17418612
Visualizing design patterns with a UML profile
In this paper, we present a UML profile which defines new stereotypes, tagged values and constraints for visualizing design patterns in UML diagrams. These new stereotypes and tagged values are attached to a modeling element to explicitly represent the role the modeling element plays in a design pattern so that the user can identify the pattern in a UML diagram.
9559762
A logical framework for design composition
The design of a large component based software system typically involves the composition of different components. The lack of rigorous reasoning about the correctness of composition is an important barrier towards the promise of "plug and play". The author describes a rigorous logic framework to reason about component compositions. We focus our analysis on design components such as design patterns, which have been used by a large number of applications. We also propose methods to verify structural and behavioral composition correctness.
16840990
Automating the analysis of design component contracts
Software patterns are a new design paradigm used to solve problems that arise when developing software within a particular context. Patterns capture the static and dynamic structure and collaboration among the components in a software design. A key promise of the pattern-based approach is that it may greatly simplify the construction of software systems out of building blocks and thus reuse experience and reduce cost. However, it also introduces significant problems in ensuring the integrity and reliability of these composed systems because of their complex software topologies, interactions and transactions. There is a need to capture these features as a contract through a formal model that allows us to analyze pattern-based designs. In this paper, we provide an overview of a formal framework for ensuring the integrity of the compositions in object-oriented designs by providing mathematically rigorous modeling and analysis techniques for object-oriented systems comprising pattern-based designs as the basic building blocks or design components. A case study related to a hypermedia Web-based application has been presented to illustrate our approach in distributed systems. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
26263616
Developing a Formal Design Analysis Framework
17680274
Ensuring structure and behavior correctness in design composition
The design of a large component-based software system typically involves the composition of different components. Instead of relying on a free composition of components, we advocate that more rigorous analysis methods to check the correctness of component composition would allow combination problems to be detected early in the development process so that people can save considerable effort offering errors downstream. In this paper we describe a rigorous method for component composition that can be used to solve combination and integration problems at the (architectural) design phase of the software development lifecycle. In addition, we introduce the notion of composition pattern in order to promote the reuse of composition solutions to solve routine component composition problems. Once a composition pattern is proven correct, its instances can be used in a particular application without further proof. In this way, our proposed method involves reusing compositions as well as reusing components. We illustrate the utility of our approach through an example related to the composition of design patterns as design components. Structural and behavioral correctness proofs about the composition of some design patterns are provided.
10543361
Commutability of Design Pattern Instantiation and Integration
Design patterns capture expert design experience in generic design structure and behavior. A design pattern needs to be instantiated before using. It can be integrated with other patterns as well. The instantiation and integration operations are two important operations when a designer uses a design pattern in a particular application. In this paper, we investigate the commutability of these two operations based on our formal specification framework. We provide rigorous proofs on the conditions when the order of these two operations does not matter. Our results enable the software designers to choose their design processes with assurance of their equivalence.
15362726
State, event, time and diagram in system modeling
The design of complex systems requires powerful mechanisms for modeling state, concurrent events, and real-time behavior; as well as for visualising and structuring systems in order to control complexity. Methods integration has become a recent research trend in software specification and design. In the graphical area, many object-oriented methods have merged into one, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) which combines various diagrammatic modeling techniques to model static and dynamic aspects of software systems. Although traditional formal methods have not scale-up well, new integrated formal methods show great promise. This tutorial will present the state of the art in formal modeling techniques (state-based Object-Z and event-based Timed CSP), their integration (TCOZ), and transformation techniques from the integrated formalism to UML diagrams. An XML web environment for projecting integrated formal models to UML diagrams will also be demonstrated.
15498231
Soundness proof of Z semantics of OWL using institutions
The correctness of the Z semantics of OWL is the theoretical foundation of using software engineering techniques to verify Web ontologies. As OWL and Z are based on different logical systems, we use institutions to represent their underlying logical systems and use institution morphisms to prove the correctness of the Z semantics for OWL DL.
12666680
Semantic Web Languages - Towards an Institutional Perspective
The Semantic Web (SW) is viewed as the next generation of the Web that enables intelligent software agents to process and aggregate data autonomously. Ontology languages provide basic vocabularies to semantically markup data on the SW. We have witnessed an increase of numbers of SW languages in the last years. These languages, such as RDF, RDF Schema (RDFS), the OWL suite of languages, the OWL− − suite, SWRL, are based on different semantics, such as the RDFS-based, description logic-based, Datalog-based semantics. The relationship among the various semantics poses a challenge for the SW community for making the languages interoperable. Institutions provide a means of reasoning about software specifications regardless of the logical system. This makes it an ideal candidate to represent and reason about the various languages in the Semantic Web. In this paper, we construct institutions for the SW languages and use institution morphisms to relate them. We show that RDF framework together with the RDF serializations of SW languages form an indexed institution. This allows the use of Grothendieck institutions to combine Web ontologies described in various languages.
7872291
Sensors and Actuators in TCOZ
Timed Communicating Object Z (TCOZ) combines Object-Z's strengths in modeling complex data and algorithms with Timed CSP's strengths in modeling real-time concurrency. TCOZ inherits CSP's channel-based communication mechanism, in which messages represent discrete synchronisations between processes. The purpose of most control systems is to observe and control analog components. In such cases, the interface between the control system and the controlled systems cannot be satisfactorily described using the channel mechanism. In order to address this problem, TCOZ is extended with continuous-function interface mechanisms inspired by process control theory, the sensor and the actuator. The utility of these new mechanisms is demonstrated through their application to the design of an automobile cruise control system.
15990035
Content-based retransmission for 3-D wavelet video streaming on the Internet
Improving the QoS of video streaming with packet loss is a challenging topic of research. In this paper, we propose a novel content-based retransmission scheme to address this issue. The basic idea is to jointly consider the packets' contents and the channel conditions to optimize QoS. The goal is to deliver the best quality of video possible under the same channel condition. Using the proposed retransmission scheme, we have designed a 3D wavelet video streaming system. Simulation results show that the content-based retransmission can improve the video quality by more than 2 dB compared with the existing non-content-based delay-constrained retransmission when the channel loss rate is high.