Quality of process modeling using BPMN: a model-driven approach

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Informática

A new MDA-SOA based framework for intercloud interoperability

Cloud computing has been one of the most important topics in Information Technology which aims to assure scalable and reliable on-demand services over the Internet. The expansion of the application scope of cloud services would require cooperation between clouds from different providers that have heterogeneous functionalities. This collaboration between different cloud vendors can provide better Quality of Services (QoS) at the lower price. However, current cloud systems have been developed without concerns of seamless cloud interconnection, and actually they do not support intercloud interoperability to enable collaboration between cloud service providers. Hence, the PhD work is motivated to address interoperability issue between cloud providers as a challenging research objective. This thesis proposes a new framework which supports inter-cloud interoperability in a heterogeneous computing resource cloud environment with the goal of dispatching the workload to the most effective clouds available at runtime. Analysing different methodologies that have been applied to resolve various problem scenarios related to interoperability lead us to exploit Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods as appropriate approaches for our inter-cloud framework. Moreover, since distributing the operations in a cloud-based environment is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP-complete) problem, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based job scheduler proposed as a part of interoperability framework, offering workload migration with the best performance at the least cost. A new Agent Based Simulation (ABS) approach is proposed to model the inter-cloud environment with three types of agents: Cloud Subscriber agent, Cloud Provider agent, and Job agent. The ABS model is proposed to evaluate the proposed framework.

Integrating early aspects with goal-oriented requirements engineering

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Model driven development implementation of a control systems user interfaces specification tool

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Model morphisms (MoMo) to enable language independent information models and interoperable business networks

MSc. Dissertation presented at Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of Universidade Nova de Lisboa to obtain the Master degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Service-oriented architecture for device lifecycle support in industrial automation

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores Especialidade: Robótica e Manufactura Integrada

A framework for efficient model transformations

The reported productivity gains while using models and model transformations to develop entire systems, after almost a decade of experience applying model-driven approaches for system development, are already undeniable benefits of this approach. However, the slowness of higher-level, rule based model transformation languages hinders the applicability of this approach to industrial scales. Lower-level, and efficient, languages can be used but productivity and easy maintenance seize to exist. The abstraction penalty problem is not new, it also exists for high-level, object oriented languages but everyone is using them now. Why is not everyone using rule based model transformation languages then? In this thesis, we propose a framework, comprised of a language and its respective environment, designed to tackle the most performance critical operation of high-level model transformation languages: the pattern matching. This framework shows that it is possible to mitigate the performance penalty while still using high-level model transformation languages.

Iberian peninsula ecosystem carbon fluxes: a model-data integration study

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia do Ambiente pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa,Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia

SOLAP+: extending the interaction model

Thesis submitted to Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Computer Science

Analysable software language translations

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Informática

Child programming: an adequate domain specific language for programming specific robots

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

A DSL for querying building data streams of energy, eeather and occupation data

The superfluous consumption of energy is faced by the modern society as a Socio-Economical and Environmental problem of the present days. This situation is worsening given that it is becoming clear that the tendency is to increase energy price every year. It is also noticeable that people, not necessarily proficient in technology, are not able to know where savings can be achieved, due to the absence of accessible awareness mechanisms. One of the home user concerns is to balance the need of reducing energy consumption, while producing the same activity with all the comfort and work efficiency. The common techniques to reduce the consumption are to use a less wasteful equipment, altering the equipment program to a more economical one or disconnecting appliances that are not necessary at the moment. However, there is no direct feedback from this performed actions, which leads to the situation where the user is not aware of the influence that these techniques have in the electrical bill. With the intension to give some control over the home consumption, Energy Management Systems (EMS) were developed. These systems allow the access to the consumption information and help understanding the energy waste. However, some studies have proven that these systems have a clear mismatch between the information that is presented and the one the user finds useful for his daily life, leading to demotivation of use. In order to create a solution more oriented towards the user’s demands, a specially tailored language (DSL) was implemented. This solution allows the user to acquire the information he considers useful, through the construction of questions about his energy consumption. The development of this language, following the Model Driven Development (MDD) approach, took into consideration the ideas of facility managers and home users in the phases of design and validation. These opinions were gathered through meetings with experts and a survey, which was conducted to the purpose of collecting statistics about what home users want to know.

Ergonomics and Usability – key factors in Knowledge Society

During the recent years human society evolved from the “industrial society age” and transitioned into the “knowledge society age”. This means that knowledge media support migrated from “pen and paper” to computer-based Information Systems. Due to this fact Ergonomics has assumed an increasing importance, as a science/technology that deals with the problem of adapting the work to the man, namely in terms of Usability. This paper presents some relevant Ergonomics, Usability and User-centred design concepts regarding Information Systems.

Traceability support in software product lines

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.

Derivation and consistency checking of models in early software product line engineering

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Informática