EA) modelling continues to grow in diversity and complexity, management of its schema, artefacts, semantics and relationships has become an important business concern. To maintain agility and flexibility within competitive markets, organizations have also been compelled to explore ways of adjusting proactively to innovations, changes and complex events also by use of EA concepts to model business processes and strategies. Thus the need to ensure appropriate validation of EA taxonomies has been considered severally as an essential requirement for these processes in order to exert business motivation; relate information systems to technological infrastructure. However, since many taxonomies deployed today use widespread and disparate modelling methodologies, the possibility to adopt a generic validation approach remains a challenge. The proliferation of EA methodologies and perspectives has also led to intricacies in the formalization and validation of EA constructs as models often times have variant schematic interpretations. Thus, disparate implementations and inconsistent simulation of alignment between business architectures and heterogeneous application systems is common within the EA domain (Jonkers et al., 2003). In this research, the Model Driven Validation Approach (MDVA) is introduced. MDVA allows modelling of EA with validation attributes, formalization of the validation concepts and transformation of model artefacts to ontologies. The transformation simplifies querying based on motivation and constraints. As the extended methodology is grounded on the semiotics of existing tools, validation is executed using ubiquitous query language. The major contributions of this work are the extension of a metamodel of Business Layer of an EAF with Validation Element and the development of EAF model to ontology transformation Approach. With this innovation, domain-driven design and object-oriented analysis concepts are applied to achieve EAF model’s validation using ontology querying methodology. Additionally, the MDVA facilitates the traceability of EA artefacts using ontology graph patterns

Automated modelling assistance by integrating heterogeneous information sources

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) uses models as its main assets in the software development process. The structure of a model is described through a metamodel. Even though modelling and meta-modelling are recurrent activities in MDE and a vast amount of MDE tools exist nowadays, they are tasks typically performed in an unassisted way. Usually, these tools cannot extract useful knowledge available in heterogeneous information sources like XML, RDF, CSV or other models and meta-models. We propose an approach to provide modelling and meta-modelling assistance. The approach gathers heterogeneous information sources in various technological spaces, and represents them uniformly in a common data model. This enables their uniform querying, by means of an extensible mechanism, which can make use of services, e.g., for synonym search and word sense analysis. The query results can then be easily incorporated into the (meta-)model being built. The approach has been realized in the Extremo tool, developed as an Eclipse plugin. Extremo has been validated in the context of two domains { production systems and process modelling { taking into account a large and complex industrial standard for classi cation and product description. Further validation results indicate that the integration of Extremo in various modelling environments can be achieved with low e ort, and that the tool is able to handle information from most existing technological spacesThis work was supported by the Ministry of Education of 1256 Spain (FPU grant FPU13/02698); the Spanish MINECO (TIN2014-52129-R);1257 the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006); the Austrian 1258 agency for international mobility and cooperation in education, science and re1259 search (OeAD) by funds from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research 1260 and Economy - BMWFW (ICM-2016-04969

Software Product Line

The Software Product Line (SPL) is an emerging methodology for developing software products. Currently, there are two hot issues in the SPL: modelling and the analysis of the SPL. Variability modelling techniques have been developed to assist engineers in dealing with the complications of variability management. The principal goal of modelling variability techniques is to configure a successful software product by managing variability in domain-engineering. In other words, a good method for modelling variability is a prerequisite for a successful SPL. On the other hand, analysis of the SPL aids the extraction of useful information from the SPL and provides a control and planning strategy mechanism for engineers or experts. In addition, the analysis of the SPL provides a clear view for users. Moreover, it ensures the accuracy of the SPL. This book presents new techniques for modelling and new methods for SPL analysis

Attribute based component design: Supporting model driven development in CbSE

In analysing the evolution of Software Engineering, the scale of the components has increased, the requirements for different domains become complex and a variety of different component frameworks and their associated models have emerged. Many modern component frameworks provide enterprise level facilities and services, such as instance management, and component container support, that allow developers to apply if needed to manage scale and complexity. Although the services provided by these frameworks are common, they have different models and implementation. Accordingly, the main problem is, when developing a component based application using a component framework, the design of the components becomes tightly integrated with the framework implementation and the framework model is embedded in the component functionality, and hence reduces reusability. Another problem arose is, the designers must have in-depth knowledge of the implementation of a component framework to be able to model, design and implement the components and take advantages of the services provided. To address these problems, this research proposes the Attribute based Component Design (AbCD) approach which allows developers to model software using logical and abstract components at the specification level. The components encapsulate the provided functionality, as well as the required services, runtime requirements and interaction models using a set of attributes. These attributes are systemically derived by grouping common features and services from light weight component frameworks and heavy weight component frameworks that are available in the literature. The AbCD approach consists of the AbCD Meta-model, which is an extension of the บML meta-model, and the Component Design Guidelines (CDG) that includes core Component based Software Engineering principles to assist the modelling process for designers. To support the AbCD approach, an implementation has been developed as a set of plug-ins, called the AbCD tool suite, for Eclipse IDE. An evaluation of the AbCD approach is conducted by using the tool suite with two case studies. The first case study focuses on abstraction achieved by the AbCD approach and the second focuses on reusability of the components. The evaluation shows that the artefacts produced using the approach provide an alternative architectural view to the design and help to re-factor the design based on aspects. At the same time the evaluation process identified possible improvements in the AbCD meta-model and the tool suite constructed. This research provides a non-invasive approach for designing component based software using model driven development