Development Of Software Architecture Research Articles

BIoTA: A Buildout IoT Application Language

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) serve a wide variety of purposes in the development of complex applications. The Internet of Things (IoT) brings additional complexity to software development due to its inherent distribution and inclusion of a massive number of heterogeneous devices (sensors and actuators). The process of developing software architectures for IoT involves the interaction of several components that play distinct roles. In this paper, we propose a language called BIoTA (Buildout IoT Application Language), a DSL whose objective is to assist and streamline the building of software architectures for IoT. The specification and implementation of the BIoTA language involve a grammar and a compiler, responsible for syntax and semantic analysis, as well as code generation. They facilitate the formalization of software architectures using automata, which would otherwise be created in an informal and ad-hoc manner to address specific IoT scenarios. We developed an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) capable of reading and creating software architectures using the BIoTA language. With the BIoTA IDE, we demonstrate three examples of software architectures for IoT smart applications in public buildings, irrigation, and parking. The IDE also makes it possible to export architectures to a software distribution package pattern based on containers (Docker Compose) for future deployment.

Architectures and algorithms of an autonomous small-scale drilling agent

This paper describes the core architectures and algorithms of an autonomous small-scale drilling agent. The agent operates in a laboratory rig, demonstrating drilling scenarios with limited or even no human intervention. The work illustrates its performance through self-coordinating state transition, Rate of Penetration (ROP, drilling speed) optimization capability, formation classification, and drilling incidents management. The agent is an original rule-based system, and its control architecture utilizes finite states automation. The novel ROP optimization strategy employs a gradient search in Weight on Bit (WOB)-rotational speed (RPM, Revolutions per Minute) control parameter space. It generates an increasing ROP trend with time and requires re-iteration at abrupt formation changes. Several drilling incidents are managed using ‘if-then’ logic-based activity decomposition. A key learning outcome from the study is the comprehension of the requirement of standard software architecture and Applications Programming Interfaces (API) for continuous research and development of the agent. Such interfaces enhance interoperability between systems and stimulate innovative thinking among independent developers to produce a better-faster set of algorithms. Laboratory testing and evaluation is an essential part of promoting the adaptation of digital technologies for drilling automation. Such studies are a useful, safe, and cost-effective solution for testing, integrating and improving hardware, software, and data management before expensive full-scale testing and integration.

Integrated environment architecture for software development with structured editing support

Integrated environment architecture for software development with structured editing support

The model-based product agent: A control oriented architecture for intelligent products in multi-agent manufacturing systems

The multi-agent control strategy has been previously shown to improve the flexibility of complex, dynamic manufacturing systems. One key component of this strategy is the product agent. The product agent is responsible for autonomously guiding a physical part in the manufacturing system based on its production goals. Though the product agent has been described in previous works, a fully developed software architecture for the product agent that uses a model-based optimization approach has not been proposed. In this work, a product agent architecture with the capabilities to explore the local environment, plan and schedule events based on its knowledge, and request desired actions from the resources in the system is presented and tested.

Methodology of designing computer ontology of subject discipline by future teachers-engineers

The article deals with the problem of the methodology of designing computer ontology of the subject discipline by the future teachers-engineers in the field of computer technologies. The scheme of ontology of the subject discipline is presented in which the set of concepts of the future computer ontology and the set of relations between them are represented. The main criteria of the choice of systems of computer ontologies for designing computer ontology of the subject discipline: software architecture and tools development; interoperability; intuitive interface are established. The selection of techniques for designing ontologies using computer ontology systems is carried out. The algorithm of designing computer ontology of the subject discipline by the future teachers-engineers in the field of computer technologies is proposed.

Investigating Software Standards: A Lens of Sustainability for Software Crowdsourcing

Inevitably, the time has come that necessitates software systems to have long lasting social impact and environmental friendliness. Although sustainability related to environmental and social aspects have been well versed in the literature, software sustainability, for the way of development and as final product for use, is still not mature enough. With the increasing role of software crowdsourcing, a new working architecture for software development, in global software development (GSD) settings, has emerged challenges regarding sustainable software development and software sustainability, which are still to be elucidated. Software standards and models exist to assist co-located and global software development; however, seismic changes in the working architecture of software development as software crowdsourcing are highlighting a risk of software failure. Recently, statistics showed that only 30% of projects are successful, whereas 50% encounter challenges and the remaining 20% are absolute failures that implicate a challenge toward software success and its sustainability. This posits questions of how many IEEE and international standard organization standards exist that cover the sustainability aspects in particular to software development and how in-depth the development practices are addressing sustainable aspects in software crowdsourcing? Thus, the aim of this paper is to examine the IEEE software standards with a lens of sustainability to software crowdsourcing. After reviewing the existing IEEE standards related to sustainability, it has been observed that few standards exist which have discussed the importance of sustainability on an abstract level (energy and examining environmental influence by the computers) in software development. Moreover, standards are focusing less attention toward the sustainability of software development in the presence of new envision toward software crowdsourcing. Thus, a lack of any guideline toward sustainable software crowdsourcing is highlighted as one of the limitations in the software standards. This paper contributes to the GSD industry in two folds, first by laying down the importance and theoretical association on and around sustainable crowdsourcing, and second by highlighting that the IEEE standards, inadequacy toward the suppressing phenomena of sustainability in software crowdsourcing, if addressed adequately, can minimize the ripple effect toward software failure.

Software Development of Integrated Wireless Sensor Networks For Real Time Monitoring of Oil and Gas Flow Rate Metering Infrastructure

This research work describes the software development of an integrated wireless sensor network (WSN) for realtime remote monitoring of oil and gas flow rate metering infrastructure. The wireless sensor network includes flow sensors, pumping machines, microcontrollers, Wi-Fi or wireless links and a database server. The pumping machine first pumps oil and gas, then a flow rate sensor measures the quantity and communicates the flow rate data in meter cube per second via a wireless link to the database server for further processing. The resulting data is stored on the database server while the continuous flow rate is displayed in real time on the website designed as the humancomputer interaction (HCI) interface through which, the quantity of the oil and gas lifted can easily be accessed without having to collect the data from several stations manually. The cost-effective indices for reporting the quantity of oil and gas lifting are of significance to any accountable and transparent system. However, manual processes have not been able to do that in real time. In this paper, our main focus is to provide the software development life cycle involved in the design and implementation processes of the system prototype using iterative incremental mode and the complete software development architecture for the wireless sensor network.

An architecture, system engineering, and acquisition approach for space system software resiliency

ContextSoftware-intensive space systems can harbor defects and vulnerabilities that may enable external adversaries or malicious insiders to disrupt or disable system functions, risking mission compromise or loss. Mitigating this risk demands a sustained focus on the security and resiliency of the system architecture including software, hardware, and other components. ObjectiveIn this paper we offer methodical approaches for improving space system resiliency through software architecture design, system engineering, and increased software security, thereby reducing the risk of latent software defects and vulnerabilities. MethodWe conducted a systematic review of existing architectural practices, standards, security and coding practices, various threats, defects, and vulnerabilities that impact space systems from hundreds of relevant publications and interviews of subject matter experts. We expanded on the system-level body of knowledge for resiliency and identified a new software architecture framework and acquisition methodology to improve the resiliency of space systems from a software perspective with an emphasis on the early phases of the systems engineering life cycle. This methodology involves seven steps: 1) Define technical resiliency requirements, 1a) Identify standards/policy for software resiliency, 2) Develop a request for proposal (RFP)/statement of work (SOW) for resilient space systems software, 3) Define software resiliency goals for space systems, 4) Establish software resiliency quality attributes, 5) Perform architectural tradeoffs and identify risks, 6) Conduct architecture assessments as part of the procurement process, and 7) Ascertain space system software architecture resiliency metrics. ResultsData illustrates that software vulnerabilities can lead to opportunities for malicious cyber activities, which could degrade the space mission capability for its user community. Reducing the number of vulnerabilities by improving architecture and software system engineering practices can contribute to making space systems more resilient. ConclusionSince cyber-attacks [1] are enabled by shortfalls in software, robust software engineering practices and an architectural design are foundational to resiliency, which is a quality that allows the system to take a hit to a critical component and recover in a known, bounded, and generally acceptable period of time. To achieve software resiliency for space systems, acquirers and suppliers must identify relevant factors and systems engineering practices to apply across the life cycle, in software requirements analysis, architecture development, design, implementation, verification and validation, and maintenance phases.

An industrial example of using Enterprise Architecture to speed up systems development

AbstractThe development of large, complex, heavy construction equipment can be difficult, time consuming and expensive, even more so if the goal is to design a complete site solution. The example used is taken from an ongoing real project named Electric site. The aim is to electrify a transport stage in a quarry – from excavation to primary crushing and transport to secondary crushing. This will reduce the CO2 95% and the total cost of operation 25%. This paper describes how a standards‐based enterprise architecture model can be used to significantly influence continued system engineering efforts as well as the software architecture for the application development. The enterprise architecture model has been developed specifically to ensure overall management of the site. It is this description, created with an enterprise perspective of the site that is used directly to speed up the development of the systems architecture. The model also details the applications that are required as part of the different systems that will support the overall management of the site.

DEVELOPMENT OF VARIANT OF SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE IMPLEMENTATION FOR LOW-POWER GENERAL PURPOSE MICROCONTROLLERS BY FINITE STATE MACHINES

As a result of the research, two directions for development of software architecture for low-power general purpose microcontrollers (LPGPM) are identified. The first, classical approach is the development using standard State patterns. The second is the development of programs, algorithms and structures based on mathematical analysis. The first direction is chosen in the work. The variant of the implementation of a typical pattern for development of software architecture (SA) in the form of a finite state machine (FSM) is proposed to discussion. This pattern allows to divide the development of the architectural part of the program for LPGPM and programming the LPGPM hardware. This approach makes it possible to divide the work of the software architect and the work of LPGPM hardware specialists. Advantage of the solution in comparison with the real time operating system (RTOS) is the saving of LPGPM hardware resources. In addition, it improves the readability of code and good testing prospects. The resulting architecture makes it possible to easily accompany the software and switch to other types of microcontroller. The disadvantage is an increase in the required amount of RAM with an increase in the number of states. It is this disadvantage that requires the application not only of experimental and engineering-intuitive methods, but also to continue research in the second direction.

A Verification‐Based Approach to Evaluate Software Architecture Evolution

As the development and wide usage of Software architecture (SA), SA evolution becomes one of the hotspots of current research in modern software engineering domain. Most current researches concentrate on the modeling of SA evolution and lack the verification and evaluation of SA evolution. We proposed a verificationbased approach to evaluate SA evolution. The basic process includes:1) using Unified modeling language (UML) sequence diagram to model the interaction of components and study different types of evolution in practical examples; 2) using SPIN-based model checking to model and verify SA evolution; 3) comparing various verification outcomes and analyzing the influence of SA evolution on SA correctness and temporal properties. Both theory analysis and an experiment on a real evolution example from Model-view controller (MVC) to Spring web MVC (SWMVC) show that the verification-based approach to evaluate SA is significant.

Bio-inspired benchmark generator for extracellular multi-unit recordings

The analysis of multi-unit extracellular recordings of brain activity has led to the development of numerous tools, ranging from signal processing algorithms to electronic devices and applications. Currently, the evaluation and optimisation of these tools are hampered by the lack of ground-truth databases of neural signals. These databases must be parameterisable, easy to generate and bio-inspired, i.e. containing features encountered in real electrophysiological recording sessions. Towards that end, this article introduces an original computational approach to create fully annotated and parameterised benchmark datasets, generated from the summation of three components: neural signals from compartmental models and recorded extracellular spikes, non-stationary slow oscillations, and a variety of different types of artefacts. We present three application examples. (1) We reproduced in-vivo extracellular hippocampal multi-unit recordings from either tetrode or polytrode designs. (2) We simulated recordings in two different experimental conditions: anaesthetised and awake subjects. (3) Last, we also conducted a series of simulations to study the impact of different level of artefacts on extracellular recordings and their influence in the frequency domain. Beyond the results presented here, such a benchmark dataset generator has many applications such as calibration, evaluation and development of both hardware and software architectures.

Energetically self-sufficient robot group study kit

The article considers the project of educational and research software and hardware kit designed for use in case-based educational project activities based on the theme of energetically autonomous robots. An important feature of the complex is its interdisciplinarity since robotics combines many fields of science and technology — mechanical design, electronics, programming, elements of artificial intelligence, energy science and others. Students can receive basic knowledge in these areas as well as gain practical skills in solving real problems that require a convergent approach. The kit serves as an experimental basis that allows to study intricacies of robot control and its hardware and software design while making structural changes, including using different power units: solar, fuel, thermoelectric and others. Power units (converters and the various sources of renewable energy) may be considered both from the theoretical point of view, i.e. from the principles of their functioning and from the practical aspect — studying their practical application in real systems. Another important aspect of the system is the development of software architecture for a robot and for a team of robots as well as studying the interactions between them. In addition to performing the target task, ancillary tasks such as maintaining the battery level, communication with other team members in a multi-agent system, should be considered in the control algorithm of the robot, which allows to study the distribution of priorities between these objectives, as shown in the example of multicriteria optimization. The prototype of the kit and its usage according to the described approach have been partially validated by conducting computational experiments with algorithms based on different search methods (random search, closest source and multi-criteria optimization methods), multi-agent paradigm and adaptive control which show a variety of possible approaches and illustrate the process of students' work. The hardware base has been validated by testing various energy modules and assembling robot using the modules of the proposed kit. The results showed the possibility and potential of studying a variety of interdisciplinary themes using the developed hardware and software complex.

Team SNU's Control Strategies for Enhancing a Robot's Capability: Lessons from the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals

This paper presents the technical approaches used and experimental results obtained by Team SNU (Seoul National University) at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals. Team SNU is one of the newly qualified teams, unlike 12 teams who previously participated in the December 2013 DRC Trials. The hardware platform THORMANG, which we used, has been developed by ROBOTIS. THORMANG is one of the smallest robots at the DRC Finals. Based on this platform, we focused on developing software architecture and controllers in order to perform complex tasks in disaster response situations and modifying hardware modules to maximize manipulability. Ensuring stability and modularization are two main keywords in the technical approaches of the architecture. We designed our interface and controllers to achieve a higher robustness level against disaster situations. Moreover, we concentrated on developing our software architecture by integrating a number of modules to eliminate software system complexity and programming errors. With these efforts on the hardware and software, we successfully finished the competition without falling, and we ranked 12th out of 23 teams. This paper is concluded with a number of lessons learned by analyzing the 2015 DRC Finals.

Behavioral Reference Model for Pervasive Healthcare Systems.

The emergence of mobile healthcare systems is an important outcome of application of pervasive computing concepts for medical care purposes. These systems provide the facilities and infrastructure required for automatic and ubiquitous sharing of medical information. Healthcare systems have a dynamic structure and configuration, therefore having an architecture is essential for future development of these systems. The need for increased response rate, problem limited storage, accelerated processing and etc. the tendency toward creating a new generation of healthcare system architecture highlight the need for further focus on cloud-based solutions for transfer data and data processing challenges. Integrity and reliability of healthcare systems are of critical importance, as even the slightest error may put the patients' lives in danger; therefore acquiring a behavioral model for these systems and developing the tools required to model their behaviors are of significant importance. The high-level designs may contain some flaws, therefor the system must be fully examined for different scenarios and conditions. This paper presents a software architecture for development of healthcare systems based on pervasive computing concepts, and then models the behavior of described system. A set of solutions are then proposed to improve the design's qualitative characteristics including, availability, interoperability and performance.

Growing construction and adaptive evolution of complex software systems

With the pervasive development of information network technology, complex software system is emerging as a new ubiquitous software paradigm. This kind of software systems often consist of a large amount of autonomic software systems via coupling and interconnection. They exhibit the common characteristics of system of systems, cyber-physical systems and socio-technical systems, including member heterogeneity, open boundary, behavior emergence and constant evolution. These properties invalidate the fundamental assumption of conventional software engineering methodology based on reductionism, thus rendering it not suitable for the construction of complex software systems. In order to effectively support construction, deployment, running and maintenance of complex software systems, this paper studies the connotation, characteristics and basic properties of complex software systems and discusses the challenges about the construction and evolution of complex software systems. By observing the common patterns in current complex systems such as the Internet, life systems, social and economy systems, we propose two fundamental principles of complex software system development, namely the law of "growing construction" and the law of "adaptive evolution". On the basis of extensive elaboration on the major research problems and supporting technologies of those two laws, we further introduce new software methodology and architecture for construction and development of complex software systems.

A systematic mapping study on the combination of software architecture and agile development

ContextCombining software architecture and agile development has received significant attention in recent years. However, there exists no comprehensive overview of the state of research on the architecture-agility combination. ObjectiveThis work aims to analyze the combination of architecture and agile methods for the purpose of exploration and analysis with respect to architecting activities and approaches, agile methods and practices, costs, benefits, challenges, factors, tools, and lessons learned concerning the combination. MethodA systematic mapping study (SMS) was conducted, covering the literature on the architecture-agility combination published between February 2001 and January 2014. ResultsFifty-four studies were finally included in this SMS. Some of the highlights: (1) a significant difference exists in the proportion of various architecting activities, agile methods, and agile practices employed in the combination. (2) none of the architecting approaches has been widely used in the combination. (3) there is a lack of description and analysis regarding the costs and failure stories of the combination. (4) twenty challenges, twenty-nine factors, and twenty-five lessons learned were identified. ConclusionsThe results of this SMS help the software engineering community to reflect on the past thirteen years of research and practice on the architecture-agility combination with a number of implications.

Software Architecture for Rapid Development of HLA-Integrated Simulations for Critical Infrastructure Elements under Natural Disasters

Software Architecture for Rapid Development of HLA-Integrated Simulations for Critical Infrastructure Elements under Natural Disasters

Architecture Model to Improve the Development of Robotics Online Reconfiguration

With the fast development of robot technologies, robots are increasingly operating in complex and unknown environments. Thus, the robotic software systems need to be online reconfigurable to fast meet users’ new demands or environment requirements. In order to improve the online reconfiguration, an innovative way to combine runtime software architecture and robotic development is proposed, and then use model-driven techniques to establish a rigorous and useable abstract architecture meta-model and robotic system meta-model. In order to improve the bidirectional transformation, model difference and merge operations are constructed and proposed. And meanwhile we extending an existing synchronization engine generation tool and makes it adapted to the robot system. Finally, our platform is test with a concrete case study on top of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio to further verify its correctness. The result proves this study can effectively improve online reconfiguration of robotic software systems, and architecture model-based online configure makes it can effectively improve the development of different types of robot software architectures, and improves the reusability of the entire development process.

A Pilot Study on the Use of Mobile Augmented Reality for Interactive Experimentation in Quadratic Equations

Recent studies have reported that the inclusion of new technological elements such as augmented reality (AR), for educational purposes, increases the learning interest and motivation of students. However, developing AR applications, especially with mobile content, is still a rather technical subject; thus the dissemination of the technology in the classroom has been rather limited. This paper presents a new software architecture for AR application development based on freely available components; it provides a detailed view of the subsystems and tasks that encompass the creation of a mobile AR application. The typical task of plotting a quadratic equation was selected as a case study to obtain feasibility insights on how AR could support the teaching-learning process and to observe the student’s reaction to the technology and the particular application. The pilot study was conducted with 59 students at a Mexican undergraduate school. A questionnaire was created in order to obtain information about the students’ experience using the AR application and the analysis of the results obtained is presented. The comments expressed by the users after the AR experience are positive, supporting the premise that AR can be, in the future, a valuable complimentary teaching tool for topics that benefit from contextual learning experience and multipoint visualization, such as the quadratic equation.