Automated Mapping of UML Activity Diagrams to Formal Specifications for Supporting Containment Checking

Business analysts and domain experts are often sketching the behaviors of a software system using high-level models that are technology- and platform-independent. The developers will refine and enrich these high-level models with technical details. As a consequence, the refined models can deviate from the original models over time, especially when the two kinds of models evolve independently. In this context, we focus on behavior models; that is, we aim to ensure that the refined, low-level behavior models conform to the corresponding high-level behavior models. Based on existing formal verification techniques, we propose containment checking as a means to assess whether the system's behaviors described by the low-level models satisfy what has been specified in the high-level counterparts. One of the major obstacles is how to lessen the burden of creating formal specifications of the behavior models as well as consistency constraints, which is a tedious and error-prone task when done manually. Our approach presented in this paper aims at alleviating the aforementioned challenges by considering the behavior models as verification inputs and devising automated mappings of behavior models onto formal properties and descriptions that can be directly used by model checkers. We discuss various challenges in our approach and show the applicability of our approach in illustrative scenarios.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2014, arXiv:1404.043

The Innovation Region: An Attempt to Develop a Multivariate Analysis Model

The aim of the article is to present a novel model for the analysis of regional differentiation of innovation cultures. The research output of sociology in this area allows us to identify three strands of analysis: materialist, ideological and social. It also allows us to make inferences about cognitive reductionism associated with the adoption of a single selected perspective. This is also what the proposed model aims to counteract. It is intended to be a conceptual construct that enables a multivariate diagnosis of the regional diversification of innovation culture. At the same time, it highlights the fact, that a complete diagnosis of innovation requires an appropriate unit of analysis (region) and a related analytical category (culture). Linking together these concepts leads to constructing a model that allows us to determine the level of innovation in the modern world and its territorial differentiation. Investigating innovation in accordance with that model involves reaching the content of the different layers of culture and analysing the relationship between the different layers of innovation and the region. Each of the indicated layers can be diagnosed in a quantitative and qualitative way. This model will be built in three stages. In the first stage, a multivariate (i.e. including the material, ideological and social aspects) unit of analysis – region – will be constructed. In the second stage, a private diagnostic category, i.e. culture, will be matched to this unit. Stage three will bring the final construction of the model.Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie nowatorskiego modelu analizy regionalnego zróżnicowania kultur innowacyjności. Dorobek badawczy socjologii w tym zakresie pozwala na identyfikację trzech nurtów analizy: materialistycznego, ideowego i społecznego. Umożliwia również wyciągnięcie wniosków na temat redukcjonizmów poznawczych wynikających z przyjęcia tylko jednej wybranej perspektywy. Temu też ma się przeciwstawiać proponowany model. Ma on być konceptualną konstrukcją umożliwiającą wielowymiarową diagnozę regionalnej dywersyfikacji kultury innowacyjności. Jednocześnie eksponuje on fakt, że do określenia potencjału innowacyjności służy odpowiednia jednostka analizy (region) i związana z nią kategoria analityczna (kultura). Powiązanie ze sobą tych pojęć konstruuje model, który pozwala określić poziom innowacyjności we współczesnym świecie i jego terytorialne zróżnicowanie. Zgodnie z nim zbadanie innowacyjności polega nie tylko na dotarciu do treści poszczególnych warstw kultury, ale również obejmuje analizę relacji pomiędzy poszczególnymi warstwami nowatorstwa i regionu. Każda ze wskazanych warstw może być diagnozowana w sposób ilościowy i jakościowy. Model ten zbudowany zostanie w trzech etapach. W pierwszym skonstruowana zostanie wielowymiarowa (uwzględniająca aspekt materialny, ideowy i społeczny) jednostka analizy – region. W drugim do jednostki tej dopasowana zostanie prywatna kategoria diagnozy – kultura. Etap trzeci przyniesie finalną konstrukcję modelu

Hoping against Hope? On Transformation in Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s Fairy Tales

Jack Zipes mourns the disregard for what he, after Ernst Bloch, refers to as the utopian purpose of the folktale: its capacity for fostering human autonomy and proposing means to alter the world. Building on Bloch’s concept, Zipes contends that what has been missing is seeing life as a process that can be altered and the difficult realities of the present actively faced, not escaped. He asserts that contemporary fairy tales succeed at reviving the utopian function when they are self-reflective and experimental, that is, when they question the forms and themes that the folktale and the fairy tale have developed [Zipes 1983: 170-193]. They succeed also when they nurture the urge for individual and social transformation. This paper examines two fairy tales of a renowned contemporary Russian author Liudmila Petrushevskaia from this perspective. Although veiled in her customary grim vision, which includes existential uncertainty and sociopolitical instability, Petrushevskaia’s fairy tales project an impulse for individual and social change. The paper outlines how the author envisions individual and social transformation in today’s world

Introduction to Microservice API Patterns (MAP)

The Microservice API Patterns (MAP) language and supporting website premiered under this name at Microservices 2019. MAP distills proven, platform- and technology-independent solutions to recurring (micro-)service design and interface specification problems such as finding well-fitting service granularities, rightsizing message representations, and managing the evolution of APIs and their implementations. In this paper, we motivate the need for such a pattern language, outline the language organization and present two exemplary patterns describing alternative options for representing nested data. We also identify future research and development directions

Modeling Architectural Patterns Using Architectural Primitives

Architectural patterns are a key point in architectural documentation. Regrettably, there is poor support for modeling architectural patterns, because the pattern elements are not directly matched by elements in modeling languages, and, at the same time, patterns support an inherent variability that is hard to model using a single modeling solution. This paper proposes tackling this problem by finding and representing architectural primitives, as the participants in the solutions that patterns convey. In particular, we examine a number of architectural patterns to discover those primitive abstractions that are common among the patterns, and at the same time demonstrate a degree of variability in each pattern. These abstractions belong in the components and connectors architectural view, though more abstractions can be found in other views. We have selected UML 2 as the language for representing these primitive abstractions as extensions of the standard UML elements. The added value of this approach is twofold: it proposes a generic and extensible approach for modeling architectural patterns by means of architectural primitives; it demonstrates an initial set of primitives that participate in several well-known architectural patterns