MIRTO: an open-source robotic platform for education

This paper introduces the MIddlesex RoboTic platfOrm (MIRTO), an open-source platform that has been used for teaching First Year Computer Science students since the academic year 2013/2014, with the aim of providing a physical manifestation of Software Engineering concepts that are often delivered using only abstract or synthetic case studies. In this paper we provide a detailed description of the platform, whose hardware specifications and software libraries are all released open source; we describe a number of teaching usages of the platform, report students’ projects, and evaluate some of its aspects in terms of effectiveness, usability, and maintenance

A theoretical and empirical study of EFSM dependence.

Dependence analysis underpins many activities in software maintenance such as comprehension and impact analysis. As a result, dependence has been studied widely for programming languages, notably through work on program slicing. However, there is comparatively little work on dependence analysis at the model level and hitherto, no empirical studies. We introduce a slicing tool for extended finite state machines (EFSMs) and use the tool to gather empirical results on several forms of dependence found in ten EFSMs, including well-known benchmarks in addition to real-world EFSM models. We investigate the statistical properties of dependence using statistical tests for correlation and formalize and prove four of the empirical findings arising from our empirical study. The paper thus provides the maintainer with both empirical data and foundational theoretical results concerning dependence in EFSM models

Monitoring Security and Dependability in Mobile P2P Systems

Abstract Ensuring the dependability and security of mobile P2P systems is an intricate task due to the autonomous and decentralised nature of such systems. In this paper, we present a framework that provides increased support for security and dependability properties by monitoring the compliance of the operation of mobile P2P applications with them at runtime. The framework performs monitoring driven by policies specified for the individual peers in a P2P application and decouples the monitoring process from the operation of the application, to increase its resilience and avoid adverse effects on its performance