Développement sans rupture de systèmes complexes : une approche basée multi-exigences

Prouver qu'un système satisfait à ses exigences est un défi important de l'ingénierie des exigences. D'une part, les approches formelles fournissent un moyen d'exprimer les exigences mathématiquement et de prouver qu'un système satisfait ses exigences. Cependant, si la formalisation offre des possibilités supplémentaires telles que la vérification, voire la validation, elle s'avère souvent trop difficile à utiliser en pratique par les acteurs impliqués dans le développement des systèmes. D'autre part, dans la plupart des cas, les exigences sont écrites et parfois tracées en langage naturel à des fins de communication et de compréhension mutuelle. De plus, cela reste le cas tout au long du processus de développement. Ainsi, il est nécessaire de considérer le besoin de s'adresser à toutes ces parties prenantes pendant le processus de développement. L'objectif principal de cette thèse est de fournir une méthodologie sans rupture qui permet de bénéficier de la formalisation des exigences tout en étant compréhensible par toutes les parties prenantes. Nous proposons une approche qui considère les exigences comme des parties du code du système, ce qui, en tant que tel, contribue à améliorer l'évaluation de la qualité. De plus, l'intégration des exigences dans le code garantit un développement sans rupture. Ces contributions visent trois avantages principaux. Premièrement, il n'est pas nécessaire de passer d'un outil ou d'un environnement à un autre : un cadre unique prend en charge le développement de l'analyse à la mise en œuvre. Deuxièmement, les changements et la réversibilité deviennent un phénomène régulier, directement pris en charge par la méthode, le langage et les outils, ce qui facilite les allers-retours. Enfin, les différents niveaux d'abstraction restent dans le cadre du paradigme orienté objet. Nous appliquons cette vision au processus de développement lui-même avec les mêmes avantages attendus. Le cycle de vie du développement peut alors bénéficier de cette forte intégration des exigences dans le code. Ces artefacts aident au développement du logiciel en fournissant un support et des lignes directrices pour l'analyse ou l'aide à la décision et en renforçant la qualité du logiciel. En outre, la réutilisabilité, l'évolutivité et la maintenabilité sont améliorées. La traçabilité entre les exigences et le code permet une analyse d'impact facile lorsque l'un de ces artefacts évolue. Cependant, si ce paradigme est familier aux développeurs et même si nous faisons un effort d'expressivité, il ne s'adresse pas aux autres parties prenantes qui ont l'habitude de travailler avec d'autres outils. Puisque nous souhaitons également que des non-experts utilisent notre approche pour valider des systèmes dans la première phase de leur développement, nous proposons un langage spécifique au domaine : (i) proche du langage naturel et (ii) basé sur une sémantique formelle. En utilisant les techniques de l'ingénierie dirigée par les modèles, ce langage permet de combler le fossé entre les différents acteurs impliqués dans un projet (compte tenu de leurs différentes expériences) et entre les exigences et le code. Nous avons enfin consacré un effort de recherche à la définition des relations entre les exigences. Nous fournissons leurs définitions formelles et leurs propriétés sur la propagation de l'état de satisfaction. Ces définitions peuvent aider les ingénieurs à vérifier les exigences (en vérifiant la validité de la sémantique des relations entre deux exigences) et à vérifier la conformité du système (grâce à la propagation de la satisfaction). Ce travail est une étape vers l'introduction de la sémantique formelle dans la traçabilité, permettant d'analyser automatiquement les exigences et d'utiliser leurs relations pour vérifier l'implémentation correspondante du système.Proving that a system satisfies its requirements is an important challenge of Requirements Engineering. On the one hand, formal approaches provide a way to express requirements mathematically and prove that a system satisfies its requirements. However, if formalization offers additional possibilities such as verification, or even validation, it often proves to be too difficult to use in practice by the stakeholders involved in the development of systems. On the other hand, in most cases, requirements are written and sometimes traced in Natural Language for communication and mutual understanding purposes. Moreover, this remains during the whole development process. Thus, it is necessary to consider the need to address all these stakeholders during the development process. The main objective of this thesis is to provide a seamless methodology that allows benefiting from the formalization of requirements while being understandable by all stakeholders. We propose an approach that considers requirements as parts of the system's code, which, as such, contributes to improving quality assessment. In addition, integrating the requirements into the code guarantees a seamless development. The contributions target three main benefits. First, there is no need to switch from one tool or environment to another: a single framework supports the development from analysis to implementation. Second, changes and reversibility become a regular occurrence, directly supported by the method, language, and tools, facilitating round-trips. Third, the different levels of abstraction remain inside the object-oriented paradigm. We apply this vision to the development process itself with the same expected advantages. The development life-cycle can then benefit from this strong integration of requirements into the code. These artifacts help in software development by providing support and guidelines for analysis or decision support and reinforcing the software quality. Besides, reusability, evolutivity, and maintainability are enhanced. Traceability between requirements and code allows an easy impact analysis when any of these artifacts evolve. However, if this paradigm is familiar to developers and even if we put an effort in providing expressivity, they are not addressed to other stakeholders that used to work with several tools. Since we also want non-experts to use our approach to validate systems in the early stage of their development, we propose a Domain-Specific Language: (i) close to natural language and (ii) based on formal semantics. Using Model-Driven Engineering techniques, this language bridges the gap between the several stakeholders involved in a project (considering their different backgrounds) and between the requirements and the code. We finally put a research effort into defining relationships between requirements. We provide their formal definitions and properties on the propagation of the satisfaction state. These definitions can help engineers verify requirements (by checking the validity of the semantics of the relationships between two requirements) and verify the system compliance (thanks to satisfaction propagation). This work is a step towards introducing formal semantics into traceability, making it possible to automatically analyze requirements and use their relationships to verify the corresponding implementation of the system

Glabralysins, potential New β-pore-forming toxin family members from the schistosomiasis vector snail biomphalaria glabrata

Biomphalaria glabrata is a freshwater Planorbidae snail. In its environment, this mollusk faces numerous microorganisms or pathogens, and has developed sophisticated innate immune mechanisms to survive. The mechanisms of recognition are quite well understood in Biomphalaria glabrata, but immune effectors have been seldom described. In this study, we analyzed a new family of potential immune effectors and characterized five new genes that were named Glabralysins. The five Glabralysin genes showed different genomic structures and the high degree of amino acid identity between the Glabralysins, and the presence of the conserved ETX/MTX2 domain, support the hypothesis that they are pore-forming toxins. In addition, tertiary structure prediction confirms that they are structurally related to a subset of Cry toxins from Bacillus thuringiensis, including Cry23, Cry45, and Cry51. Finally, we investigated their gene expression profiles in snail tissues and demonstrated a mosaic transcription. We highlight the specificity in Glabralysin expression following immune stimulation with bacteria, yeast or trematode parasites. Interestingly, one Glabralysin was found to be expressed in immune-specialized hemocytes, and two others were induced following parasite exposure

A tabu search heuristic for the Equitable Coloring Problem

The Equitable Coloring Problem is a variant of the Graph Coloring Problem where the sizes of two arbitrary color classes differ in at most one unit. This additional condition, called equity constraints, arises naturally in several applications. Due to the hardness of the problem, current exact algorithms can not solve large-sized instances. Such instances must be addressed only via heuristic methods. In this paper we present a tabu search heuristic for the Equitable Coloring Problem. This algorithm is an adaptation of the dynamic TabuCol version of Galinier and Hao. In order to satisfy equity constraints, new local search criteria are given. Computational experiments are carried out in order to find the best combination of parameters involved in the dynamic tenure of the heuristic. Finally, we show the good performance of our heuristic over known benchmark instances

Efficient algorithms for finding critical subgraphs

AbstractThis paper presents algorithms to find vertex-critical and edge-critical subgraphs in a given graph G, and demonstrates how these critical subgraphs can be used to determine the chromatic number of G. Computational experiments are reported on random and DIMACS benchmark graphs to compare the proposed algorithms, as well as to find lower bounds on the chromatic number of these graphs. We improve the best known lower bound for some of these graphs, and we are even able to determine the chromatic number of some graphs for which only bounds were known

Combining modelled snowpack stability with machine learning to predict avalanche activity

Predicting avalanche activity from meteorological and snow cover simulations is critical in mountainous areas to support operational forecasting. Several numerical and statistical methods have tried to address this issue. However, it remains unclear how combining snow physics, mechanical analysis of snow profiles and observed avalanche data improves avalanche activity prediction. This study combines extensive snow cover and snow stability simulations with observed avalanche occurrences within a random forest approach to predict avalanche situations at a spatial resolution corresponding to elevations and aspects of avalanche paths in a given mountain range. We develop a rigorous leave-one-out evaluation procedure including an independent evaluation set, confusion matrices and receiver operating characteristic curves. In a region of the French Alps (Haute-Maurienne) and over the period 1960–2018, we show the added value within the machine learning model of considering advanced snow cover modelling and mechanical stability indices instead of using only simple meteorological and bulk information. Specifically, using mechanically based stability indices and their time derivatives in addition to simple snow and meteorological variables increases the probability of avalanche situation detection from around 65 % to 76 %. However, due to the scarcity of avalanche events and the possible misclassification of non-avalanche situations in the training dataset, the predicted avalanche situations that are really observed remains low, around 3.3 %. These scores illustrate the difficulty of predicting avalanche occurrence with a high spatio-temporal resolution, even with the current data and modelling tools. Yet, our study opens perspectives to improve modelling tools supporting operational avalanche forecasting.</p

Neurath Johannes, Las fiestas de la Casa Grande. Procesos rituales, cosmovisión y estructura social en una comunidad huichola, CONACULTA / Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico, 2002, 379 p. + 1 p. dépl., bibl., gloss., ill., cartes, fig., photos

Cet ouvrage s’attaque à un serpent de mer de la discipline : comment se débarrasser de l’excellence conférée par les Occidentaux à certaines cultures amérindiennes plutôt qu’à d’autres ? Depuis un siècle, les Huichol jouissent d’une véritable aura anthropologique, induite par la fascination extatique qu’ils ont suscitée chez plusieurs générations de chercheurs. Une sorte de mystique phénoménologique – qui n’est pas sans rappeler l’odyssée des Dogon dans la littérature africaniste – continue d..

A Hybrid Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Graph 3-Coloring

The Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is the name of an optimization algorithm that was inspired by the intelligent behavior of a honey bee swarm. It is widely recognized as a quick, reliable, and efficient methods for solving optimization problems. This paper proposes a hybrid ABC (HABC) algorithm for graph 3-coloring, which is a well-known discrete optimization problem. The results of HABC are compared with results of the well-known graph coloring algorithms of today, i.e. the Tabucol and Hybrid Evolutionary algorithm (HEA) and results of the traditional evolutionary algorithm with SAW method (EA-SAW). Extensive experimentations has shown that the HABC matched the competitive results of the best graph coloring algorithms, and did better than the traditional heuristics EA-SAW when solving equi-partite, flat, and random generated medium-sized graphs