SACRED: Software Approach for Collaboration and Research Dissemination

Introduction

“None of us is as smart as all of us” - Kenneth Blanchard

The opportunity of connecting scientific and engineering minds in a collaborative fashion is a boon that yields stupendous results. In this era of information technology, collaborative research is feasible to a great extent as it brings together academicians and industrial engineers in smaller constellations. This provides multi-fold benefits to society and works as a stepping stone for budding researchers. The main challenges faced by a collaborative platform are: availability/approachability of domain expertise, proper division of labor among contributors, proper utilization of available skills, setting common goals among contributors, a common understanding among stakeholders, uniformity in work product, focused plan and regular updates to the community without losing zeal. In an effort to overcome these challenges, this paper presents a software approach that will harmonize research in a wider context. In other words, the work aims to bring the wealth of research contributions generated by diverse research groups under a common umbrella.

As part of this work, a group of mixed criticality systems (MCS) researchers launched a novel initiative platform - An Analysis Framework for MCS (ARMS), to build a large-scale research repository for enabling higher visibility of research results. ARMS aims at providing a framework to encourage collaboration between industry and academia thus enabling higher acceptance of research results by considering MCS as the test domain. It is a cloud-based platform designed for archiving, updating and reporting existing tasks models in MCS. The associated cloud-based database (DB) gets updated with on-going and new task models to keep up with recent and ever evolving research works. The ARMS platform compares and contrasts domain needs vis-a-vis with task models, attributes and presents a comprehensive landscape of the existing task model parameters in the mixed criticality domain. It also provides academicians and engineers the opportunity to choose task models appropriate to the specifics of the problem under study and provides a holistic view of chosen algorithms and models by analyzing, scheduling and generating statistics. The software-centric framework used in the development of ARMS is named - Software Approach for Collaboration and REsearch Dissemination (SACRED).

SACRED provides a detailed step-by-step software-centric approach that consists of three phases namely, setup, rollout and collaboration. The setup phase includes a systematic literature review, that results in identification, grouping and clustering of task parameters based on usage scenarios and functional attributes. It includes a multi-vocal literature review consisting of published works, grey literature and industrial contributions. The rollout phase launches the ARMS framework for stakeholder’s use. It is a three-stage process, consisting of platform finalization, design & development and validation & deployment of the cloud-based framework. The collaboration phase provides facility for pursuits and distribution. It further helps in establishing partnerships that allow comparison of existing research results and facilitates in performing regular updates. The software-centric processes, practices and procedures followed in the development of ARMS is extensible to other domains/disciplines wherever collaborative research yields benefits.

The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents related literature on collaborative platforms. Section 3 provides the software process followed by SACRED. Section 4 presents a case study of the SACRED process applied to the cloud-based aggregator platform ARMS. Section 5 lists the challenges faced/best practices followed in SACRED and a comparative analysis with other collaborative platforms and Section 6 concludes the work.