The authors present an initial wise development framework: a development environment that proactively and interactively assists the software engineer in modeling complex reactive systems. Their... Show More

The authors present an initial wise development framework: a development environment that proactively and interactively assists the software engineer in modeling complex reactive systems. Their framework repeatedly analyzes models of the system under development at various levels of abstraction, and then reasons about these models in order to detect possible errors, to derive emergent properties of interest, and to assist in system testing and debugging. Upon request, the environment can instrument the system model in order to monitor or test the execution for certain behaviors, or even augment it in order to repair or avoid detected behavior that is undesired. The direction and prioritization of the analysis and related tasks is based on the relevance of the observed properties and the expected impact of actions to be taken, and is performed by specialized automated and human-assisted techniques that have been incorporated into the framework. The authors' development environment is an initial step in the direction of their recent Wise Computing vision, which calls for turning the computer (namely, the development environment) into an equal member of the development team: knowledgeable, independent, concerned and proactively involved in the development process. They have implemented their tool within the context of behavioral programming (BP) – a scenario-based modeling approach, in which components are aligned with how humans often describe desired system behavior. The authors' work thus further enhances the naturalness and incrementality of developing in BP.

An effective technique for generating instances of a metamodel should quickly and automatically generate instances satisfying the metamodel's structural and OCL constraints. Ideally it should also... Show More

An effective technique for generating instances of a metamodel should quickly and automatically generate instances satisfying the metamodel's structural and OCL constraints. Ideally it should also produce quantitatively meaningful instances with respect to certain criteria, that is, instances which meet specified generic coverage criteria that help the modelers test or verify a metamodel at a general level. In this paper, the author presents an approach consisting of two techniques for coverage oriented metamodel instance generation. The first technique realises the standard coverage criteria defined for UML class diagrams, while the second technique focuses on generating instances satisfying graph-based criteria. With the author's approach, both kinds of criteria are translated to SMT formulas which are then investigated by an SMT solver. Each successful assignment is then interpreted as a metamodel instance that provably satisfies a coverage criteria or a graph property. The author has already integrated this approach into his existing tool to demonstrate the feasibility.

Business Process customization is an active research area in the process management field, dealing with variations/commonalities among processes of a given process family and runtime adaptations of... Show More

Business Process customization is an active research area in the process management field, dealing with variations/commonalities among processes of a given process family and runtime adaptations of single process instances. Many theoretical approaches have been suggested in the last years; however, practical implementations are rare and limited in their functionality. In this article, a new approach is proposed for capturing customizable process models based on well-known graph transformation techniques and with focus on practical aspects like definition of variation points, linking and propagation of changes, visual highlighting of differences in process variants, and dynamically selecting a specific variant at runtime. The suggested concepts are discussed within case studies, comprising different graph transformation systems for generating process variants supporting (a) variability by restriction, (b) variability by restriction and by extension, and (c) runtime adaptations due to the executing actor. The overall approach is being implemented in the FireStart BPM suite.

Model transformations constitute the key technology for model-driven software development, a software engineering discipline which became more and more important during the last decade. While tool... Show More

Model transformations constitute the key technology for model-driven software development, a software engineering discipline which became more and more important during the last decade. While tool support for unidirectional batch transformations is rather mature, bidirectional and incremental transformations are only weakly investigated. Nevertheless, several usage scenarios demand for incremental and bidirectional transformations, like round-trip engineering between UML class models and Java source code. This paper presents a bidirectional transformation between UML class models and a Java model which is obtained from Java source code. The transformation is written in QVT Relations, a declarative model transformation language provided by the OMG. While the case study demonstrates that it is possible to specify bidirectional transformations between heterogeneous metamodels in a single relational specification, it also reveals some inherent limitations of the language and the corresponding tool support.

Domain specific modelling languages reduce the effort required to specify systems by providing higher level abstractions. Although this is a promising approach for reducing the complexity of system... Show More

Domain specific modelling languages reduce the effort required to specify systems by providing higher level abstractions. Although this is a promising approach for reducing the complexity of system specifications, creating a new domain specific modelling language is a complex task. WebDPF is a web-based metamodelling tool that aims to reduce the effort required to develop domain specific modelling languages. The proposed technique is based on model transformations which enhances a modelling language with auto-completion. WebDPF supports multilevel metamodelling, diagrammatic specification of model constraints, and development, simulation and analysis of model transformation systems. The authors study the termination of the underlying model transformation systems and provide sufficient condition for termination. The tool is equipped with a scalable model navigation facility that enables a modeler to deal with large models.

Software companies that develop embedded systems following the principles of service-oriented architecture can anticipate various benefits from choreography modelling. Current choreography modelling... Show More

Software companies that develop embedded systems following the principles of service-oriented architecture can anticipate various benefits from choreography modelling. Current choreography modelling languages, however, have a limited applicability in embedded systems development since they are not expressive enough to capture all the choreography-relevant aspects that are typical in this domain. This problem is addressed in this study with the analysis of the needs in embedded systems domain for choreography modelling language. The analysis was guided by design science and relied on expert interviews, company-specific documents, relevant scientific literature and the experts' evaluation of the redesigned choreography modelling language. The main results of the analysis presented in this paper are a) design requirements addressing the limitations of choreography modelling languages for embedded systems development and b) proposals for modelling language implementation technologies. The derived design requirements indicate on choreography-relevant embedded systems development aspects such as the constraint-based access and real-time execution. Modelling language implementation technology proposals include Eclipse modelling framework and Sirius. The feasibility of these results is evaluated by redesigning an existing choreography modelling language based on the derived design requirements, implementing a prototype editor for the redesigned language and by evaluating the redesigned language with experts.