Model-based development (MBD) is an increasingly used approach for the development of embedded control software, with Matlab Simulink/Stateflow as the widely accepted language. The adoption of this development paradigm is prevalent in many safety-critical domains, including the automotive industry. With an increasing reliance on software for controlling vehicle functionality and the yearly advent of new vehicle features, automotive models have been growing in size and complexity, causing them to become increasingly difficult to maintain, refactor, and test. Given the centrality of models in MBD, it is a requisite that they be maintained under well-defined and principled software development processes that use precise notation to document system requirements and behavioural design description. Tabular methods have long been used for defining decision-making logic in software, due to their concise and precise manner of communicating complex behaviour, so it is not surprising that they are finding increased use in automotive software models. Thus their presence in Simulink models is increasingly prominent in the implementation of complex behaviour in production code. As a result of the safety-critical nature of the automotive industry, as well as the increasing size and complexity of its models, reliable refactoring and simplification techniques for tabular expressions are becoming an important need for automotive companies. To address this need, this thesis presents a methodology for refactoring complex tabular designs to improve requirements traceability with a focus on Matlab Simulink/Stateflow and the MBD approach. A case study of industrial examples from an automotive partner are used to motivate the work and demonstrate the proposed methodology's effectiveness in reducing design size and complexity, while also increasing testability and requirements traceability. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

O surgimento e o uso crescente de novas tecnologias têm levado à produção e armazenamento de grandes volumes de dados biomédicos. Tais dados são provenientes de diferentes técnicas, armazenados em formatos de representação diversos e utilizados por diferentes ferramentas. Esta heterogeneidade representa um empecilho ao maior uso desses dados em abordagens integrativas de pesquisa como, por exemplo, a biologia sistêmica. Neste cenário, artefatos de modelagem conceitual, tais como ontologias, têm sido utilizados para organizar e integrar dados heterogêneos de uma forma coerente. A OBO Foundry representa, atualmente, o maior esforço no desenvolvimento de ontologias biomédicas de forma colaborativa. Dentre as ontologias desenvolvidas pela OBO Foundry, destaca-se Ontologia de Relacionamentos (RO-OBO). A RO-OBO provê definições formais para um conjunto de relacionamentos de propósito geral utilizados nas ontologias biomédicas e busca promover a criação de ontologias mais corretas e integráveis. Um perfil UML foi proposto para representar formalmente o conjunto de conceitos e relacionamentos existentes na RO-OBO. Este perfil permite desenvolver modelos UML utilizando os conceitos presentes nesta ontologia, bem como torna possível o desenvolvimento de suporte à validação sintática dos modelos criados em relação a um conjunto de restrições formalmente definidas. Adicionalmente, percebe-se na literatura que o suporte à integração de modelos UML e ontologias OBO, em particular as ontologias representadas na linguagem OBO File Format, é limitado. Neste sentido, este trabalho teve como objetivo geral investigar o suporte ao desenvolvimento de ontologias biomédicas na linguagem UML. De forma específica, investigou-se o desenvolvimento de um editor gráfico, chamado OBO-RO Editor, para o suporte à construção de ontologias utilizando o perfil UML proposto, bem como a integração de ontologias desenvolvidas utilizando UML e ontologias desenvolvidas na linguagem OBO File Format. De forma a atingir nossos objetivos, uma arquitetura de referência foi definida e um processo de desenvolvimento orientado a modelos foi utilizado. A arquitetura definida é composta por uma série de artefatos inter-relacionados os quais são transformados (semi) automaticamente em código de aplicação, possibilitando a obtenção de ciclos de desenvolvimento mais rápidos e confiáveis. O OBO-RO Editor disponibiliza um conjunto de elementos gráficos de modelagem definidos a partir do perfil UML proposto, bem como provê mecanismos para a validação sintática (semi) automática de uma ontologia desenvolvida segundo as restrições definidas neste perfil. Adicionalmente, o OBO-RO Editor também provê suporte à integração de modelos UML a outras ontologias da OBO Foundry, permitindo o reuso e o desenvolvimento menos propenso a erros de ontologias no domínio biomédico. / The development and increasing use of new technologies has resulted in the production and storage of a huge amount of biomedical data. These data are produced using different techniques, stored in different formats and consumed by different (software) tools. This heterogeneity hinders effective data usage in integrative research approaches, including systems biology. In this scenario, conceptual modeling artifacts, such as ontologies, have been used to organize and integrate heterogeneous data in a coherent manner. Nowadays, the OBO Foundry represents the most important effort for the collaborative development of ontologies in the biomedical domain. The OBO Relation Ontology (OBO-RO) can be considered one of the most relevant ontologies in the domain. This ontology provides formal definitions for a number of general purpose relationships used in biomedical ontologies, thus facilitating the integration of existing ontologies and the development of new ontologies in the domain. An UML profile has been proposed to formally define the different types of concepts and relationships provided by the OBO-RO. This profile enables the creation of UML models using such concepts and allows the development of support for the automatic validation of these models based on formal constraints. Additionally, the support for the integration between UML models and OBO ontologies, particularly ontologies represented using the OBO File Format, is limited. In this sense, this project aimed at investigating the support for the development of biomedical ontologies using UML. In particular, we investigated the development of a graphical editor, named OBO-RO Editor, to support ontology development using the proposed UML profile. Additionally, we also investigated the integration of ontologies developed using UML and ontologies developed using the OBO File Format. In order to achieve our goals, we have defined a reference architecture and a model-driven development process. The reference architecture consists of a number of related artifacts that are transformed to application code (semi) automatically. Such characteristic allowed us to obtain faster and more reliable development cycles. The OBO-RO Editor provides a number of graphical elements defined in the proposed UML profile for the modeling of biomedical ontologies and support the (semi) automatic syntactic validation of such ontologies against the contraints defined in the profile. Additionally, OBO-RO Editor also provides support for the integration of developed UML models and other OBO ontologies, allowing the reuse and the accurate development of biomedical ontologies.

Traits are primitive units of code reuse that serve as building blocks of classes. In this research, we enhance reuse by extending the capabilities of traits; in particular, we add modeling abstractions to them. Traits have a variety of benefits, including facilitating reuse and separation of concerns. They have appeared in several programming languages, particularly derivatives of Smalltalk. However, there is still no support for traits that contain modeling abstractions, and no straightforward support for them in general-purpose programming languages. The latter is due to structural concerns that exist for them at runtime, especially traits that contain modeling abstractions. Model-driven technologies are making inroads into the development community, albeit slowly. Modeling abstractions such as state machines and associations provide new opportunities for reuse, and can be combined with inheritance for even greater reusability. However, issues with inheritance apply also when these new abstractions are inheritable units. This suggests that traits and models ought to be able to be synergistically combined. We perform a comprehensive analysis of using modeling elements in traits. We implement such traits in Umple, which is a model-oriented programming language that permits embedding of programming concepts into models. The contributions of the thesis are: a) Adding new elements including state machines and associations into traits, hence bringing more reusability, modularity, and applications to traits; b) Developing an algorithm that allows reusing, extending, and composing state machines through traits; c) Extending traits with required interfaces so dependencies at the semantic level become part of their usage, rather than simple syntactic capture; d) Adding template parameters with associations in traits, offering new applications for traits in which it is possible to define design patterns and to have a library of most-used functionality; e) The implementation of all the above concepts, including generating code in multiple general-purpose programming languages through automatic model transformation.

O surgimento e o uso crescente de novas tecnologias têm levado à produção e armazenamento de grandes volumes de dados biomédicos. Tais dados são provenientes de diferentes técnicas, armazenados em formatos de representação diversos e utilizados por diferentes ferramentas. Esta heterogeneidade representa um empecilho ao maior uso desses dados em abordagens integrativas de pesquisa como, por exemplo, a biologia sistêmica. Neste cenário, artefatos de modelagem conceitual, tais como ontologias, têm sido utilizados para organizar e integrar dados heterogêneos de uma forma coerente. A OBO Foundry representa, atualmente, o maior esforço no desenvolvimento de ontologias biomédicas de forma colaborativa. Dentre as ontologias desenvolvidas pela OBO Foundry, destaca-se Ontologia de Relacionamentos (RO-OBO). A RO-OBO provê definições formais para um conjunto de relacionamentos de propósito geral utilizados nas ontologias biomédicas e busca promover a criação de ontologias mais corretas e integráveis. Um perfil UML foi proposto para representar formalmente o conjunto de conceitos e relacionamentos existentes na RO-OBO. Este perfil permite desenvolver modelos UML utilizando os conceitos presentes nesta ontologia, bem como torna possível o desenvolvimento de suporte à validação sintática dos modelos criados em relação a um conjunto de restrições formalmente definidas. Adicionalmente, percebe-se na literatura que o suporte à integração de modelos UML e ontologias OBO, em particular as ontologias representadas na linguagem OBO File Format, é limitado. Neste sentido, este trabalho teve como objetivo geral investigar o suporte ao desenvolvimento de ontologias biomédicas na linguagem UML. De forma específica, investigou-se o desenvolvimento de um editor gráfico, chamado OBO-RO Editor, para o suporte à construção de ontologias utilizando o perfil UML proposto, bem como a integração de ontologias desenvolvidas utilizando UML e ontologias desenvolvidas na linguagem OBO File Format. De forma a atingir nossos objetivos, uma arquitetura de referência foi definida e um processo de desenvolvimento orientado a modelos foi utilizado. A arquitetura definida é composta por uma série de artefatos inter-relacionados os quais são transformados (semi) automaticamente em código de aplicação, possibilitando a obtenção de ciclos de desenvolvimento mais rápidos e confiáveis. O OBO-RO Editor disponibiliza um conjunto de elementos gráficos de modelagem definidos a partir do perfil UML proposto, bem como provê mecanismos para a validação sintática (semi) automática de uma ontologia desenvolvida segundo as restrições definidas neste perfil. Adicionalmente, o OBO-RO Editor também provê suporte à integração de modelos UML a outras ontologias da OBO Foundry, permitindo o reuso e o desenvolvimento menos propenso a erros de ontologias no domínio biomédico. / The development and increasing use of new technologies has resulted in the production and storage of a huge amount of biomedical data. These data are produced using different techniques, stored in different formats and consumed by different (software) tools. This heterogeneity hinders effective data usage in integrative research approaches, including systems biology. In this scenario, conceptual modeling artifacts, such as ontologies, have been used to organize and integrate heterogeneous data in a coherent manner. Nowadays, the OBO Foundry represents the most important effort for the collaborative development of ontologies in the biomedical domain. The OBO Relation Ontology (OBO-RO) can be considered one of the most relevant ontologies in the domain. This ontology provides formal definitions for a number of general purpose relationships used in biomedical ontologies, thus facilitating the integration of existing ontologies and the development of new ontologies in the domain. An UML profile has been proposed to formally define the different types of concepts and relationships provided by the OBO-RO. This profile enables the creation of UML models using such concepts and allows the development of support for the automatic validation of these models based on formal constraints. Additionally, the support for the integration between UML models and OBO ontologies, particularly ontologies represented using the OBO File Format, is limited. In this sense, this project aimed at investigating the support for the development of biomedical ontologies using UML. In particular, we investigated the development of a graphical editor, named OBO-RO Editor, to support ontology development using the proposed UML profile. Additionally, we also investigated the integration of ontologies developed using UML and ontologies developed using the OBO File Format. In order to achieve our goals, we have defined a reference architecture and a model-driven development process. The reference architecture consists of a number of related artifacts that are transformed to application code (semi) automatically. Such characteristic allowed us to obtain faster and more reliable development cycles. The OBO-RO Editor provides a number of graphical elements defined in the proposed UML profile for the modeling of biomedical ontologies and support the (semi) automatic syntactic validation of such ontologies against the contraints defined in the profile. Additionally, OBO-RO Editor also provides support for the integration of developed UML models and other OBO ontologies, allowing the reuse and the accurate development of biomedical ontologies.

A series of studies were conducted with the aim of showing that the Representational Redescription (RR) model (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) can be used a general model of cognitive development. In this thesis, 3 aspects of the RR model were explored. The first set of experiments involved analysing the generalisability of RR levels across tasks in a domain. In an initial study, the levels of the RR model were successfully applied to a balance scale task. Then, in a subsequent study, children’s RR levels on the balance scale task were compared with their RR levels on a balance beam task (see Pine et al, 1999). Children were seen to access the same level of verbal knowledge across both tasks. This suggests that it is verbal knowledge which provides the basis for generalisation of knowledge. The second set of experiments involved a consideration of the RR model in relation to the domain of numeracy. The levels of the RR model were applied to children’s developing representations for the one-to-one and cardinality principles. The RR levels were shown to have utility in predicting children’s openness to different types of “procedurally based” and “conceptually based” teaching interventions, with pre-implicit children benefiting from procedural interventions, and children who have implicit and more advanced representational levels benefiting from conceptual interventions. The final study involved a microgenetic analysis of children’s representational levels on the balance beam task. The findings from this study indicated the importance of a period of stability prior to a cognitive advance, and demonstrated that cognitive advances can be driven by changes in the verbal explanations that are offered, rather than changes in successful performance. This provides support for the mechanism of change proposed by Karmiloff-Smith, 1992. Together, the findings indicate that the RR model provides a useful perspective about the cognitive development of children. In particular, the thesis highlights when children can use the same representations for different tasks in a domain and suggests the mechanism that brings about representational change.

Simulink Block Library for LEGO NXT Abstract Dominik Škoda July 30, 2014 The goal of this work is to create a support for the LEGO NXT platform in Simulink development environment. Such support of the target platform already exists, but it suffers from several disadvantages. At first it is provided exclusively for Windows operating systems, and the implementation is closed, therefor neither extensible nor customizable. The main premise of this project is the support of Linux operating systems. The project is also opened to ensure the extensibility and customizability. The model-driven development of systems for the LEGO NXT platform using this project comprises the model testing in a simulation and code generation in Simulink environment by using its standard tools, and deployment of completed programs to target devices. The systems generated with the help of this project are categorized as real-time systems.

Information systems often hold data of considerable value. Their continuing development or maintenance will often necessitate evolution of the system and migration of the data from one version to the next: a process that may be expensive, time-consuming, and prone to error. That such a process remains a source of challenges, is recognized by both academia and industry. In current practice, data migration is often considered only in the later stages of development, leaving critical data to be transformed and loaded by hand-written scripts, long after the design process has been completed. The advent of model-driven engineering offers an opportunity to consider the question of information system evolution and data migration earlier in the development process. A precise account of the proposed changes to an existing system model can be used to predict the consequences for existing data, and to generate the necessary data migration implementation. This dissertation shows how automatic data migration can be achieved by extending the definition of a data modeling language to include model level operations, each of which corresponds to the addition, modification, or deletion of a model component. Using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) notation as an example, we show how the specification of these operations may be translated into an abstract program in the Abstract Machine Notation (AMN), employed in the B-method, and then formally checked for consistency and applicability prior to translation into a concrete programming notation, such as Structured Query Language (SQL).

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a multi-component intervention composed of (a) one-on-one teacher-student interaction, (b) teacher provided process praise, and (c) family-teacher good news phone calls on problem behavior among students in elementary school. A single-subject multiple baseline design was utilized to examine the functional relation between the intervention and student outcomes. Participants were two teachers and three students with high levels of problem behavior as well as low quality relationships with their teachers. Students met individually with teachers one time per week to develop and discuss student centered goals. Teachers provided students with specific process praise and made weekly good news phone calls to the students' families. These components were predicted to improve student levels of academic engagement and reduce disruptive behavior through increasing relationship quality. Results suggested the intervention shows promise in decreasing disruptive behavior. No relationship was found between the intervention and academic engagement. Teacher reports provided descriptions of their perceptions of increased relationship quality and social validity.

Test Driven Development (TDD), Model-Driven Development (MDD), and Test Case Generation with their associated practices and tools each in their own right promise to deliver robust higher quality code more economically then other approaches. These process are not mutually exclusive but are not typically used together. This thesis develops a combined approach using complimentary aspects of each of the above three process. Test cases are described, generated, and then injected back into the model, which is then used to produce the test and production code. We have enhanced a model-driven tool to support the approach, adding a test case generator, capable of understanding augmented MDD software model and utilizing the constraints captured in our test-centric language to generate model-level test cases back into the model. Our results show that, with a reduction in overall effort one can produce a tested model-based system in which its test and implementation for multiple platforms such as C and Java, using one of multiple test xUnit frameworks.

Model driven development (MDD) is on the rise in software engineering and no more so than in the realm of real-time and embedded systems. Being able to leverage the code generation and validation techniques made available through MDD is worth exploring, and is the focus of much academic and industrial research. However given the iterative nature of MDD, the natural evolution of models causes test case generation to occur multiple times throughout a software modeling project. Currently, the existing process of regenerating test cases for a modified model of a system can be costly, inefficient, and even redundant. The focus of this research was to achieve an improved understanding of the impact of typical model evolution steps on both the execution of the model and its test cases, and how this impact can be mitigated by reusing previously generated test cases. In this thesis we use existing techniques for symbolic execution and test case generation to perform an analysis on example models and determine how evolution affects model artifacts; these findings were then used to classify evolution steps based on their impact. From these classifications, we were able to determine exactly how to perform updates to existing symbolic execution trees and test suites in order to obtain the resulting test suites using minimal computational resources whenever possible. The approach was implemented in a software plugin, IncreTesCaGen, that is capable of incrementally generating test cases for a subset of UML-RT models by leveraging the existing testing artifacts (symbolic execution trees and test suites), as well as presenting additional analysis results to the user. Finally, we present the results of an initial evaluation of our tool, which provides insight into the tool’s performance, the effects of model evolution on execution and test case generation, as well as design tips to produce optimal models for evolution. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-26 14:18:50.838