Développement logiciel par transformation de modèles

La recherche en génie logiciel a depuis longtemps tenté de mieux comprendre le processus de développement logiciel, minimalement, pour en reproduire les bonnes pratiques, et idéalement, pour pouvoir le mécaniser. On peut identifier deux approches majeures pour caractériser le processus. La première approche, dite transformationnelle, perçoit le processus comme une séquence de transformations préservant certaines propriétés des données à l’entrée. Cette idée a été récemment reprise par l’architecture dirigée par les modèles de l’OMG. La deuxième approche consiste à répertorier et à codifier des solutions éprouvées à des problèmes récurrents. Les recherches sur les styles architecturaux, les patrons de conception, ou les cadres d’applications s’inscrivent dans cette approche. Notre travail de recherche reconnaît la complémentarité des deux approches, notamment pour l’étape de conception: dans le cadre du développement dirigé par les modèles, nous percevons l’étape de conception comme l’application de patrons de solutions aux modèles reçus en entrée. Il est coutume de définir l’étape de conception en termes de conception architecturale, et conception détaillée. La conception architecturale se préoccupe d’organiser un logiciel en composants répondant à un ensemble d’exigences non-fonctionnelles, alors que la conception détaillée se préoccupe, en quelque sorte, du contenu de ces composants. La conception architecturale s’appuie sur des styles architecturaux qui sont des principes d’organisation permettant d’optimiser certaines qualités, alors que la conception détaillée s’appuie sur des patrons de conception pour attribuer les responsabilités aux classes. Les styles architecturaux et les patrons de conception sont des artefacts qui codifient des solutions éprouvées à des problèmes récurrents de conception. Alors que ces artefacts sont bien documentés, la décision de les appliquer reste essentiellement manuelle. De plus, les outils proposés n’offrent pas un support adéquat pour les appliquer à des modèles existants. Dans cette thèse, nous nous attaquons à la conception détaillée, et plus particulièrement, à la transformation de modèles par application de patrons de conception, en partie parce que les patrons de conception sont moins complexes, et en partie parce que l’implémentation des styles architecturaux passe souvent par les patrons de conception. Ainsi, nous proposons une approche pour représenter et appliquer les patrons de conception. Notre approche se base sur la représentation explicite des problèmes résolus par ces patrons. En effet, la représentation explicite du problème résolu par un patron permet : (1) de mieux comprendre le patron, (2) de reconnaître l’opportunité d’appliquer le patron en détectant une instance de la représentation du problème dans les modèles du système considéré, et (3) d’automatiser l’application du patron en la représentant, de façon déclarative, par une transformation d’une instance du problème en une instance de la solution. Pour vérifier et valider notre approche, nous l’avons utilisée pour représenter et appliquer différents patrons de conception et nous avons effectué des tests pratiques sur des modèles générés à partir de logiciels libres.

Transformation by example

La transformation de modèles consiste à transformer un modèle source en un modèle cible conformément à des méta-modèles source et cible. Nous distinguons deux types de transformations. La première est exogène où les méta-modèles source et cible représentent des formalismes différents et où tous les éléments du modèle source sont transformés. Quand elle concerne un même formalisme, la transformation est endogène. Ce type de transformation nécessite généralement deux étapes : l’identification des éléments du modèle source à transformer, puis la transformation de ces éléments. Dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous proposons trois principales contributions liées à ces problèmes de transformation. La première contribution est l’automatisation des transformations des modèles. Nous proposons de considérer le problème de transformation comme un problème d'optimisation combinatoire où un modèle cible peut être automatiquement généré à partir d'un nombre réduit d'exemples de transformations. Cette première contribution peut être appliquée aux transformations exogènes ou endogènes (après la détection des éléments à transformer). La deuxième contribution est liée à la transformation endogène où les éléments à transformer du modèle source doivent être détectés. Nous proposons une approche pour la détection des défauts de conception comme étape préalable au refactoring. Cette approche est inspirée du principe de la détection des virus par le système immunitaire humain, appelée sélection négative. L’idée consiste à utiliser de bonnes pratiques d’implémentation pour détecter les parties du code à risque. La troisième contribution vise à tester un mécanisme de transformation en utilisant une fonction oracle pour détecter les erreurs. Nous avons adapté le mécanisme de sélection négative qui consiste à considérer comme une erreur toute déviation entre les traces de transformation à évaluer et une base d’exemples contenant des traces de transformation de bonne qualité. La fonction oracle calcule cette dissimilarité et les erreurs sont ordonnées selon ce score. Les différentes contributions ont été évaluées sur d’importants projets et les résultats obtenus montrent leurs efficacités.

Acquiring expert knowledge for the design of conceptual information systems

Conceptual Information Systems unfold the conceptual structure of data stored in relational databases. In the design phase of the system, conceptual hierarchies have to be created which describe different aspects of the data. In this paper, we describe two principal ways of designing such conceptual hierarchies, data driven design and theory driven design and discuss advantages and drawbacks. The central part of the paper shows how Attribute Exploration, a knowledge acquisition tool developped by B. Ganter can be applied for narrowing the gap between both approaches.

Fujaba Days 2011

Fujaba is an Open Source UML CASE tool project started at the software engineering group of Paderborn University in 1997. In 2002 Fujaba has been redesigned and became the Fujaba Tool Suite with a plug-in architecture allowing developers to add functionality easily while retaining full control over their contributions. Multiple Application Domains Fujaba followed the model-driven development philosophy right from its beginning in 1997. At the early days, Fujaba had a special focus on code generation from UML diagrams resulting in a visual programming language with a special emphasis on object structure manipulating rules. Today, at least six rather independent tool versions are under development in Paderborn, Kassel, and Darmstadt for supporting (1) reengineering, (2) embedded real-time systems, (3) education, (4) specification of distributed control systems, (5) integration with the ECLIPSE platform, and (6) MOF-based integration of system (re-) engineering tools. International Community According to our knowledge, quite a number of research groups have also chosen Fujaba as a platform for UML and MDA related research activities. In addition, quite a number of Fujaba users send requests for more functionality and extensions. Therefore, the 8th International Fujaba Days aimed at bringing together Fujaba develop- ers and Fujaba users from all over the world to present their ideas and projects and to discuss them with each other and with the Fujaba core development team.

Sensitivity of large-scale atmospheric analyses to humidity observations and its impact on the global water cycle and tropical and extratropical weather systems in ERA40

Reanalysis data obtained from data assimilation are increasingly used for diagnostic studies of the general circulation of the atmosphere, for the validation of modelling experiments and for estimating energy and water fluxes between the Earth surface and the atmosphere. Because fluxes are not specifically observed, but determined by the data assimilation system, they are not only influenced by the utilized observations but also by model physics and dynamics and by the assimilation method. In order to better understand the relative importance of humidity observations for the determination of the hydrological cycle, in this paper we describe an assimilation experiment using the ERA40 reanalysis system where all humidity data have been excluded from the observational data base. The surprising result is that the model, driven by the time evolution of wind, temperature and surface pressure, is able to almost completely reconstitute the large-scale hydrological cycle of the control assimilation without the use of any humidity data. In addition, analysis of the individual weather systems in the extratropics and tropics using an objective feature tracking analysis indicates that the humidity data have very little impact on these systems. We include a discussion of these results and possible consequences for the way moisture information is assimilated, as well as the potential consequences for the design of observing systems for climate monitoring. It is further suggested, with support from a simple assimilation study with another model, that model physics and dynamics play a decisive role for the hydrological cycle, stressing the need to better understand these aspects of model parametrization. .

Managing digital coordination of design: emerging hybrid practices in an institutionalized project setting

What happens when digital coordination practices are introduced into the institutionalized setting of an engineering project? This question is addressed through an interpretive study that examines how a shared digital model becomes used in the late design stages of a major station refurbishment project. The paper contributes by mobilizing the idea of ‘hybrid practices’ to understand the diverse patterns of activity that emerge to manage digital coordination of design. It articulates how engineering and architecture professions develop different relationships with the shared model; the design team negotiates paper-based practices across organizational boundaries; and diverse practitioners probe the potential and limitations of the digital infrastructure. While different software packages and tools have become linked together into an integrated digital infrastructure, these emerging hybrid practices contrast with the interactions anticipated in practice and policy guidance and presenting new opportunities and challenges for managing project delivery. The study has implications for researchers working in the growing field of empirical work on engineering project organizations as it shows the importance of considering, and suggests new ways to theorise, the introduction of digital coordination practices into these institutionalized settings.

The Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES), model description – part 1: energy and water fluxes

This manuscript describes the energy and water components of a new community land surface model called the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES). This is developed from the Met Office Surface Exchange Scheme (MOSES). It can be used as a stand alone land surface model driven by observed forcing data, or coupled to an atmospheric global circulation model. The JULES model has been coupled to the Met Office Unified Model (UM) and as such provides a unique opportunity for the research community to contribute their research to improve both world-leading operational weather forecasting and climate change prediction systems. In addition JULES, and its forerunner MOSES, have been the basis for a number of very high-profile papers concerning the land-surface and climate over the last decade. JULES has a modular structure aligned to physical processes, providing the basis for a flexible modelling platform.

Prototype Generation from Ontology Charts

Semantic Analysis is a business analysis method designed to capture system requirements. While these requirements may be represented as text, the method also advocates the use of Ontology Charts to formally denote the system's required roles, relationships and forms of communication. Following model driven engineering techniques, Ontology Charts can be transformed to temporal Database schemas, class diagrams and component diagrams, which can then be used to produce software systems. A nice property of these transformations is that resulting system design models lend themselves to complicated extensions that do not require changes to the design models. For example, resulting databases can be extended with new types of data without the need to modify the database schema of the legacy system. Semantic Analysis is not widely used in software engineering, so there is a lack of experts in the field and no design patterns are available. This make it difficult for the analysts to pass organizational knowledge to the engineers. This study describes an implementation that is readily usable by engineers, which includes an automated technique that can produce a prototype from an Ontology Chart. The use of such tools should enable developers to make use of Semantic Analysis with minimal expertise of ontologies and MDA.

A Methodology for Building Service-Oriented Applications in the Presence of Non-Functional Properties

This thesis presents ⇡SOD-M (Policy-based Service Oriented Development Methodology), a methodology for modeling reliable service-based applications using policies. It proposes a model driven method with: (i) a set of meta-models for representing non-functional constraints associated to service-based applications, starting from an use case model until a service composition model; (ii) a platform providing guidelines for expressing the composition and the policies; (iii) model-to-model and model-to-text transformation rules for semi-automatizing the implementation of reliable service-based applications; and (iv) an environment that implements these meta-models and rules, and enables the application of ⇡SOD-M. This thesis also presents a classification and nomenclature for non-functional requirements for developing service-oriented applications. Our approach is intended to add value to the development of service-oriented applications that have quality requirements needs. This work uses concepts from the service-oriented development, non-functional requirements design and model-driven delevopment areas to propose a solution that minimizes the problem of reliable service modeling. Some examples are developed as proof of concepts

Uma linguagem de modelagem da interação para auxiliar a comunicação designer-usuário

The development of interactive systems involves several professionals and the integration between them normally uses common artifacts, such as models, that drive the development process. In the model-driven development approach, the interaction model is an artifact that includes the most of the aspects related to what and how the user can do while he/she interacting with the system. Furthermore, the interactive model may be used to identify usability problems at design time. Therefore, the central problematic addressed by this thesis is twofold. In the first place, the interaction modeling, in a perspective that helps the designer to explicit to developer, who will implement the interface, the aspcts related to the interaction process. In the second place, the anticipated identification of usability problems, that aims to reduce the application final costs. To achieve these goals, this work presents (i) the ALaDIM language, that aims to help the designer on the conception, representation and validation of his interactive message models; (ii) the ALaDIM editor, which was built using the EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) and its standardized technologies by OMG (Object Management Group); and (iii) the ALaDIM inspection method, which allows the anticipated identification of usability problems using ALaDIM models. ALaDIM language and editor were respectively specified and implemented using the OMG standards and they can be used in MDA (Model Driven Architecture) activities. Beyond that, we evaluated both ALaDIM language and editor using a CDN (Cognitive Dimensions of Notations) analysis. Finally, this work reports an experiment that validated the ALaDIM inspection method

MARISA-MDD: uma abordagem para transformações entre modelos orientados a aspectos: dos requisitos ao projeto detalhado

Aspect Oriented approaches associated to different activities of the software development process are, in general, independent and their models and artifacts are not aligned and inserted in a coherent process. In the model driven development, the various models and the correspondence between them are rigorously specified. With the integration of aspect oriented software development (DSOA) and model driven development (MDD) it is possible to automatically propagate models from one activity to another, avoiding the loss of information and important decisions established in each activity. This work presents MARISA-MDD, a strategy based on models that integrate aspect-oriented requirements, architecture and detailed design, using the languages AOV-graph, AspectualACME and aSideML, respectively. MARISA-MDD defines, for each activity, representative models (and corresponding metamodels) and a number of transformations between the models of each language. These transformations have been specified and implemented in ATL (Atlas Definition Language), in the Eclipse environment. MARISA-MDD allows the automatic propagation between AOV-graph, AspectualACME, and aSideML models. To validate the proposed approach two case studies, the Health Watcher and the Mobile Media have been used in the MARISA-MDD environment for the automatic generation of AspectualACME and aSideML models, from the AOV-graph model

CrossMDA-SPL: uma abordagem para gerência de variabilidades dirigida por modelos e aspectos

This paper proposes a systematic approach to management of variability modelsdriven and aspects using the mechanisms of approaches Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) and Model-Driven Development (MDD). The main goal of the approach, named CrossMDA-SPL, is to improve the management(gerência), modularization and isolation ou separation of the variability of the LPSs of architecture in a high level of abstraction (model) at the design and implementing phases of development Software Product Lines (SPLs), exploiting the synergy between AOSD and MDD. The CrossMDA-SPL approach defines some artifacts basis for advance the separation clear in between the mandatory (bounden) and optional features in the architecture of SPL. The artifacts are represented by two models named: (i) core model (base domain) - responsible for specify the common features the all members of the SPL, and (ii) variability model - responsible for represent the variables features of SPL. In addition, the CrossMDA-SPL approach is composed of: (i) guidelines for modeling and representation of variability, (ii) CrossMDA-SPL services and process, and (iii) models of the architecture of SPL or product instance of SPL. The guidelines use the advantages of AOSD and MDD to promote a better modularization of the variable features of the architecture of SPL during the creation of core and variability models of the approach. The services and sub-processes are responsible for combination automatically, through of process of transformation between the core and variability models, and the generation of new models that represent the implementation of the architecture of SPL or a instance model of SPL. Mechanisms for effective modularization of variability for architectures of SPL at model level. The concepts are described and measured with the execution of a case study of an SPL for management systems of transport electronic tickets

MaRISA-AOCode: uma abordagem genérica para geração de código orientado a aspectos

Currently there are several aspect-oriented approaches that are related to different stages of software development process. These approaches often lack integration with each other and their models and artifacts are not aligned in a coherent process. The integration of Aspect-Oriented Software development (AOSD) and Model-Driven Development (MDD) enables automatic propagation of models from one phase to another, avoiding loss of important information and decisions established in each. This paper presents a model driven approach, called Marisa-AOCode, which supports the processing of detailed design artifacts to code in different Aspect-Oriented Programming languages. The approach proposed by Maris- AOCode defines transformation rules between aSideML, a modeling language for aspectoriented detailed design, and Metaspin, a generic metamodel for aspect-oriented programming languages. The instantiation of the generic metamodel (Metaspin) provided by the approach of Maris-AOCode is illustrated by the transformation of Metaspin for two languages: AspectLua and CaesarJ. We illustrate the approach with a case study based on the Health Watcher System

Um modelo conceitual baseado em MDD e padrões para evolução de sistemas OA

Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is a technique that complements the Object- Oriented Software Development (OOSD) modularizing several concepts that OOSD approaches do not modularize appropriately. However, the current state-of-the art on AOSD suffers with software evolution, mainly because aspect definition can stop to work correctly when base elements evolve. A promising approach to deal with that problem is the definition of model-based pointcuts, where pointcuts are defined based on a conceptual model. That strategy makes pointcut less prone to software evolution than model-base elements. Based on that strategy, this work defines a conceptual model at high abstraction level where we can specify software patterns and architectures that through Model Driven Development techniques they can be instantiated and composed in architecture description language that allows aspect modeling at architecture level. Our MDD approach allows propagate concepts in architecture level to another abstraction levels (design level, for example) through MDA transformation rules. Also, this work shows a plug-in implemented to Eclipse platform called AOADLwithCM. That plug-in was created to support our development process. The AOADLwithCM plug-in was used to describe a case study based on MobileMedia System. MobileMedia case study shows step-by-step how the Conceptual Model approach could minimize Pointcut Fragile Problems, due to software evolution. MobileMedia case study was used as input to analyses evolutions on software according to software metrics proposed by KHATCHADOURIAN, GREENWOOD and RASHID. Also, we analyze how evolution in base model could affect maintenance on aspectual model with and without Conceptual Model approaches

Optimum design of microirrigation systems in sloping lands

When an area to be irrigated has a high slope gradient in the manifold line direction, an option is to use a tapered pipeline to economize on pipe costs and to keep pressure head variations within desired limits. The objective of this paper is to develop a linear optimization model to design a microirrigation system with tapered, downhill manifold lines, minimizing the equivalent annual cost of the hydraulic network and the annual pumping cost, and maximizing the emission uniformity previously established to the subunit. The input data are irrigation system layout, cost of all hydraulic network components, and electricity price. The output data are equivalent annual cost, pipeline diameter in each line of the system, pressure head in each node, and total operating pressure head. To illustrate its capability, the model is applied in a citrus orchard in Sao, Paulo State, Brazil, considering slopes of 3, 6, and 9%. The model proved to be efficient in the design of the irrigation system in terms of the emission uniformity desired.