This thesis presents a semantic-based modeling approach for describing Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). Ontologies are utilized as a major representation mechanism for describing various elements available in the architecture. The methodology proposes an architecture specification mechanism to constuct a unified ontology that enables transition from design concerns to the modeling elements. A multi-level modeling is also achieved by employing Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques to describe various models at different stages of the software architecture. This aims to organize service-oriented models within a number of architecture viewpoints in order to provide an architectural perspective for SOA. The use of ontologies for model specification also allows us to make use of ontology mapping to specify the transformation between different models. Additionally, we present a case study to demonstrate the proposed methodology on a real-world healthcare scenario.

<p>This master thesis is about building an adaptive library based on a platform independent model, which represents a conceptual design realizing the functional requirements being independent of the technologies and software architectures changes.</p><p>This adaptive library is a model, which has a higher level of abstraction than the code that we will generate afterwards, generalizes the solution of those problems that can be resolved using different implementations that uses different kinds of data structures.</p><p>In addition the higher level of abstraction that this adaptive library is having will give a speed up in developing the application and higher quality solution because of the maintainability and reusability. This solution is going to have the propriety to be changed easily in order to solve different concrete problems.</p>

<p>This report presents the results of a thesis project that surveys and designs about the issue “Feature Model for Adaptive Computing”. In this project, there are two main issues, first one is about the Feature Modeling, and the second is how to use this Feature Modeling for adaptive computing.</p><p>In this thesis report, at the beginning, we present the problem we expected to solve and introduce some background information, including the knowledge of feature model and adaptive computing. Then we explain our solution and evaluate this solution. At the end of this report, we give a short conclusion about our thesis project and feature work.</p>

Since information systems become more and more important in today\'s society, business firms, organizations, and individuals rely on these systems to manage their daily business and social activities. The dependency of possibly critical business processes on complex IT systems requires a strategy that supports IT departments in reducing the time needed to implement changed or new domain requirements of functional departments. In this context, software models help to manage system\'s complexity and provide a tool for communication and documentation purposes. Moreover, software engineers tend to use automated software model processing such as code generation to improve development and maintenance processes. Particularly in the context of web-based information systems, a number of model driven approaches were developed. However, we believe that compared to the user interface layer and the persistency layer, there could be a better support of consistent approaches providing a suitable architecture for the consistent model driven development of business logic. To ameliorate this situation, we developed an architectural blueprint consisting of meta models, tools, and a method support for model driven development and maintenance of business logic from analysis until system maintenance. This blueprint, which we call Amabulo infrastructure, consists of five layers and provides concepts and tools to set up and apply concrete infrastructures for model driven development projects. Modeling languages can be applied as needed. In this thesis we focus on business logic layers of J2EE applications. However, concrete code generation rules can be adapted easily for different target platforms. After providing a high-level overview of our Amabulo infrastructure, we describe its layers in detail: The Visual Model Layer is responsible for all visual modeling tasks. For this purpose, we discuss requirements for visual software models for business logic, analyze several visual modeling languages concerning their usefulness, and provide an UML profile for business logic models. The Abstract Model Layer provides an abstract view on the business logic model in the form of a domain specific model, which we call Amabulo model. An Amabulo model is reduced to pure logical information concerning business logic aspects. It focuses on information that is relevant for the code generation. For this purpose, an Amabulo model integrates model elements for process modeling, state modeling, and structural modeling. It is used as a common interface between visual modeling languages and code generators. Visual models of the Visual Model Layer are automatically transformed into an Amabulo model. The Abstract System Layer provides a formal view onto the system in the form of a Coloured Petri Net (CPN). A Coloured Petri Net representation of the modeled business logic is a formal structure and independent of the actual business logic implementation. After an Amabulo model is automatically transformed into a CPN, it can be analyzed and simulated before any line of code is generated. The Code Generation Layer is responsible for code generation. To support the design and implementation of project-specific code generators, we discuss several aspects of code integration issues and provide object-oriented design approaches to tackle the issues. Then, we provide a conceptual mapping of Amabulo model elements into architectural elements of a J2EE infrastructure. This mapping explicitly considers robustness features, which support a later manual integration of generated critical code artifacts and external systems. The Application Layer is the target layer of an Amabulo infrastructure and comprises generated code artifacts. These artifacts are instances of a specific target platform specification, and they can be modified for integration purposes with development tools. Through the contributions in this thesis, we aim to provide an integrated set of solutions to support an efficient model driven development and maintenance process for the business logic of information systems. Therefore, we provide a consistent infrastructure blueprint that considers modeling tasks, model analysis tasks, and code generation tasks. As a result, we see potential for reducing the development and maintenance efforts for changed domain requirements and simultaneously guaranteeing robustness and maintainability even after several changes.

Graphical modeling is becoming an increasingly important part of software engineering as it provides means of increasing productivity by raising the level of abstraction in software devel-opment. One of the most widely adopted modeling notations is the Unified Modeling Language (UML) which has gained popularity due to its generality and broad applicability. Despite its advantages, this general purpose notation is burdened with the lack of purpose specific model-ing abstractions. The modeling abstractions in the language lack specialized properties and thus models might not precisely express the intentions of the modeler. In consequence, this leads to ineffectiveness of using models in UML. This thesis presents research aimed at improving modeling with UML. By exploiting the language customization mechanisms inherent in UML – stereotypes and profiles – the research presented in the thesis explores such aspects of improving modeling as creating language cus-tomizations or using a customized modeling language. The context, in which the modeling is considered, is delineated by the principles of model driven software development (MDD). The principles recognize the usage of models as the primary artefacts in software development thus providing a solid foundation for considering the use of models in software development. One of the contributions in the thesis is the identification and definition of factors determin-ing the successful realization of MDD in industry. These factors provide means of positioning language customization in the forefront of MDD. Another contribution in the thesis is eliciting and prioritizing a set of criteria for choosing between language customization mechanisms, which is a result of another industrial case study. A series of experiments in academic and industrial environments showed the magnitude of improvements to be expected after replacing a standard modeling language with a customized modeling notation. This series of experiments provided a basis for experimenting with stereo-types and software inspections which indicated a considerable increase in effectiveness of the reading techniques used in software inspections after replacing a standard notation with a cus-tomized one. The results from all empirical studies affected the development of quality assessment crite-ria for stereotypes. The criteria and the exploration of several existing profiles led to the devel-opment of guidelines for creating “good” stereotypes by analyzing existing UML profiles. An additional contribution in the thesis is exploring the usage of an alternative mechanism to stereo-types – model libraries – for adaptation of a modeling language. The way in which model librar-ies can be created in an efficient way is studied by creating a method for extracting knowledge from ontologies into UML domain models. The results of the research presented in the thesis show how to improve modeling with UML by customizing the language with stereotypes. The main contribution is the exploration and evaluation of issues related to creating language customizations and using the customized language.

A real-time system is one in which the correctness of the computations not only depends upon the logical correctness of the computation but also upon the time at which the result is produced. If the timing constraints of the system are not met, system failure is said to have occurred. Real-time system consist specialized hardware an software components. Nowadays, systems are so big and complex that teams of architects, analysts, programmers, testers and users must work together to create reliable real-time system. To manage this, a number of system development life cycle models have been created. System development life cycle refers to a methodology for developing systems. It provides a consistent framework of tasks and deliverables needed to develop systems. System development consist stages, that are common for all models: project planning, requirements definition, system design, implementation, testing, deployment and maintenance. However, there still are problems, that lead project to the failure. Problems appear while iterating from design stage to the implementation or prototype creation. Thesis describes methodology, that provide a way to overcome these problems. The main idea is to transform functional structure of the real-time system, that is designed using easy to understand graphical environment, to the executable code that will be able to run on target hardware components. Thesis describe the methods of doing such transformation. Methodology allows to create... [to full text]

Current technologies such as anti-virus software programs and network firewalls provide reasonably secure protection at the host and network levels, but not at the application level. When network and host-level entry points are comparatively secure, public interfaces of web applications become the focus of malicious software attacks. In this thesis, we focus on one of most serious web application vulnerabilities, broken access control. Attackers often try to access unauthorized objects and resources other than URL pages in an indirect way; for instance, using indirect access to back-end resources such as databases. The consequences of these attacks can be very destructive, especially when the web application allows administrators to remotely manage users and contents over the web. In such cases, the attackers are not only able to view unauthorized content,but also to take over site administration. To protect against these types of attacks, we have designed and implemented a security analysis framework for dynamic web applications. A reverse engineering process is performed on an existing dynamic web application to extract a role-based access-control security model. A formal analysis is applied on the recovered model to check access-control security properties. This framework can be used to verify that a dynamic web application conforms to access control polices specified by a security engineer. Our framework provides a set of novel techniques for the analysis and modeling of web applications for the purpose of security verification and validation. It is largely language independent, and based on adaptable model recovery which can support a wide range of security analysis tasks. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2010-04-30 14:30:53.018

Transformations play a central role in Model Based Software Engineering. Similar to the development of other types of software, a transformation's specification and implementation does not necessarily remain static over the course of a project's lifetime; the transformation may develop incrementally and evolve. The goal of this thesis is to propose metrics that can be used to characterize the evolution of model transformations. To perform an initial demonstration of the metrics, this thesis considers an incrementally defined model transformation task. The transformation is implemented using two model transformation languages, a textual language and a graphical language, and metrics are extracted from the historical artifacts. The thesis defines a set of change metrics based on an abstract syntax difference model. Language feature metrics are also defined for both transformation languages. A process for extracting model-based change metrics and language metrics from the abstract syntax of the transformation languages is introduced. The applicability of the metrics in characterizing changes is demonstrated using exploratory clustering analysis on a transformation task. We show how, for this transformation task using both languages, metrics derived from the difference model result in clusters that reflect characteristics of individual changes, in contrast to clusters obtained with language metrics. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-28 10:47:10.999

This document presents a synthesis of the research results conducted in the eld of software veri cation for model-driven engineering (MDE). MDE is becoming one of the dominant software engineering paradigms in the industry. The main characteristic of MDE is the use of software models and model manipulation operations as main artifacts in all software engineering activities. This change of perspective implies that correctness of models (and model manipulation operations) becomes a key factor in the quality of the nal software product. The problem of ensuring software correctness is still considered to be a Grand Challenge for the software engineering community. At the modellevel, we are still missing a set of tools and methods that helps in the detection of defects and smoothly integrates in existing MDE-based tool-chains without an excessive overhead. Characteristics of existing tools, which require designer interaction, deep knowledge of formal methods or extensive manual model annotations seriously impair its usability in practice. In this document, we present our pragmatic set of techniques for formal model veri cation to overcome these limitations. We call our techniques pragmatic because they try to nd the best trade-o between completeness of the veri cation and the usability of the process.

Viena iš technologinių sričių, kur galima pritaikyti modeliavimu grindžiamą architektūrą (MGA) yra Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE) informacinių sistemų kūrimas. Nors generuoti pilną programinį kodą taikant MGA metodus nėra įprasta, tačiau egzistuoja abstraktūs metodai, bei daliniai sprendimai leidžiantys daryti prielaidą, kad tai yra įmanoma. Remiantis egzistuojančiais abstrakčiais metodais ir daliniais sprendimais buvo sukurtas MGA metodas ir kodo generatorius, leidžiantis sugeneruoti visą programinį kodą pagal modelio duomenis. Sukurtas metodas buvo išbandytas su realia informacine MagicTest žinių testavimo sistema. Bandymas su realia sistema parodė, kad pasiūlytas MGA metodas gali būti sėkmingai taikomas JEE platformos informacinių sistemų kūrimui. / One of the technological areas where can be used model driven architecture (MDA) is Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE) development of information systems. Although to generate a complete program using MDA is not common, but there are some abstract methods, and partial solutions suggesting that this is possible. Based on existing methods of abstract and partial solutions new MDA method and code generator was created. Generator allows to generate software code based on the model data. The method and generator was tested with the real information MagicTest knowledge testing system. The test of the real system showed that the proposed MDA method can be successfully applied to J2EE platform for developing information systems.