Multichannel Service Delivery Architecture

System architectures that deliver real-time services to customers must be flexible, scalable, and support a wide range of communication channels. This chapter presents an architecture that was designed to support multiple delivery channels and was successfully used to implement mobile banking services. The considerations behind the design and the approach used to deliver SMS-based mobile services using service-oriented architecture principles are reviewed and some of the practical challenges that were encountered with the implementation are explored. The ability for this solution architecture to support other real-time service channels is also examined.

Optimized and Distributed Variant Logic for Model-Driven Applications

The customization of Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) is expensive throughout its lifecycle, especially across an enterprise-wide distributed application environment. The authors' ongoing development of a temporal meta-data framework for EIS applications seeks to minimize these issues with the application model supporting the capability for end users to define their own supplemental or alternate application logic as what they term Variant Logic (VL). VL can be applied to any existing model object, defined by any authorized user, through modeling rather than coding, then executed by any user as an alternative to the original application logic. VL is also preserved during automated application updates and can also interoperate directly between similar model-based execution instances within a distributed execution environment, readily sharing the alternate logic segments. The authors also present an enhanced pre-processing architecture that optimizes the execution of Logic Variants to the same execution order of single path model logic.

Developing Executable UML Components Based on fUML and Alf

Model-driven architecture frameworks provide an approach for specifying systems independently of a particular platform and for transforming such system models for a particular platform, but development processes based on MDA are not widely used today because they are in general heavy-weight processes: in most situations they cannot deliver (incrementally) partial implementations to be executed immediately. Executable UML means an execution semantics for a subset of actions sufficient for computational completeness. This chapter uses Alf as the fUML-based action language to describe the operations for iComponent: the proposed solution for a platform-independent component model for dynamic execution environments. Moreover, a UML profile for modeling components is defined and applied, following agile principles, to the development of service-oriented components for dynamic execution environments. The intended use of the proposed approach is enterprise systems.

Modelling, Simulation, and Analysis for Enterprise Architecture

Modern organizations need to address increasingly complex challenges including how to represent and maintain their business goals using technologies and IT platforms that change on a regular basis. This has led to the development of modelling notations for expressing various aspects of an organization with a view to reducing complexity, increasing technology independence, and supporting analysis. Many of these Enterprise Architecture (EA) modelling notations provide a large number of concepts that support the business analysis but lack precise definitions necessary to perform computer-supported organizational analysis. This chapter reviews the current EA modelling landscape and proposes a simple language for the practical support of EA simulation including business alignment in terms of executing a collection of goals against prototype execution.

Reasoning Qualitatively about Handheld Multimedia Framework Quality Attributes

Today's mobile handheld devices, such as smartphones and action cameras, are well equipped for a wide range of multimedia and context-aware tasks. Such tasks can leverage traditional services like streaming audio and video as well as newer services like sensor fusion. Ubiquitous network access, coupled with an increasingly sophisticated mixture of device-based hardware and software, is enabling context-aware applications at an unprecedented rate. The objective of this chapter is to discuss specific quality attributes with respect to device-side software architectures providing these multimedia and sensor capabilities. This chapter focuses specifically on device-side client architectures rather than network or server architectures. Specific domain requirements and quality attributes are first derived through a synthesis of current research and industry trends, and subsequently analyzed. The analysis reveals some qualitative results that seem unintuitive at first glance but that become more understandable when provided with rationale relative to the handheld domain context.

Putting Personal Smart Spaces into Context

The convergence between mobile telecommunications and the Future Internet opened the way for the development of innovative pervasive computing services. The self-improving Personal Smart Spaces (PSSs) are coupling next generation mobile communications facilities with the features provided by the static smart spaces to support a more ubiquitous, mobile, context-aware, and personalised smart space. Addressing the advanced requirements of PSSs regarding the establishment of a robust distributed context management framework is a challenging task. Evaluating such a system is not a straightforward process, especially when it is also based on comparative assessments of its performance, as various existing systems demonstrate different unique characteristics making the quantitative comparisons quite complex and difficult to accomplish. This chapter elaborates on a context modelling and management approach that is suitable for addressing the PSS requirements and provides experimental evaluation evidence regarding its performance.

High-Integrity Model-Based Development

Model-Based Development (MBD) has become increasingly used for critical systems, and it is the subject of the MBDV supplement to the DO-178C standard. In this chapter, the authors review the requirements of DO-178C for model-based development, and they identify ways in which MBD can be combined with formal verification to achieve DO-178C requirements for traceability and verifiability of models. In particular, the authors consider the implications for model transformations, which are a central part of MBD approaches, and they identify how transformations can be verified using formal methods tools.

Object-Oriented Cognitive Complexity Measures

This chapter presents the analysis of ten recently proposed object-oriented metrics based on cognitive informatics. The metrics based on cognitive informatics use cognitive weight. Cognitive weight is the representation of the understandability of the piece of software that evaluates the difficulty experienced in comprehending and/or performing the piece of software. Development of metrics based on Cognitive Informatics (CI) is a new area of research, and from this point of view, for the analysis of these metrics, it is important to know their acceptability from other existing evaluation and validation criteria. This chapter presents a critical review on existing object-oriented cognitive complexity measures. In addition, a comparative study based on some selected attributes is presented.

Graphical Modeling of Security Goals and Software Vulnerabilities

Security has become recognized as a critical aspect of software development, leading to the development of various security-enhancing techniques, many of which use some kind of custom modeling language. Models in different languages cannot readily be related to each other, which is an obstacle to using several techniques together. The sheer number of languages is, in itself, also an obstacle to adoption by developers. The authors have developed a modeling language that can be used in place of four existing modeling languages: attack trees, vulnerability cause graphs, security activity graphs, and security goal indicator trees. Models in the new language can be transformed to and from the earlier language, and a precise definition of model semantics enables an even wider range of applications, such as testing and static analysis. This chapter explores this new language.

A Generic Architectural Model Approach for Efficient Utilization of Patterns

A software pattern describes the core of the solution to a problem that tends to (re-)occur in a particular environment. Such patterns are commonly used as a means to facilitate the creation of an architectural design satisfying the desired quality goals. In this chapter, the practical challenges of efficient usage of patterns in domain-specific software development are presented. The specific domain considered here is the mobile domain, for which is given a sample collection of potentially useful patterns. After that, a novel generic architectural model approach for organizing patterns is presented. In this approach, the identification of relevant patterns is considered as the process of reducing the set of candidate patterns by domain-implied constraints. These constraints can be incorporated in a domain-specific generic architectural model that reflects the commonalities in the solutions of the particular domain. This approach has been validated with a real company application development case.