An active-architecture approach to COTS integration

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software products are increasingly used as standard components within integrated information systems. This creates challenges since both their developers and source code are not usually available, and the ongoing development of COTS cannot be predicted. The ArchWare Framework approach recognises COTS products as part of the ambient environment of an information system and therefore an important part of development is incorporating COTS as effective system components. This integration of COTS components, and the composition of components, is captured by an active architecture model which changes as the system evolves. Indeed the architecture modelling language used enables it to express the monitoring and evolution of a system. This active architecture model is structured using control system principles. By modelling both integration and evolution it can guide the system’s response to both predicted and emergent changes that arise from the use of COTS products.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

A Reflexive Formal Software Process Model

. In this paper a very simple reflexive formal software development method is described. The method is called OBM which provides a formal specification language. This paper demonstrates that the OBM development method can be defined as a process model in the OBM language. An example is used to illustrate how to develop and modify applications using the OBM development method. 1 Motivation for the Study The study of software processes has attracted increasing attention in the last decade. One of the characteristics of such processes is that they are subject to frequent change. Thus, often either a software process needs to be changed or a new process needs to be created. The activities for managing a process, e.g. creating or changing, are usually referred to as meta-activities. A process consisting of the meta-activities for a particular process is referred to as a metaprocess. As pointed out in [6], since meta-processes are also processes, they themselves also need to be created an..

Reflection and Reification in Process System Evolution: Experience and Opportunity

Process systems aim to support many people involved in many processes over a long period of time. They provide facilities for storing and manipulating processes in both the representation and enactment domains. This paper argues that process systems should support ongoing transformations between these domains, at any level of granularity. The notion of creating a enactment model instance from a representation is merely one restricted transformation. Especially when process evolution is considered the case for thinking in terms of model instances is weak. This argument is supported by our experience of the ProcessWeb process system facilities for developing and evolving process models. The idea of hyper-code, which supports very general transformations between representation and enactment domains, is described. This offers the prospect of further improvements in this area

Modelling Processes Using a Stepwise Refinement Technique

. In many existing process modelling approaches, the emphasis is on the representations of process models, but not so much on the development of them. In this paper we present a method, called OBM, for developing such representations using a stepwise refinement technique. An example is used to show how a model may be gradually refined. 1 Background and Introduction In EWSPT'92 [10], we reported a small case study [24] which we undertook to investigate the application of an existing concurrent formal specification method, Base Model (BM) [23], to process modelling. The case study showed that although BM could be used as a specification method for some applications, particularly those targeted by the process modelling language PML [5], there was still a wide scope for improvement so that BM could be a more suitable technique for process modelling. Our subsequent work mainly concentrated on specifying 1 the ISPW-6 software process problem example (ISPW-6 example for short) [15]. As a ..

Cooperating Evolving Components a rigorous approach to evolving large software systems

Large software systems have a large number of components and are developed over a long time period frequently by a large number of people. We describe a framework approach to evolving such systems based on an integration of product and process modelling. The evolving system is represented as a Product Tower, a hierarchy of components which provides views of the product at multiple levels of refinement. The evolution process is component based with the cooperation between components being mediated by the Product Tower. This ensures that the evolution process is scaleable and that it maintains, and evolves, the design model. We illustrate our approach with an example, outlining an evolution both of the product and of the process. The reflexive facilities of the process are shown to be key in ensuring the framework's ability to evolve. Keywords: product evolution, process evolution, process modelling, design hierarchy 1 Introduction Modern large software systems are systems which: ffl ..

User-Level Threads on a General Hardware Interface

This paper is concerned with the thread-related interface primitives. These deal with thread contex

OBM: A Specification Method for Modelling Organisational Process

Recently many process modelling approaches have been developed. However, in most of these approaches, it is often assumed that the processes in an organisation are clearly defined, and therefore the emphasis of process modelling is often put on the final representation of the organisational process. However, in reality, processes are often not clearly defined. It is important to provide mechanisms to capture the processes. In this paper, we present an approach, called OBM, which provides a means to gradually identify the details of the processes in an organisation and develops the detailled representation of the organisational process by refinement. OBM is a method for developing models of organisational process. In OBM, a process model is developed at different levels. Each level may be composed of several components. Each component at level i may be refined in a subsequent level. The consistency between the level i component and its level i+1 refinement is checked. OBM provides const..