Statistical Techniques Complement UML When Developing Domain Models of Complex Dynamical Biosystems

Computational modelling and simulation is increasingly being used to complement traditional wet-lab techniques when investigating the mechanistic behaviours of complex biological systems. In order to ensure computational models are fit for purpose, it is essential that the abstracted view of biology captured in the computational model, is clearly and unambiguously defined within a conceptual model of the biological domain (a domain model), that acts to accurately represent the biological system and to document the functional requirements for the resultant computational model. We present a domain model of the IL-1 stimulated NF-κB signalling pathway, which unambiguously defines the spatial, temporal and stochastic requirements for our future computational model. Through the development of this model, we observe that, in isolation, UML is not sufficient for the purpose of creating a domain model, and that a number of descriptive and multivariate statistical techniques provide complementary perspectives, in particular when modelling the heterogeneity of dynamics at the single-cell level. We believe this approach of using UML to define the structure and interactions within a complex system, along with statistics to define the stochastic and dynamic nature of complex systems, is crucial for ensuring that conceptual models of complex dynamical biosystems, which are developed using UML, are fit for purpose, and unambiguously define the functional requirements for the resultant computational model

Interactive views to improve the comprehension of UML models - an experimental validation

Software development is becoming more and more model-centric. As a result models are used for a large variety of purposes, such as quality analysis, understanding, and maintenance. We argue that the UML and related existing tooling does not offer sufficient support to the developer to understand the models and evaluate their quality. We have proposed and implemented a collection of views to increase model understanding: MetaView, ContextView, MetricView, and UML-City-View. The purpose of this experiment is to validate whether there is a difference between the proposed views and the existing views with respect to comprehension correctness and comprehension effort. The comprehension task performed by the subjects was to answer a questionnaire about a model. 100 MSc students with relevant background knowledge have participated in the experiment. The results are statistically significant and show that the correctness is improved by 4.5% and that the time needed is reduced by 20%

Second International Workshop on Model Size Metrics

This paper reports on the Model Size Metrics (MSM) workshop held as satellite event of the MODELS 2007 conference. The focus of the workshop is to develop metrics for use in model-centric software development. As a starting point for discussion we focused on size. The workshop aim was to bring together researchers in this area, share experiences and discuss future directions. This paper summarizes the presentations that were given and the highlights of the discussion that followed and summarizes open issues for future work

MetricViewEvolution : UML-based views for monitoring model evolution and quality

As the role of models during software development and maintenance is becoming more and more important, techniques are needed to control a model's quality during evolution. We present our tool MetricViewEvolution as a step towards managing model quality during development and evolution. Six views are implemented in MetricViewEvolution that aid the user in tasks such as model understanding, identification of quality problems and evolution trends. The views combine structural model information with metrics data from inside the model and external sources. MetricViewEvolution has been applied successfully in industrial case studie

In practice : UML software architecture and design description

The Unified Modeling Language has attracted many organizations and practitioners. UML is now the de facto modeling language for software development. Several features account for its popularity: it's a standardized notation, rich in expressivity; UML 2.0 provides 13 diagram types that enable modeling several different views and abstraction levels. Furthermore, UML supports domain-specific extensions using stereotypes and tagged values. Finally, several case tools integrate UML modeling with other tasks such as generating code and reverse-engineering models from code. Our study focused on UML use and model quality in actual projects rather than on its adequacy as a notation or language

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Enhancing end-to-end QoS for multimedia streaming in IMS-based networks

Convergence of the emerging IP Multimedia Subsystem(IMS) includes unlicensed, nondedicated and nondeterministic hence uncontrollable. computer access, networks for IP multimedia services. It enables provision of resource demanding real-time services and multimedia communication raising new end-to-end Quality-of-Service (QoS) challenges, for which quality adaptation using resource management is proposed as a solution in this paper. This is an integrated solution taking both IMS and computer access networks into account as well as the two end-devices and the application servers (AS) involved in communication. The best user experience is targeted under real-time variation of available network (e.g. bandwidth, buffer space) and end-device (e.g. battery, CPU, memory, storage) resources throughout a session. The multimedia content is dynamically adapted to fit the resource availability variations, achieving maximum system (i.e. network and end-devices) resource utilization and enhanced QoS. The resource availability update signalling is carried over Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) during the session. This is work in progress

A visualization framework for task-oriented modelling using UML

The UML is a collection of 13 diagram notations to describe different views of a software system. The existing diagram types display model elements and their relations. Software engineering is becoming more and more model-centric, such that software engineers start using UML models for more tasks than just describing the system. Tasks such as analysis or prediction of system properties require additional information such as metrics of the UML model or from external sources, e.g. a version control system. In this paper we identify tasks of model-centric software engineering and information that is required to fulfil these tasks. We propose views to visualize the information to support fulfilling the tasks. This paper reports on industrial case studies and a light-weight user experiment to validate the usefulness of the proposed views that are implemented in our MetricView evolution too