26328924
Model checking the composition of hypermedia design components
Component-based software development aims at building software system by assembling software components to reduce cost, risk and time-to-market. However, conflicts among components constitute a crucial barrier to successful software composition. In this paper, we present an approach to analyze the properties of components and their compositions in order to detect and correct composition errors. We also demonstrate how model checking can be used to verify properties about the composition of design components. Furthermore, using a hypermedia case study, we show how to represent, instantiate, and integrate design components, and how to find composition errors by applying model checking techniques.
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.
26263616
Developing a Formal Design Analysis Framework
168887
On analysis of design component contracts: a case study
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 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 is presented to illustrate our approach in distributed systems.
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.
6980198
A combined approach to checking web ontologies
The understanding of Semantic Web documents is built upon ontologies that define concepts and relationships of data. Hence, the correctness of ontologies is vital. Ontology reasoners such as RACER and FaCT have been developed to reason ontologies with a high degree of automation. However, complex ontology-related properties may not be expressible within the current web ontology languages, consequently they may not be checkable by RACER and FaCT. We propose to use the software engineering techniques and tools, i.e., Z/EVES and Alloy Analyzer, to complement the ontology tools for checking Semantic Web documents.In this approach, Z/EVES is first applied to remove trivial syntax and type errors of the ontologies. Next, RACER is used to identify any ontological inconsistencies, whose origins can be traced by Alloy Analyzer. Finally Z/EVES is used again to express complex ontology-related properties and reveal errors beyond the modeling capabilities of the current web ontology languages. We have successfully applied this approach to checking a set of military plan ontologies.
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.
5239234
The role of secondary attributes in formal object modelling
When modelling a large and complex system, clarity of the specification becomes an important factor. In object-oriented specification, the states of individual objects are captured by the values of their attributes. Frequently however, there are dependencies between the attributes of an object. An appropriate indication of which attributes are primary (independent) and which are secondary (dependent) can add significantly to clarity. This paper details the notion of secondary attributes, their roles and implications in formal object-oriented specification.
15881034
Network Topology and a Case Study in TCOZ
Object-Z is strong in modeling the data and operations of complex systems. However, it is weak in specifying real-time and concurrent systems. Timed Communicating Object-Z (TCOZ) extends the Object-Z notation with Timed CSP constructs. TCOZ is particularly well suited for specifying complex systems whose components have their own thread of control. This paper demonstrates expressiveness of the TCOZ notation through a case study on specifying a multi-lift system that operates in real-time.
207130315
Formal Designs for Embedded and Hybrid Systems
The design of embedded and hybrid systems requires powerful mechanisms for modeling data, state, concurrency and real-time behaviour. The {first} part of this paper illustrates a powerful design notation Timed Communicating Object Z (TCOZ) that has both channel based and sensor/actuator based interfaces. We believe that TCOZ is well suited for presenting more complete and coherent design models for complex embedded and hybrid systems. However, the challenge is how to analyze and check these models with tools support. One effective approach is to project (transform) the design models into multiple domains, then to use existing specialized tools in those domains to perform the checking and analyzing tasks. The second part of this paper demonstrates one particular projection from TCOZ designs to Timed Automata (TA) models so that TA model checkers can be used to check time related properties.