Evolución Dinámica de Arquitecturas Software Orientadas a Aspectos

Se persigue dotar a los sistemas software altamente disponibles de la capacidad de alterar tanto su estructura como su comportamiento en tiempo de ejecución, afectando al mínimo número de subsistemas que lo forman. Esto se ha realizado a nivel de arquitecturas software y basándose en la separación de asuntos de intéres.Costa Soria, C. (2007). Evolución Dinámica de Arquitecturas Software Orientadas a Aspectos. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/12907Archivo delegad

An Aspect-Oriented Approach for Supporting Autonomic Reconfiguration of Software Architectures

[EN] The increasing complexity of current software systems is encouraging the development of self-managed software architectures, i.e. systems capable of reconfiguring their structure at runtime to fulfil a set of goals. Several approaches have covered different aspects of their development, but some issues remain open, such as the maintainability or the scalability of self-management subsystems. Centralized approaches, like self-adaptive architectures, offer good maintenance properties but do not scale well for large systems. On the contrary, decentralized approaches, like self-organising architectures, offer good scalability but are not maintainable: Reconfiguration specifications are spread and often tangled with functional specifications. In order to address these issues, this paper presents an aspect-oriented autonomic reconfiguration approach where: (1) each subsystem is provided with self-management properties so it can evolve itself and the components that it is composed of; (2) self-management concerns are isolated and encapsulated into aspects, thus improving its reuse and maintenance. Povzetek: Predstavljen je pristop s samo-preoblikovanjem programske arhitekture.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Department of Science and Technology under the National Program for Research, Development and Innovation project MULTIPLE (TIN2009-13838), and by the Conselleria d'Educació i Ciència (Generalitat Valenciana) under the contract BFPI06/227.Costa Soria, C.; Pérez Benedí, J.; Carsí Cubel, JÁ. (2011). An Aspect-Oriented Approach for Supporting Autonomic Reconfiguration of Software Architectures. Informatica. 35(1):15-27. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/31147S152735

An Aspect-Oriented Approach for Supporting Autonomic Reconfiguration of Software Architectures

[EN] The increasing complexity of current software systems is encouraging the development of self-managed software architectures, i.e. systems capable of reconfiguring their structure at runtime to fulfil a set of goals. Several approaches have covered different aspects of their development, but some issues remain open, such as the maintainability or the scalability of self-management subsystems. Centralized approaches, like self-adaptive architectures, offer good maintenance properties but do not scale well for large systems. On the contrary, decentralized approaches, like self-organising architectures, offer good scalability but are not maintainable: Reconfiguration specifications are spread and often tangled with functional specifications. In order to address these issues, this paper presents an aspect-oriented autonomic reconfiguration approach where: (1) each subsystem is provided with self-management properties so it can evolve itself and the components that it is composed of; (2) self-management concerns are isolated and encapsulated into aspects, thus improving its reuse and maintenance. Povzetek: Predstavljen je pristop s samo-preoblikovanjem programske arhitekture.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Department of Science and Technology under the National Program for Research, Development and Innovation project MULTIPLE (TIN2009-13838), and by the Conselleria d'Educació i Ciència (Generalitat Valenciana) under the contract BFPI06/227.Costa Soria, C.; Pérez Benedí, J.; Carsí Cubel, JÁ. (2011). An Aspect-Oriented Approach for Supporting Autonomic Reconfiguration of Software Architectures. Informatica. 35(1):15-27. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/31147S152735

Model-Driven Development of Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures

[EN] The Model-Driven Development (MDD) paradigm has become widely spread in the last few years due to being based on models instead of source code, and using automatic generation techniques to obtain the final software product. Until now, the most mature methodologies that have been proposed to develop software following MDD are mainly based on functional requirements by following the Object-Oriented Paradigm. Therefore, mature MDD methodologies are required for supporting the code generation from models that specify non-functional requirements. The Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) approach was created to provide explicit mechanisms for developing non-functional requirements through reusable elements called aspects. Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures (AOSA) emerged to deal with the design of both, functional requirements and non-functional requirements, which opened an important challenge in the software engineering field: the definition of a methodology for supporting the development of AOSAs following the MDD paradigm. This new methodology should allow the code generation from models which specify functional and non-functional requirements. This paper presents a mature approach, called PRISMA, which deals with this challenge. Therefore, this contribution takes a step forward in the area presenting in detail the PRISMA MDD process, which has been applied to generate the code of several real applications of the tele-operated robotics domain. PRISMA MDD approach provides complete support for the development of technology-independent AOSAs, which can be compiled from high-level, aspect-oriented architectural models into different technology platforms and languages following an MDD process. This contribution illustrates how to apply the PRISMA MDD approach through the modelling framework that has been developed to support it, and a case study of a tele-operated robot that has been completely developed using this approach. Finally, the results obtained from the application of PRISMA MDD process to develop applications of the tele-operation domain are analyzed in terms of code generation.The work reported here has been partially sponsored by the Spanish MEC projects (DSDM TIN2008-00889-E and MULTIPLE TIN2009-13838), and MICINN (INNOSEP TIN2009-13849)Pérez Benedí, J.; Ramos Salavert, I.; Carsí Cubel, JÁ.; Costa Soria, C. (2013). Model-Driven Development of Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures. Journal of Universal Computer Science. 19(10):1433-1473. https://doi.org/10.3217/jucs-019-10-143314331473191

Spreading remote lab usage: A system — A community — A Federation

Experiments have been at the heart of scientific development and education for centuries. From the outburst of Information and Communication Technologies, virtual and remote labs have added to hands-on labs a new conception of practical experience, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education. This paper aims at describing the features of a remote lab named Virtual Instruments System in Reality, embedded in a community of practice and forming the spearhead of a federation of remote labs. More particularly, it discusses the advantages and disadvantages of remote labs over virtual labs as regards to scalability constraints and development and maintenance costs. Finally, it describes an actual implementation in an international community of practice of engineering schools forming the embryo of a first world wide federation of Virtual Instruments System in Reality nodes, under the framework of a project funded by the Erasmus+ Program.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

DYNAMIC EVOLUTION AND RECONFIGURATION OF SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURES THROUGH ASPECTS

Change is an intrinsic property of software. A software system, during its lifetime, may require several updates, improvements, or new features. If these change requirements are not addressed, the risk of becoming a useless system increases. In fact, this is a challenging issue of safety- and mission-critical software systems, which cannot be stopped to perform maintenance or evolution operations due to their continuous operation. To reduce the aging of these critical systems, they must be provided with mechanisms enabling their dynamic evolution, i.e. the support of changes on their structure and behaviour while they remain in operation. This thesis is concerned with the design of a framework to build architecture-based, dynamically evolvable, software systems. The fact that this framework is a software architecture based approach provides the following advantages: (i) it offers a high-level of abstraction for describing dynamic changes; (ii) it allows varying the level of system description; and (iii) it advantages from the existing support for system modelling, code-generation, and formal analysis provided by architecture description languages. The framework presented in this thesis, called Dynamic PRISMA, is characterized by the combination of two levels of dynamism: Dynamic Reconfiguration, which addresses changes at the configuration level (i.e. the architectural configuration), and Dynamic Type Evolution, which addresses changes at the type-level (i.e. the specification of architectural types and instances). This combination is one of the major contributions of this thesis: thus a system is not only able to reconfigure at runtime the building blocks it is composed of (i.e. architectural types), but also to redefine these building blocks (or introduce new ones) at runtime. Another contribution of the thesis is the identification of the concerns related to dynamic evolution and their integration in the framework through aspects. This improves the separation of concerns and allows us to change reconfiguration specifications, evolution mechanisms, or the business logic independently of each other. A third contribution of this thesis is how this dynamism is supported: reconfiguration through autonomic capabilities, which provides proactivity according to either internal or external stimuli; and type evolution through asynchronous reflection, which enables the modification of a type specification and the transformation of their instances at different rates (i.e. when they are ready for evolution). Specifically, the asynchronous evolution semantics is precisely described by means of graph transformations. This formalism has been chosen because it naturally models both the system architecture and its asynchronous evolution. The work presented in this thesis is illustrated through a case study from the robotics domain; an area which could potentially benefit from the results of this thesis.El cambio es una propiedad intrínseca del software. Un sistema software, a lo largo de su vida útil, puede necesitar actualizaciones, mejoras o la integración de nuevas características. Si estas necesidades de cambio no son cubiertas, el riesgo de que el sistema software deje de ser útil aumenta. Esto supone un reto para los sistemas críticos, los cuales no pueden ser detenidos para realizar operaciones de mantenimiento o evolución debido a que deben estar continuamente operativos. Para reducir el envejecimiento de dichos sistemas, éstos deben incorporar mecanismos que les permitan evolucionar dinámicamente, i.e. tolerar cambios tanto estructurales como de comportamiento mientras están operativos. Esta tesis aborda el diseño de una infraestructura para la construcción de sistemas software dinámicamente evolucionables y basados en arquitecturas software. Las razones que han motivado el uso de un enfoque basado en arquitecturas software son: (i) proporcionan un alto nivel de abstracción para definir cambios dinámicos; (ii) permiten variar el nivel de descripción del sistema; y (iii) permiten reutilizar las herramientas existentes para modelado de sistemas, generación automática de código, y análisis formal proporcionadas por los lenguajes de descripción de arquitecturas. El marco presentado en esta tesis, llamado Dynamic PRISMA, se caracteriza por la combinación de dos niveles de dinamismo: Reconfiguración Dinámica, que aborda los cambios a nivel de configuración (i.e. la configuración arquitectónica), y Evolución Dinámica de Tipos, que aborda los cambios a nivel de tipos (i.e. la especificación de tipos arquitectónicos e instancias). Esta combinación es una de las mayores contribuciones de esta tesis: así, un sistema no es solamente capaz de reconfigurar durante su ejecución los elementos constructivos que lo forman (i.e. los tipos arquitectónicos), sino también de redefinir dichos elementos constructivos (o introducir otros) durante su ejecución. Otra contribución de la tesis es la identificación de las funcionalidades relacionadas con la evolución dinámica y su integración a través de aspectos. Esto mejora la separación de funcionalidades y permite cambiar de forma independiente entre sí las especificaciones de reconfiguración, los mecanismos de evolución, o la lógica de negocio. Una tercera contribución es cómo este dinamismo se ha soportado: la reconfiguración a través de capacidades autonómicas, aportando así proactividad en función de estímulos internos y/o externos; y la evolución de tipos a través de la reflexión asíncrona, permitiendo así modificar la especificación de un tipo y la transformación de sus instancias en distintos tiempos (i.e. cuando éstas están listas para su evolución). Además, la semántica de la evolución asíncrona se ha formalizado a través de transformaciones de grafos, lo que ha permitido modelar de forma natural tanto la arquitectura de un sistema como su evolución asíncrona. Por último, el trabajo presentado en esta tesis se ha ilustrado a través de un caso de estudio del dominio robótico; un área que podría verse potencialmente beneficiada con los resultados de esta tesis.Costa Soria, C. (2011). DYNAMIC EVOLUTION AND RECONFIGURATION OF SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURES THROUGH ASPECTS [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/11038Palanci

Data Science in Healthcare: Benefits, Challenges and Opportunities

The advent of digital medical data has brought an exponential increase in information available for each patient, allowing for novel knowledge generation methods to emerge. Tapping into this data brings clinical research and clinical practice closer together, as data generated in ordinary clinical practice can be used towards rapid-learning healthcare systems, continuously improving and personalizing healthcare. In this context, the recent use of Data Science technologies for healthcare is providing mutual benefits to both patients and medical professionals, improving prevention and treatment for several kinds of diseases. However, the adoption and usage of Data Science solutions for healthcare still require social capacity, knowledge and higher acceptance. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of needs, opportunities, recommendations and challenges of using (Big) Data Science technologies in the healthcare sector. This contribution is based on a recent whitepaper (http://www.bdva.eu/sites/default/files/Big%20Data%20Technologies%20in%20Healthcare.pdf) provided by the Big Data Value Association (BDVA) (http://www.bdva.eu/), the private counterpart to the EC to implement the BDV PPP (Big Data Value PPP) programme, which focuses on the challenges and impact that (Big) Data Science may have on the entire healthcare chain