Semantic model-driven development of web service architectures.

Building service-based architectures has become a major area of interest since the advent of Web services. Modelling these architectures is a central activity. Model-driven development is a recent approach to developing software systems based on the idea of making models the central artefacts for design representation, analysis, and code generation. We propose an ontology-based engineering methodology for semantic model-driven composition and transformation of Web service architectures. Ontology technology as a logic-based knowledge representation and reasoning framework can provide answers to the needs of sharable and reusable semantic models and descriptions needed for service engineering. Based on modelling, composition and code generation techniques for service architectures, our approach provides a methodological framework for ontology-based semantic service architecture

Quantitative Verification: Formal Guarantees for Timeliness, Reliability and Performance

Computerised systems appear in almost all aspects of our daily lives, often in safety-critical scenarios such as embedded control systems in cars and aircraft or medical devices such as pacemakers and sensors. We are thus increasingly reliant on these systems working correctly, despite often operating in unpredictable or unreliable environments. Designers of such devices need ways to guarantee that they will operate in a reliable and efficient manner. Quantitative verification is a technique for analysing quantitative aspects of a system's design, such as timeliness, reliability or performance. It applies formal methods, based on a rigorous analysis of a mathematical model of the system, to automatically prove certain precisely specified properties, e.g. ``the airbag will always deploy within 20 milliseconds after a crash'' or ``the probability of both sensors failing simultaneously is less than 0.001''. The ability to formally guarantee quantitative properties of this kind is beneficial across a wide range of application domains. For example, in safety-critical systems, it may be essential to establish credible bounds on the probability with which certain failures or combinations of failures can occur. In embedded control systems, it is often important to comply with strict constraints on timing or resources. More generally, being able to derive guarantees on precisely specified levels of performance or efficiency is a valuable tool in the design of, for example, wireless networking protocols, robotic systems or power management algorithms, to name but a few. This report gives a short introduction to quantitative verification, focusing in particular on a widely used technique called model checking, and its generalisation to the analysis of quantitative aspects of a system such as timing, probabilistic behaviour or resource usage. The intended audience is industrial designers and developers of systems such as those highlighted above who could benefit from the application of quantitative verification,but lack expertise in formal verification or modelling

Presenting Business Process Improvement Changes – A Systematic Literature Review

Äriprotsessi täiustamine aitab parandada lõppkasutaja kogemust, vähendada kulutusi ja kiirendada tööd. Eksisteerib mitmeid äriprotsessi täiustamise tehnikaid. Olemasolevate protsesside juures ei ole aga demonstreeritud muutuste mõju. Et täita see lünk, pakub antud lõputöö ülevaadet viisidest, kuidas demonstreerida äriprotsesside muutuste mõju päris elu näidete põhjal. Sel eesmärgil on tehtud süstemaatiline kirjanduse ülevaade artiklitest, mis kasutavad äriprotsesside täiustamist päris elu näidetes, et näha, kuidas need muutuseid on esitletud. Leitud artikleid analüüsiti ning leiti vastused uurimuse küsimustele. Analüüsi tulemusena leiti, et nagu igas teises teadusvaldkonnas, mis käsitleb muutusi, saab neid esitleda visuaalselt, numbriliselt või mitte- struktureeritud viisil, kasutates erinevaid esitlemise strateegiaid. Teadmine, kuidas antakse edasi asjade muutumist, aitab inimestel paremini aru saada nende sisust. Võimalik on paremini aru saada äriprotsesside muutustest.Business Process Improvement (BPI) has a big potential by helping to improve end-user satisfaction, to reduce costs and throughput times. A lot of business process improvement techniques exist, but they lack the information about the presentation of the effects of business process change. In order to fill this gap, this thesis provides an overview of the ways that are used to present the effects of business process change in real-life business process scenarios. For that purpose, a systematic literature review is performed to identify papers that apply BPI on real-life cases from industry to see what means are used to capture and present those changes. The identified final papers are analysed in order to answer to Research Questions (RQ). The analysis reveals that as in any other scientific field where change is occurring the change could be presented either visually, or in a numerical way, or in a not structured (narrative) way using some presentation strategies. This knowledge that gives some hints on how changes are conveyed can be used to support people to better understand the changes which occur in a process after a BPI

Icon: A diagrammatic theorem prover for ontologies

Concept diagrams form a visual language that is aimed at non-experts for the specification of ontologies and reason- ing about them. Empirical evidence suggests that they are more accessible to ontology users than symbolic notations typically used for ontologies (e.g., DL, OWL). Here, we re- port on iCon, a theorem prover for concept diagrams that al- lows reasoning about ontologies diagrammatically. The input to iCon is a theorem that needs proving to establish how an entailment, in an ontology that needs debugging, is caused by a minimal set of axioms. Such a minimal set of axioms is called an entailment justification. Carrying out inference in iCon provides a diagrammatic proof (i.e., explanation) that shows how the axioms in an entailment justification give rise to the entailment under investigation. iCon proofs are for- mally verified and guaranteed to be correct.Zohre

Modelling and Analysis Using GROOVE

In this paper we present case studies that describe how the graph transformation tool GROOVE has been used to model problems from a wide variety of domains. These case studies highlight the wide applicability of GROOVE in particular, and of graph transformation in general. They also give concrete templates for using GROOVE in practice. Furthermore, we use the case studies to analyse the main strong and weak points of GROOVE

A UML-based static verification framework for security

Secure software engineering is a new research area that has been proposed to address security issues during the development of software systems. This new area of research advocates that security characteristics should be considered from the early stages of the software development life cycle and should not be added as another layer in the system on an ad-hoc basis after the system is built. In this paper, we describe a UML-based Static Verification Framework (USVF) to support the design and verification of secure software systems in early stages of the software development life-cycle taking into consideration security and general requirements of the software system. USVF performs static verification on UML models consisting of UML class and state machine diagrams extended by an action language. We present an operational semantics of UML models, define a property specification language designed to reason about temporal and general properties of UML state machines using the semantic domains of the former, and implement the model checking process by translating models and properties into Promela, the input language of the SPIN model checker. We show that the methodology can be applied to the verification of security properties by representing the main aspects of security, namely availability, integrity and confidentiality, in the USVF property specification language