Distance Learning Education of Software Engineering: Principles and Experiences

Whether distance learning spells the end of traditional campuses, as some maintain, or whether distance learning instead represents a powerful addition to a growing array of delivery options for higher education, its impact on higher education is great and growing. Distance learning is creating alternative models of teaching and learning, new job descriptions for faculty, and new types of higher education providers. The advent of Distance and Distributed Learning has raised numerous questions about quality and quality assurance: ² How do established distance learning institutions ensure quality? ² What more needs to be done? ² How do quality assurance agencies view the distinction between on- and off-campus teaching and learning? This talk discusses these issues from the viewpoints of funding organisa- tion, quality assurance agencies and the learners

The Design and Analysis of Context-Aware, Secure Workflow Systems

Workflows are set of activities that implement and realise business goals. Modern business goals add extra requirements on workflow systems and their management. Workflows may cross many organisations and utilise services on a variety of devices and/or supported by different platforms. Current workflows are therefore inherently context-aware. Each context is governed and constrained by its own policies and rules to prevent unauthorised participants from executing sensitive tasks and also to prevent tasks from accessing unauthorised services and/or data. We present a sound and multi-layered design language for the design and analysis of secure and context aware workflows systems

The systematic construction of information systems

Process modelling is a vital issue for communicating with experts of the application domain. Depending on the roles and responsibilities of the application domain experts involved, process models are discussed on different levels of abstraction. These may range from detailed regulation for process execution to the interrelation of basic core processes on a strategic level. To ensure consistency and to allow for a flexible integration of process information on different levels of abstraction, we introduce a transformational calculus that allows the incremental addition to and refinement of the information in a process model, while maintaining the validity of more abstract high level processes. A complete formal treatment of model and the calculus is given and is illustrated on a small banking example.Funding received from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the Research Grant GR/M/0258

Regionally Distributed Architecture for Dynamic e-Learning Environment (RDADeLE)

Non

Provably Correct Derivation of Algorithms Using FermaT

The transformational programming method of algorithm derivation starts with a formal specification of the result to be achieved, plus some informal ideas as to what techniques will be used in the implementation. The formal specification is then transformed into an implementation, by means of correctness-preserving refinement and transformation steps, guided by the informal ideas. The transformation process will typically include the following stages: (1) Formal specification (2) Elaboration of the specification, (3) Divide and conquer to handle the general case (4) Recursion introduction, (5) Recursion removal, if an iterative solution is desired, (6) Optimisation, if required. At any stage in the process, sub-specifications can be extracted and transformed separately. The main difference between this approach and the invariant based programming approach (and similar stepwise refinement methods) is that loops can be introduced and manipulated while maintaining program correctness and with no need to derive loop invariants. Another difference is that at every stage in the process we are working with a correct program: there is never any need for a separate "verification" step. These factors help to ensure that the method is capable of scaling up to the development of large and complex software systems. The method is applied to the derivation of a complex linked list algorithm and produces code which is over twice as fast as the code written by Donald Knuth to solve the same problem

ATOM: an object-based formal method for real-time systems

An object based formal method for the development of real-time systems, called ATOM, is presented. The method is an integration of the real-time formal technique TAM (Temporal Agent Model) with an industry-strength structured methodology known as HRT-HOOD. ATOM is a systematic formal approach based on the refinement calculus. Within ATOM, a formal specification (or abstract description statement) contains Interval Temporal Logic (ITL) description of the timing, functional, and communication behavior of the proposed real-time system. This formal specification can be analyzed and then refined into concrete statements through successive applications of sound refinement laws. Both abstract and concrete statements are allowed to freely intermix. The semantics of the concrete statements in ATOM are defined denotationally in specification-oriented style using ITL.Funding received from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the Research Grant GR/M/0258

WSN Configuration using Agent Modeling and Hybrid Intelligent Decision Support System

A conceptual multi-agent framework based on a knowledge-based collaborative decision suppor

An Observation Model to Detect Security Violations in Web Services Environment

Growing violation activity makes monitoring of information technology resource systems day by day necessity. As a matter of importance, the popularity of surveillance systems increases with its associated systems. The security of such surveillance systems plays a critical role as their compromise has a technical impact and the need for them is increasing. The complexity of surveillance systems is growing as the system architecture and application must fulfill various requirements of ever demanding project scenarios. The surveillance system is a tool that observes the service behaviour as the e-observer technique works. This paper is proposed an enhanced observer model which maintains a list of its dependents, and then automatically reports any changes in state to an evaluator model, by calling one of their methods. The e-observer is concerned with the state of service behaviour to determine whether it obeys, using its intended behaviour or policy rules; these policies are used to refer to the specific security rules for particular systems. However, web services have become more sophisticated in recent years. WSs are being used successfully for interoperable solutions across various networks

A framework for analysing the effect of "change" in legacy code

We propose a sound and practical approach, based on a formal method (known as Interval Temporal Logic), to cope with “change” and analyse its effect. The approach allows us to capture a snapshot of system’s behaviour over which various interesting properties, such as liveness, timeliness and safety properties, can be validated compositionally. These properties may include invariants that are required to be valid after changes have taken place. We also present and evaluate design and implementation of a formal tool, AnaTempura, which supports the developed approach. A case study is presented to illustrate our approach and the tool.Funding received from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the Research Grant GR/M/0258

CCA: a calculus of context-aware ambients.

We present a process calculus, CCA, for the modelling and verification of mobile systems that are context-aware. This process calculus is built upon the calculus of mobile ambients and introduces new constructs to enable ambients and processes to be aware of the environment in which they are being executed. This results in a powerful calculus where mobility and context-awareness are first-class citizens. We present the syntax and a formal semantics of the calculus. We show that CCA can encode the -calculus, and illustrate the pragmatics of the calculus through a case study of a context-aware hospital bed