A Service Chain Discovery and Recommendation Scheme Using Complex Network Theory

Service chain discovery and recommendation are significant in services composition. A complex network module based algorithm using services invocable relations is proposed to search useful service chains on the network. Furthermore, a new scheme for discovering composite services processes automatically and recommending service chains by ranking their QoS is provided. Simulations are carried out and the results indicate that some useful service chains in the dataset provided by the WSC2009 can be found by the new algorithm

Domain-specific languages

Domain-Specific Languages are used in software engineering in order to enhance quality, flexibility, and timely delivery of software systems, by taking advantage of specific properties of a particular application domain. This survey covers terminology, risks and benefits, examples, design methodologies, and implementation techniques of domain-specific languages as used for the construction and maintenance of software systems. Moreover, it covers an annotated selection of 75 key publications in the area of domain-specific languages

Slicing techniques applied to architectural analysis of legacy software

Tese de doutoramento em Informática (ramo de conhecimento em Fundamentos da Computação)Program understanding is emerging as a key concern in software engineering. In a situation in which the only quality certificate of the running software artifact still is life-cycle endurance, customers and software producers are little prepared to modify or improve running code. However, faced with so risky a dependence on legacy software, managers are more and more prepared to spend resources to increase confidence on - i.e., the level of understanding of - their (otherwise untouchable) code. In fact the technological and economical relevance of legacy software as well as the complexity of their re-engineering entails the need for rigour. Addressing such a scenario, this thesis advocates the use of direct source code analysis for both the process of understanding and transformation of software systems. In particular, the thesis focuses on the development and application of slicing techniques at both the “micro" and “macro" structural levels of software. The former, deals with fine-grained structures of programs, slicing operating over elementary program entities, such as types, variables or procedure identifiers. The latter, on the other hand, addresses architectural issues and interaction modes across modules, components or services upon which a system is decomposed. At the \micro" level this thesis delves into the problem of slicing functional programs, a paradigm that is gaining importance and was generally neglected by the slicing community. Three different approaches to functional slicing are proposed, accompanied by the presentation of the HaSlicer application, a software tool developed as a proof-of-concept for some of the ideas discussed. A comparison between the three approaches, their practical application and the motivational aspects for keeping investigating new functional slicing processes are also discussed. Slicing at a \macro" level is the theme of the second part of this thesis, which addresses the problem of extracting from source code the system's coordination model which governs interaction between its components. This line of research delivers two approaches for abstracting software systems coordination models, one of the most vital structures for software architectural analysis. Again, a software tool – CoordInspector – is introduced as a proof-of-concept.A compreensão de sistemas de software reveste-se de uma cada vez maior importância no campo da engenharia de software. Numa situação em que a única garantia de funcionamento dos diversos componentes de software reside apenas na metodologia de desenvolvimento adoptada, tanto clientes bem como produtores de software encontram-se pouco preparados para modificar ou melhorar os seus programas. No entanto, face a uma tão grande dependência em relação ao código legado, os gestores estão cada vez mais receptivos a gastar recursos de forma a aumentar a confiança - i.e., o nível de compreensão - dos seus (de outra forma intocáveis) programas. De facto, a relevância tecnológica e económica do software legado bem como a complexidade associada à sua reengenharia provocam uma urgente necessidade de rigor. Tendo este cenário como contexto, esta tese advoga o uso de uma análise directa de código fonte com o objectivo de compreender e transformar sistemas de software. Em particular, esta tese debruça-se sobre o desenvolvimento e a aplicação de técnicas de slicing aos níveis “micro" e “macro" das estruturas de software. A análise efectuada ao nível “micro" lida com estruturas de programas de pequena granularidade, onde o slicing opera sobre entidades elementares dos programas, tais como tipos, variáveis ou identificadores de procedimentos. Por outro lado, o nível de análise “macro" aborda questões arquitecturais, tais como as interacção entre módulos, componentes ou serviços sobre os quais um sistema de software pode ser decomposto. Ao nível “micro", esta tese aborda o problema de efectuar slicing a programas funcionais, um paradigma que se reveste de uma cada vez maior importância e o qual tem sido negligenciado pela comunidade de slicing. Neste sentido, esta tese apresenta três diferentes abordagens ao slicing funcional, acompanhadas pela apresentação da aplicação HaSlicer, uma ferramenta de software desenvolvida como prova de conceito para algumas das ideias expostas. No decorrer da apresentação destas propostas de abordagem ao slicing funcional, efectua-se ainda uma comparação entre os diversos processos, as suas aplicações práticas bem como os aspectos motivacionais que levaram à investigação de novos processos de slicing funcional. As operações de slicing ao nível “macro" constituem o tema da segunda parte desta tese, onde se aborda o problema específico da extracção de arquitecturas de sistemas de software. Neste sentido, são desenvolvidas duas abordagens distintas para a abstracção do modelo de coordenação de um sistema de software, o que constitui uma das mais vitais estruturas para a análise de sistemas de software. Mais uma vez, é apresentada uma ferramenta de software – CoordInspector – como prova de conceito.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - SFRH/BD/19127/200

TTSS'11 - 5th International Workshop on Harnessing Theories for Tool Support in Software

The aim of the workshop is to bring together practitioners and researchers from academia, industry and government to present and discuss ideas about: • How to deal with the complexity of software projects by multi-view modeling and separation of concerns about the design of functionality, interaction, concurrency, scheduling, and nonfunctional requirements, and • How to ensure correctness and dependability of software by integrating formal methods and tools for modeling, design, verification and validation into design and development processes and environments. • Case studies and experience reports about harnessing static analysis tools such as model checking, theorem proving, testing, as well as runtime monitoring

Feature-based Approach to Bridge the Information Technology and Business Gap

The gap between business goals (problem domain), such as cost reduction, new business processes, increasing competitive advantage, etc., and the supporting Information Technology infrastructure (solution domain), such as the ability to implement software solutions to achieve these goals, is complex and challenging to bridge. This gap emerges for many reasons; for instance, inefficient communication, domain terminology misunderstanding or external factors, e.g. business change. As most business and software products can be described by a set of features, a promising solution would be to link both the problem and solution domains based on these features. Thus, the proposed approach aims to bridge the gap between the problem and the solution domains by using a feature-based technique in order to provide a quick and efficient means for understanding the relationships between IT solutions and business goals. The novelty of the proposed framework emanates from the three characteristics of the business-IT gap: the problem domain, the solution domain and the matching process. Besides the proposed feature-based IT-business framework, other contributions are proposed: a feature extracting method and feature matching algorithms. The proposed approach is achieved in three phases. The first phase is to decompose business needs and transform them into a feature model (presented in UML diagrams); this is represented as a top-to-middle process. The second phase is a reverse engineering process. A system program code is sliced into modules and transformed into feature-based models (again, in UML diagrams); these are represented as a bottom-to-middle process. The third phase is a model-driven engineering process. It uses model comparison techniques to match the UML feature models of the top-to-middle and bottom-to-middle phases. The presented approach in this research shows that features elicited from the business goals can be matched to features extracted from in the IT side. This proposed approach is feasible and able to provide a quick and efficient means for improving feature-based business IT matching. Two case studies are presented to demonstrate that the feature-oriented view of features from the users' perspective can be matched to the feature-oriented view of features in the IT side. This matching can serve to remove any ambiguities that may cause difficulties in the cases of system maintenance or system evolution, in particular when there are changes in requirements, which is to be expected when there is any business change

SAVCBS 2004 Specification and Verification of Component-Based Systems: Workshop Proceedings

This is the proceedings of the 2004 SAVCBS workshop. The workshop is concerned with how formal (i.e., mathematical) techniques can be or should be used to establish a suitable foundation for the specification and verification of component-based systems. Component-based systems are a growing concern for the software engineering community. Specification and reasoning techniques are urgently needed to permit composition of systems from components. Component-based specification and verification is also vital for scaling advanced verification techniques such as extended static analysis and model checking to the size of real systems. The workshop considers formalization of both functional and non-functional behavior, such as performance or reliability

Proceedings of the Second NASA Formal Methods Symposium

This publication contains the proceedings of the Second NASA Formal Methods Symposium sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and held in Washington D.C. April 13-15, 2010. Topics covered include: Decision Engines for Software Analysis using Satisfiability Modulo Theories Solvers; Verification and Validation of Flight-Critical Systems; Formal Methods at Intel -- An Overview; Automatic Review of Abstract State Machines by Meta Property Verification; Hardware-independent Proofs of Numerical Programs; Slice-based Formal Specification Measures -- Mapping Coupling and Cohesion Measures to Formal Z; How Formal Methods Impels Discovery: A Short History of an Air Traffic Management Project; A Machine-Checked Proof of A State-Space Construction Algorithm; Automated Assume-Guarantee Reasoning for Omega-Regular Systems and Specifications; Modeling Regular Replacement for String Constraint Solving; Using Integer Clocks to Verify the Timing-Sync Sensor Network Protocol; Can Regulatory Bodies Expect Efficient Help from Formal Methods?; Synthesis of Greedy Algorithms Using Dominance Relations; A New Method for Incremental Testing of Finite State Machines; Verification of Faulty Message Passing Systems with Continuous State Space in PVS; Phase Two Feasibility Study for Software Safety Requirements Analysis Using Model Checking; A Prototype Embedding of Bluespec System Verilog in the PVS Theorem Prover; SimCheck: An Expressive Type System for Simulink; Coverage Metrics for Requirements-Based Testing: Evaluation of Effectiveness; Software Model Checking of ARINC-653 Flight Code with MCP; Evaluation of a Guideline by Formal Modelling of Cruise Control System in Event-B; Formal Verification of Large Software Systems; Symbolic Computation of Strongly Connected Components Using Saturation; Towards the Formal Verification of a Distributed Real-Time Automotive System; Slicing AADL Specifications for Model Checking; Model Checking with Edge-valued Decision Diagrams; and Data-flow based Model Analysis

Lifted structural invariant analysis of Petri net product lines

Petri nets are commonly used to represent concurrent systems. However, they lack support for modelling and analysing system families, like variants of controllers, different variations of a process model, or the possible configurations of a flexible assembly line. To facilitate modelling potentially large collections of similar systems, in this paper, we enrich Petri nets with variability mechanisms based on product line engineering. Moreover, we present methods for the efficient analysis of the place and transition invariants in all defined versions of a Petri net. Efficiency is achieved by analysing the system family as a whole, instead of analysing each possible net variant separately. For this purpose, we lift the notion of incidence matrix to the product line level, and rely on constraint solving techniques. We present tool support and evaluate the benefits of our techniques on synthetic and realistic examples, achieving in some cases speed-ups of two orders of magnitude with respect to analysing each net variant separatelyThis work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science (PID2021-122270OB-I00) and the R&D programme of Madrid (P2018/TCS-4314

Innovative Food Product Development using Molecular Gastronomy: a Focus on Flavour and Sensory Evaluation

The primary goal of this research was to develop novel ice cream products using the principles of molecular gastronomy. An ice cream model system (emulsion) was developed, in which the effects of ingredient levels on stability and formation were investigated and optimised using Response Surface Methodology (RSM). Two characteristic volatiles of banana (isoamyl acetate and furfuryl acetate) were added to the optimised emulsion, and their headspace emission was quantified using Solid Phase Microextraction with Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry. RSM was used to investigate the main and interactive effects of ingredient, salt and pH levels on the headspace emission of these volatiles. Salt was found to significantly influence (p ≤ 0.05) headspace emission of isoamyl acetate. The pairing of novel foods (banana and bacon (B+BN), banana and basmati rice (B+R), and banana and olive oil (B+O)) was investigated as an important sensory phenomenon with a key interest in determining how different components in the selected food pairings (both volatile and non-volatile) affect and interact with other components to influence sensory perception. Consumer sensory evaluation (n = 85) showed that B+R and B+BN were significantly more acceptable (p ≤ 0.05) pairings than B+O. Correlation of descriptive sensory analysis (n = 28) and organic volatile profiling was conducted to try to elucidate the hedonic results. Two ice cream product recipes were formulated to provide a matrix for the two preferred novel food pairings (B+R and B+BN). Product acceptability was assessed using two consumer panels representing general and specific markets. Significant differences (p ≤ 0.05) between hedonic results of the two panels suggest that the B+R ice cream may be more suited to a general retail product, whereas the B+BN ice cream may be more suited to a selective culinary market