Women’s Postgraduate

Aspect-orientation provides a new way of modularization by clearly separating crosscutting concerns from non-crosscutting ones. Although originally emerged at the programming level, aspect-orientation meanwhile stretches also over other development phases. Not only due to the rise of model-driven engineering, some approaches already exist for dealing with aspect-orientation at the modeling level. Nevertheless, concepts from the programming level are often simply reused without proper adaptation. Consequently, such approaches fall short in considering the full spectrum of modeling concepts. This paper takes a first step towards a consolidated and more comprehensive view on aspect-orientation by discussing a common reference architecture for aspect-oriented modeling. This reference architecture identifies the basic ingredients of aspect-orientation which in turn are abstracted from specific aspect-oriented programming languages and modeling approaches

Context-Awareness in Mobile Tourism Guides -- A Comprehensive Survey

Today’s tourists expect to get personalized access to tourism information at anytime, from anywhere with any media. Mobile tourism guides provide the user with such an ubiquitous access. The prerequisite for this is the notion of customisation, requiring awareness of the applications context together with appropriate adaptation mechanisms. Currently, there is a proliferation of mobile tourism guides, proposing an unmanageable number of diverse functionalities. This paper sheds light on those approaches by identifying their strengths and weaknesses, thus providing the basis for nextgeneration mobile tourism guides. For this, an evaluation framework is used comprising detailed criteria for the two orthogonal dimensions of context and adaptation

Aspect-oriented modeling of ubiquitous web applications: The aspectwebml approach

Ubiquitous web applications (UWA) are required to be customizable, meaning their services need to be adaptable towards the context of use, e.g., user, location, time, and device. Considering UWA’s from a software engineering point of view, a systematic development on basis of models is crucial. Current web modeling languages, however, often disregard the crosscutting nature of customization potentially affecting all parts of a web application, and often mingle core and customization functionality. This leads to inefficient development processes, high maintenance overheads, and a low potential for reuse. We regard customization as a crosscutting concern in the sense of the aspect-oriented paradigm. As

Correct-by-construction model driven engineering composition operators

International audienceModel composition is a crucial activity in Model Driven Engineering both to reuse validated and verified model elements and to handle separately the various aspects in a complex system and then weave them while preserving their properties. Many research activities target this compositional validation and verification (V & V) strategy: allow the independent assessment of components and minimize the residual V & V activities at assembly time. However, there is a continuous and increasing need for the definition of new composition operators that allow the reconciliation of existing models to build new systems according to various requirements. These ones are usually built from scratch and must be systematically verified to assess that they preserve the properties of the assembled elements. This verification is usually tedious but is mandatory to avoid verifying the composite system for each use of the operators. Our work addresses these issues, we first target the use of proof assistants for specifying and verifying compositional verification frameworks relying on formal verification techniques instead of testing and proofreading. Then, using a divide and conquer approach, we focus on the development of elementary composition operators that are easy to verify and can be used to further define complex composition operators. In our approach, proofs for the complex operators are then obtained by assembling the proofs of the basic operators. To illustrate our proposal, we use the Coq proof assistant to formalize the language-independent elementary composition operators Union and Substitution and the proof that the conformance of models with respect to metamodels is preserved during composition. We show that more sophisticated composition operators that share parts of the implementation and have several properties in common (especially: aspect oriented modeling composition approach, invasive software composition, and package merge) can then be built from the basic ones, and that the proof of conformance preservation can also be built from the proofs of basic operators