Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Grid services and web services have similarities but also significant differences. Although conceived for web services, it is seen how (Business Process Execution Logic) can be used to orchestrate a collection of grid services. It is explained how (Chisel Representation Employing Systematic Specification) has been extended to describe grid service composition. The descriptions are automatically converted into / code for practical realisation of the composed services. This achieves orchestration of grid services deployed using the widely used Globus Toolkit and Active interpreter. The same descriptions are automatically translated into , allowing systematic checks for interoperability and logical errors prior to implementation.

B3G is an emerging network technology which conceives the convergence of telecommunication and IP-based networks for providing enhanced services able to transfer both voice and non-voice data through wired and wireless networks. Moreover, B3G networks can be no longer considered as “” entities which only transport data between end-points, but they must be considered as “” parties that have their own behavior and provide services. This creates a completely new application domain where applying current software engineering design tools, such as software architectures, fails. In fact, dealing with B3G networks requires to explicit low-level details usually abstracted by the architectural descriptions.

To this extent, we present an ongoing work on investigating B3G-oriented application modeling. In particular, we propose an enhanced UML profile to define and analyze software architectures that explicitly exploit the B3G domain properties.

This paper proposes RTDWD (Real-time Distributed Wideband-Delphi), a real-time collaborative web application for user stories estimation through the Wideband-Delphi method. RTDWD realizes, in a lightweight way, virtual meetings for a critical phase of the requirements management in distributed Agile development processes, such as Distributed eXtreme Programming. The web 2.0-based nature of RTDWD adds new communication modes to a distributed Agile development process, where a close real-time collaboration is needed but difficult to realize due to the geographic dislocation of team members. Features of RTDWD allow to take into consideration several scenarios where mobile devices (i.e. Pocket PCs and Smartphones) well substitute desktop and laptop computers. We present our experience in order to point out to the researcher community the usefulness of RTDWD and, generally, of the lightweight real-time collaboration underlining the need to introduce new technologies on practices of distributed Agile processes.

The future development of Air Traffic Management (ATM), set by the ATM 2000+ Strategy, involves a structural revision of ATM processes, a new ATM concept and a system approach for the ATM network. This requires ATM services to go through significant structural, operational and cultural changes that will contribute towards the ATM 2000+ Strategy. Moreover, from a technology viewpoint, future ATM services will employ new systems forming the emergent ATM architecture underlying and supporting the European Commission’s Single European Sky Initiative. Introducing safety relevant systems in ATM contexts requires us to understand the risk involved in order to mitigate the impact of possible failures. This paper is concerned with trust in technology. Technology innovation supports further (e.g., safety or performance) improvements, although there is often a lack of trust in changes. This paper argues that organizations need to identify trust strategies and policies supporting the delivery of technology innovation. Moreover, the identification of trust strategies and policies supports the understanding of subtle interactions between diverse, often competing, system objectives.

This paper presents a study of the main current collaborative applications and shows how their architectural models focus on the interactive aspects of the systems for very specific applications. It also analyses state-of-the-art web service-based collaborative applications and shows how they only solve specific problems and do not provide an extensible and flexible architecture. From this study, we conclude that there is currently no standard architecture (and even less a web service-based one) which can be taken as a model for collaborative application development. We therefore propose a web service-based architectural model for the development of this type of application. This model provides flexible collaborative sessions in order to facilitate collaborative work in a consistent way and with group awareness mechanisms. The proposed architecture enables applications, components or tools to be added and can be extended with new web services when required without the need to modify existing services. The resulting collaborative applications are therefore flexible and extensible.

Software development within geographically dispersed and multi-institutional projects faces challenges in the domain of validation and quality assurance of software products. Experience in such projects, especially in the area of Grid computing, has shown that the lack of appropriate tools and procedures may cause high overall development costs and delays in the deployment, development and maintenance of the software. In this paper, we introduce ETICS, an integrated infrastructure for the automated configuration, build and testing of Grid and distributed software. The goal of the infrastructure is to provide a service for software projects by integrating well-established procedures, tools and resources in a coherent framework and adapting them to the special needs of distributed projects. A set of versatile tools and best-practice guidelines for quality assurance implementation are also provided to maximize the project’s chances of delivering reliable and interoperable software.

We introduce an original approach, which combines monitoring and model checking techniques into a comprehensive methodology for the architectural verification of Component-based systems. The approach works by first capturing the traces of execution via the instrumented middleware; then, the observed traces are reverse engineered into Message Sequence Charts, which are then checked for compliance to the Component-based Software Architecture, using a model checker. The methodology has been conceived for being applied indifferently for validating the system in house before deployment and for continuous validation in the field following evolution. A case study for the first case is here illustrated.

We introduce the XPT approach for the automated systematic generation of XML instances which conform to a given XML Schema, and its implementation into the proof-of-concept tool TAXI. XPT can be used to automatize the black-box testing of any general application that expects in input the XML instances. We generate a comprehensive set of instances by sampling all the possible combinations of elements within the schema, applying and adapting the well known Category-Partition strategy for functional testing. Originally, XPT has been conceived for application to the e-Learning domain, within which we briefly discuss some examples.

Model transformations are an important part of the MDA approach. The process of converting a PIM into a PSM should be done by certain model transformations. While there are many transformation languages for UML available they all share the discrepancy between the syntax of the transformation specification language and the visual UML syntax. Today model transformations are defined either in a textual manner or in a language that uses constructs from the underlying metamodel. This paper presents a novel approach to specify model transformations as patterns in the concrete syntax of UML 2. These patterns are easier to read than usual transformation specifications and use only standard UML 2 constructs. This is achieved using the built-in extension mechanism of UML 2 - the Profiles. Besides the specification, these profiles offer the application of patterns within any UML 2 compliant modeling tool. As such, these patterns can be seen as a front-end for model transformation.

This paper provides an overview of a starting project called BATICS (Building Adaptive Three-dimensional Interfaces for Critical Complex Control Systems). This project aims to bring a more viable approach in the fields of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), software modeling and verification, automatic code generation, and adaptivity. The goal is to build a comprehensive methodology for semi-automated, formal model-based generation of effective, reliable and adaptive 3D GUIs for diagnosing control systems. This can be used to assist in GUI development for very complex systems, like industrial systems, high energy physics experiments and similar.