Formal Specification of Non-Functional Properties of Context-Aware Systems

During the recent years, there is an increasing demand for software systems that dynamically adapt their behavior at run-time in response to changes in user preferences, execution environment, and system requirements, being thus context-aware. Authors are referring here to requirements related to both functional and non-functional aspects of system behavior since changes can also be induced by failures or unavailability of parts of the software system itself. To ensure the coherence and correctness of the proposed model, all relevant properties of system entities are precisely and formally described. This is especially true for non-functional properties, such as performance, availability, and security. This article discusses semantic concepts for the specification of non-functional requirements, taking into account the specific needs of a context-aware system. Based on these semantic concepts, we present a specification language that integrates non-functional requirements design and validation in the development process of context-aware self-adaptive systems.

ConE: A Concurrent Edit Detection Tool for Large-scale Software Development

Modern, complex software systems are being continuously extended and adjusted. The developers responsible for this may come from different teams or organizations, and may be distributed over the world. This may make it difficult to keep track of what other developers are doing, which may result in multiple developers concurrently editing the same code areas. This, in turn, may lead to hard-to-merge changes or even merge conflicts, logical bugs that are difficult to detect, duplication of work, and wasted developer productivity. To address this, we explore the extent of this problem in the pull-request-based software development model. We study half a year of changes made to six large repositories in Microsoft in which at least 1,000 pull requests are created each month. We find that files concurrently edited in different pull requests are more likely to introduce bugs. Motivated by these findings, we design, implement, and deploy a service named Concurrent Edit Detector (ConE) that proactively detects pull requests containing concurrent edits, to help mitigate the problems caused by them. ConE has been designed to scale, and to minimize false alarms while still flagging relevant concurrently edited files. Key concepts of ConE include the detection of the Extent of Overlap between pull requests, and the identification of Rarely Concurrently Edited Files . To evaluate ConE, we report on its operational deployment on 234 repositories inside Microsoft. ConE assessed 26,000 pull requests and made 775 recommendations about conflicting changes, which were rated as useful in over 70% (554) of the cases. From interviews with 48 users, we learned that they believed ConE would save time in conflict resolution and avoiding duplicate work, and that over 90% intend to keep using the service on a daily basis.

Attack Taxonomy for Cyber-Physical System

Cyber-physical systems are the systems that combine the physical world with the world of information processing. CPS involves interaction between heterogeneous components that include electronic chips, software systems, sensors and actuators. It makes the CPS vulnerable to attacks. How to deal with the attacks in CPSs has become a research hotspot. In this paper we have study the Architecture of CPS and various security threats at each layer of the archicture of CPS. We have also developed attack taxonomy for CPS. Keywords: Cyber Physical System, Threat, Attack

Semantic Metadata Annotation Services in the Biomedical Domain—A Literature Review

For all research data collected, data descriptions and information about the corresponding variables are essential for data analysis and reuse. To enable cross-study comparisons and analyses, semantic interoperability of metadata is one of the most important requirements. In the area of clinical and epidemiological studies, data collection instruments such as case report forms (CRFs), data dictionaries and questionnaires are critical for metadata collection. Even though data collection instruments are often created in a digital form, they are mostly not machine readable; i.e., they are not semantically coded. As a result, the comparison between data collection instruments is complex. The German project NFDI4Health is dedicated to the development of national research data infrastructure for personal health data, and as such searches for ways to enhance semantic interoperability. Retrospective integration of semantic codes into study metadata is important, as ongoing or completed studies contain valuable information. However, this is labor intensive and should be eased by software. To understand the market and find out what techniques and technologies support retrospective semantic annotation/enrichment of metadata, we conducted a literature review. In NFDI4Health, we identified basic requirements for semantic metadata annotation software in the biomedical field and in the context of the FAIR principles. Ten relevant software systems were summarized and aligned with those requirements. We concluded that despite active research on semantic annotation systems, no system meets all requirements. Consequently, further research and software development in this area is needed, as interoperability of data dictionaries, questionnaires and data collection tools is key to reusing and combining results from independent research studies.

Modelling of Mechanisms as a Methodological Tool (the Case of Designing a Cycloidal Pin Transmission)

The suggested modern approach to modelling of objects and systems allows not only to create models but also to use them to study the main properties of the object (system) with a high degree of clarity and adequacy, as well as to develop most important skills of young engineers in creating and implementing digital models of engineering objects.The objective of the study is to analyse capacity of one of the modern automated computational design systems as a methodological tool.The functionality of an automated computational design system is considered for the case of constructing a model of a planetary cycloidal pinion transmission. The resulting model allows visualising the kinematics of the designed mechanism in the form of static or moving graphic images. The model built based on the described approach contains digital images of mechanism parts, which can be transferred without modification to specialised software systems for analysing strength characteristics or manufacturing material models of a product using rapid prototyping methods.The proposed approach allows to perfect actions referring to the analysis of properties and synthesis of new structures using tools that correspond to the modern level of technology development and to get a visual idea of the process of developing a machine from a mathematical model to its material objectification.The research methods are based on the fundamental principles of mathematical and simulation modelling, data analysis and processing using powerful automated computational design tools.The tools used for modelling can be used for different forms of learning, i.e., without reference to specific premises and equipment.

REENGINEERING TECHNIQUE ADAPTATION OF LEGACY SOFTWARE SYSTEMS

В статье рассматривается адаптация методики реинжиниринга унаследованных систем. Приводится обзор подходов к реинжинирингу. Несмотря на то, что термин «реинжиниринг» в первую очередь относится к изменению бизнес процессов, он удачно подходит и к модернизации программного обеспечения. Обосновывается необходимость адаптации методики. В статье описывается применение адаптированной методики на примере реинжиниринга программного комплекса для прогнозных исследований ТЭК. Приведен исторический обзор версий ПК «ИНТЭК» и описаны поэтапно все шаги проведения его реинжиниринга на основе агентно-сервисного подхода The article presents an adaptation of the legacy systems reengineering technique. An overview of approaches to reengineering is given. Although the term “reengineering” primarily refers to changing business processes, it is well suited to software development. The necessity of adapting the method has been substantiated. The article describes the application of the described methodology on the example of software complex reengineering for predictive research of the fuel and energy complex. A historical overview of the current problem is given and all stages of INTEC PC reengineering are described step by step

Dynamic Analysis of Software Systems with Aperiodic Impulse Rejuvenation

This paper aims to obtain the dynamical solution and instantaneous availability of software systems with aperiodic impulse rejuvenation. Firstly, we formulate the generic system with a group of coupled impulsive differential equations and transform it into an abstract Cauchy problem. Then we adopt a difference scheme and establish the convergence of this scheme by applying the Trotter–Kato theorem to obtain the system’s dynamical solution. Moreover, the instantaneous availability as an important evaluation index for software systems is derived, and its range is also estimated. At last, numerical examples are shown to illustrate the validity of theoretical results.

Sustainability in Information and Communication Technologies

Information and communication technologies (ICT) can provide added value in an organizational context in order to enhance the definition of business support strategies. The purpose of the chapter is to focus on the contribution of ICT to implement a sustainability policy in the organizations, in the context of the sustainable development goals to improve cooperation and promote development. In this context, the principles of the Karlskrona Manifesto are applied to the development of software systems. The methodology focused on the literature review of the domain and on a case study, in order to analyze the impact of ICT as an engine of sustainability in organizations. The main conclusions focus on the analysis of the impact of established practices in organizations to design and develop sustainable software systems. The results point to a greater consciousness of the potential effects of software systems on sustainability, which will improve management practices, reducing the quantity of material to be recycled, and aligning organizational strategies with Green IT.

A Game Theoretic Approach for Quality Assurance in Software Systems Using Antifragility-Based Learning Hooks

The use of software in mission critical applications poses greater quality needs. Quality assurance activities are aimed at ensuring such quality requirements of the software system. Antifragility is a property of software that increases its quality as a result of errors, faults, and attacks. Such antifragile software systems proactively accepts the errors and learns from these errors and relies on test-driven development methodology. In this article, an innovative approach is proposed which uses a fault injection methodology to perform the task of quality assurance. Such a fault injection mechanism makes the software antifragile and it gets better with the increase in the intensity of such errors up to a point. A software quality game is designed as a two-player game model with stressor and backer entities. The stressor is an error model which injects errors into the software system. The software system acts as a backer, and tries to recover from the errors. The backer uses a cheating mechanism by implementing software Learning Hooks (SLH) which learn from the injected errors. This makes the software antifragile and leads to improvement of the code. Moreover, the SLH uses a Q-Learning reinforcement algorithm with a hybrid reward function to learn from the incoming defects. The game is played for a maximum of K errors. This approach is introduced to incorporate the anti-fragility aspects into the software system within the existing framework of object-oriented development. The game is run at the end of every increment during the construction of object-oriented systems. A detailed report of the injected errors and the actions taken is output at the end of each increment so that necessary actions are incorporated into the actual software during the next iteration. This ensures at the end of all the iterations, the software is immune to majority of the so-called Black Swans. The experiment is conducted with an open source Java sample and the results are studied selected two categories of evaluation parameters. The defect related performance parameters considered are the defect density, defect distribution over different iterations, and number of hooks inserted. These parameters show much reduction in adopting the proposed approach. The quality parameters such as abstraction, inheritance, and coupling are studied for various iterations and this approach ensures considerable increases in these parameters.