Round-trip Engineering Research Articles

UMLsecRT: Reactive Security Monitoring of Java Applications With Round-Trip Engineering

UMLsecRT: Reactive Security Monitoring of Java Applications With Round-Trip Engineering

BXtendDSL: A layered framework for bidirectional model transformations combining a declarative and an imperative language

Model-driven software development (MDSD) heavily relies on model transformations. While in a strict forward engineering process unidirectional transformations are used, bidirectional transformations are crucial as soon as roundtrip engineering comes into play. In this paper, we present a hybrid language specifically designed to describe bidirectional model transformations. From a declarative transformation specification code is generated which uses our framework for bidirectional and incremental model transformations. A sophisticated code generation mechanism allows for hooking into the generated transformation code at the imperative level to supply behavior that cannot be expressed declaratively. A thorough evaluation demonstrates conciseness, expressiveness, and scalability of our approach.

Model-driven round-trip engineering for TinyOS-based WSN applications

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications working on TinyOS operating system is widely used in various areas. However, the requirement of managing the power constraints makes TinyOS different from ordinary systems and hence building WSNs with TinyOS can be a challenging and time-consuming task. As successfully applied in many other domains, model-driven engineering (MDE) can facilitate the design and implementation of such applications. Within this context, the researchers have performed noteworthy studies on deriving various MDE approaches and tools. However, these studies do not support the synchronization between TinyOS application models and the generated programs especially when any change is made in the programs. Hence, in this paper, we introduce a model-driven round-trip engineering (RTE) methodology in which both the MDE of TinyOS applications and synchronization between TinyOS instance models and corresponding code are provided with the use of a toolchain. A domain-specific modeling language, called DSML4TinyOS is used for the MDE of such applications while existing TinyOS programs can be reverse engineered in an environment, called RE4TinyOS. Models retrieved from the existing programs can be automatically processed again with DSML4TinyOS. Evaluation results showed that it is possible to obtain the configurations of the TinyOS applications completely just modeling with DSML4TinyOS whereas the same process leads the automatic creation of almost half of the module parts of these applications. Moreover, the time required for developing such systems from scratch decreased approximately to its half. The results also showed that both model-code synchronization and the integration of existing TinyOS applications which do not have system models previously, into the proposed MDE are possible with using RE4TinyOS. RE4TinyOS succeeded in the reverse engineering of all main parts of the TinyOS applications taken from the official TinyOS Github repository and generated models were able to be visually processed in the MDE environment for further modifications.

A Systematic Comparison of Roundtrip Software Engineering Approaches applied to UML Class Diagram

Model-based software engineering contemplates several software developments approaches in which models play an important role. One such approach is round-trip engineering. The objective of this paper is to benchmark the comparative analysis of the round-trip engineering capability of three modelling tools: Papyrus, Modelio and Visual Paradigm. The conclusions drawn throughout the paper will answer the question: How effective are current code generation tools for documenting application evolution? Throughout the discussion, we have pointed out several improvements that these UML modelling tools have recently brought to the discussion. We have also proposed some improvements that we consider desirable to improve Roundtrip Engineering approaches pointing out possible directions and solutions.

Round-Trip Engineering for Petrochemical Industry Automation

The petrochemical industry is becoming increasingly complex and, as a result, different software platforms are used to assist in system design. Generally, it happens that the same component of the physical plant is (re)modeled on different software platforms, so the reuse of these models becomes difficult, compromises system interoperability, and generates the need for rework in projects. Previous work proposed the infrastructure named M4PIA (Model-Driven Engineering for Petrochemical Industry Automation), which allows to represent industrial plants through different, compatible and object-oriented models. By means of model transformations, it supports automatic code generation from a high-level abstraction model to specific software platforms. The present work provides the integration of Round-Trip Engineering (RTE) in the M4PIA infrastructure so that from a platform-specific model it allows to obtain, through model-to-model (M2M) transformation, a platform-independent model. In order to validate the implemented RTE transformations, it was developed a case study related to a simplified gas compression system.

Empirical study on the effectiveness and efficiency of model-driven architecture techniques

Previous studies have reported conflicting opinions on the feasibility of model-driven architecture (MDA). Studies have investigated the mechanics of MDA, but few have examined its effectiveness and efficiency from a developer’s perception. This study conducted empirical research in which a system was implemented by subjects using MDA; afterward, evaluated its perceived efficiency and effectiveness. In the model construction phase, Unified Modeling Language and Object Constraint Language were perceived as effective and efficient. In the model transformation phase, the query/view/transformation standard was perceived as marginally efficient rather than effective, and the round-trip engineering phase was not perceived as effective or efficient. These findings are explained using 12 themes identified in subjects’ opinions. This study may help scholars understand the importance of efficiency and effectiveness on MDA techniques and facilitate the development of more acceptable and practical MDA.

Agile and hierarchical round-trip engineering of IEC 61131-3 control software

The control software often performs complex, important, and responsible operations in industrial manufacturing systems. The size and complexity of such software are still increasing, thus it is important to provide engineers with methods and tools that simplify the development process. The situation can be improved by modeling using the Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach, standardized implementation process, as well as various testing methods. In the paper, the authors propose the further step, which consists of the comprehensive agile hierarchical round-trip engineering approach dedicated to the IEC 61131-3 control software. It divides the project into four connected parts – model, configuration, implementation, and tests. Such a solution allows developers to work independently and iteratively on various project parts, because changes are discovered automatically and are propagated to suitable views inside the project. The synchronization mechanism has been introduced into the CPDev engineering environment for programming industrial controllers.

Conceptualizing an Environmental Software Modeling Framework for Sustainable Management Using UML

The concept of sustainable environmental management is expressed on the basis of ecosystem services as it enables getting to the quantitative measures. A practical utilization of this interpretation of sustainability requires a mechanism whereby all the goods and services provided by ecosystems are adequately quantified, valuated and incorporated in the decision-making process. Each of these tasks is substantially non-trivial. In order to deal with said complexity, a sophisticated information system has to be available to the stakeholders of environmental sustainability. An environmental software modeling framework, as a tool implementing the tasks of sustainability, is conceptualized in the meta-model of the Unified Modeling Language. The task of sustainable management is articulated as an optimal control problem, though other articulations are also possible. The overall multi-layered architecture of the framework and its key software components are discussed in the paper. Internal functional logic of each software component is described in terms of UML diagrams due to their proven semantic, descriptive and visual power in modeling and presenting of the software requirements and related artifacts, full compatibility with the object-oriented paradigm of the software systems development and a round-trip engineering feature supported by a spectrum of commercial and free CASE-tools. An approach presented in the paper can be suggested as a standardized methodology suitable for a broader range of software undertakings in the domain of environmental informatics.

Round-trip engineering with the Two-Tier Programming Toolkit

A major impediment to the long-term quality of large and complex programs is inconsistency between design and implementation. Conflicts between intent and execution are common because detecting them is laborious, error-prone, and poorly supported, and because the costs of continuously maintaining design documents outweigh immediate gains. A growing inconsistency between design and implementation results in software that is unpredictable and poorly understood. Round-trip engineering tools support an iterative process of detecting conflicts and resolving them by changing either the design or the implementation. We describe a Toolkit which supports a round-trip engineering of native Java programs without interfering with any existing practices, tools, or development environments, thereby posing a minimal barrier on adoption. The Toolkit includes a user-guided software visualization and design recovery tool, which generates Codecharts from source code. A “round-trip” process is possible because Codecharts visualizing source code can be edited to reflect the intended design, and the Verifier can detect conflicts between the intended and as-implemented design. We demonstrate each stage in this process, showing how the Toolkit effectively helps to close the gap between design and implementation, recreate design documentation, and maintaining consistency between intent and execution.

An Empirical Perspective of Roundtrip Engineering for the Development of Secure Web Application Using UML 2.0

An Empirical Perspective of Roundtrip Engineering for the Development of Secure Web Application Using UML 2.0

BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS IN DIFFERENT MODELING LANGUAGES

The business objective is often to increase process speed or reduce cycle time; to increase quality; or to reduce costs, such as labor, materials, scrap, or capital costs. In practice, a management decision to invest in business process modeling is often motivated by the need to document requirements for an information technology project.Change management programs are typically involved to put any improved business processes into practice. With advances in software design, the vision of BPM models becoming fully executable (and capable of simulations and round-trip engineering) is coming closer to reality.

UML 2.0 based framework for the development of secure web application

This research paper proposes experimental support to secure round trip engineering and use of security performance flexibility trusted operating systems for the designing of secure web applications. In this research paper, to address security concerns, we suggest use of trusted operating systems as a platform to run these web applications. For improving the performance of these web applications, we observe that all security checks in a trusted operating system are not necessary. As per our suggestion, various unnecessary security checks can be skipped by administrator, so that system performance of these web applications can improve. These unnecessary security checks, system calls and operations can be easily identified at the time of requirements elicitation. For example, as we know, the popular web servers deal with public information. The majority of this information is publicly readable and available to all users, but these users should not be able to alter this data. This research paper aims to support the efficiency of object-oriented class-based programming and object-oriented modeling in secure software development. The round trip engineering for the development of complex web applications, helps developers in code restructuring, identify probable bugs or deficiencies for probable improvements and helps from the analysis phase to the maintenance phase.

Using triple graph grammars to realise incremental round‐trip engineering

Model-driven software engineering is supported with the help of model transformations. At present, the technology for defining and executing uni-directional batch transformations seems to be fairly well developed, while bidirectional and incremental transformations are more difficult to handle. In this study, the authors present a bidirectional and incremental transformation tool for round-trip engineering between class diagrams and Java source code. Unlike other approaches, the tool may work with arbitrary Java code rather than only with source code following specific coding conventions. For its realisation, they selected triple graph grammars (TGGs) because they allow to generate bidirectional incremental transformations from a single set of undirected rules. When applying TGGs, they observed several strengths and weaknesses which are also discussed in this study.

Round-trip Engineering UML Class Models and Java Models

Model transformations constitute the key technology for model-driven software development, a software engineering discipline which became more and more important during the last decade. While tool support for unidirectional batch transformations is rather mature, bidirectional and incremental transformations are only weakly investigated. Nevertheless, several usage scenarios demand for incremental and bidirectional transformations, like round-trip engineering between UML class models and Java source code. This paper presents a bidirectional transformation between UML class models and a Java model which is obtained from Java source code. The transformation is written in QVT Relations, a declarative model transformation language provided by the OMG. While the case study demonstrates that it is possible to specify bidirectional transformations between heterogeneous metamodels in a single relational specification, it also reveals some inherent limitations of the language and the corresponding tool support.

Biobank Semantic Information Management With The Health Intelligence Platform

Introduction/ Background Traditionally Biobanks were mostly used as repositories of cells and tissues. They are addressing scientific questions mainly for retrospective trials where stored tissues and cells can be used. This paradigm has been changing lately. Biobanks can play a different and more prominent role in the scientific process. In fact, the information contained in biobanks can fuel the scientific reasoning itself more than just accompanying it with management of specimens and data. Information management for biobanks should integrate all kinds of information from various sources including clinical records and documents to support flexible retrieval and analytics based on that information. One of the key concepts to support this is to treat the sample like the patient or donor. Selecting a sample for a research trial may be done based on real-time data from the clinical processes. This closes the loop and opens the iron curtain between clinical processes and clinical research. It is a key requirement for supporting research for precision medicine allowing for dynamic decisions and trial designs. Another important aspect is collaboration and sharing of important information preserving data security and patient safety. Informed consent should be dynamically integrated into the scientific process and support patient/donor literacy for the scientific question. Aims More precisely we define requirements for biobank management systems to be: Collaboration and global sharing of data; Support for Scientific workflows and knowledge management; Association of genotype and phenotype data and Integration of patient records; Integration with registries and standards integration; Support for informed consent. Methods We present a biobank architecture based on our product ‘Health Intelligence Platform (HIP)’ that supports these requirements. We describe a way to support scientific reasoning directly with HIP and integrate sample management in a way that it contributes to scientific reasoning and outcome. The NLP semantic information extraction together with information extraction from (semi)structured sources provide a necessary integration to support the link between sample and clinical information. The semantic convergence model of HIP supports semantic queries based on an integrated semantic information base. Selecting samples or running analytics based on this information is possible in real time. The flexible knowledge management supports quick adaption of the knowledge base. Researchers are able to adapt the ontologies by visual interaction with the data sources and semantic tagging. The semantic workbench supports roundtrip engineering of ontologies and conflict resolution. We will present an evaluation framework that compares traditional biobank processes with HIP biobank management. We present the integration capabilities and provide an outlook to allow patient participation in research to address upcoming issues in precision medicine. Conclusion: Biobank management with HIP supports biobank management by providing tools and services for horizontal (across stakeholders, workflows and collaborations) and vertical (across institutions and disciplines) semantic integration of data into one common data model. HIP biobank management supports semantic retrieval of sample data and associated scientific and patient centered information. The HIP Core is used already and is used to identify patients for clinical trials based on information from clinical records and documents.

Towards designing of SPF based secure web application using UML 2.0

This paper describes UML-based foundations for model driven architecture and forward engineering of UML static models. In this paper, we propose an integrated environment for designing object-oriented enterprise models. In this projected process for Fast Prototyping, we design object models like use case diagram, sequence diagram, class diagram, etc. We use object-oriented conceptual modeling techniques to design and develop various applications like E-commerce, Banking, Comparison shopping, Ticketing, Online insurance policy management, product purchase system, etc. This paper suggests forward engineering to generate source code from object models through IBM Rational Rose software. This object oriented source code help software development team from analysis to maintenance phase as well as for round trip engineering. Due to high security concern, we have to use highly secure operating systems as a platform to run these web applications. In this regard, a number of trusted operating systems like Argus, Trusted Solaris, and Virtual Vault have been developed by various companies to handle the increasing need of security. The novel integration of security engineering with model-driven software expansion approach has various advantages. As we observe that all security checks in a Trusted Operating System is not necessary. Some non-essential security checks can be skipped by administrator to increase system performance. These non essential security checks can be easily identified at the time of requirement analysis. For example, the majority of web servers deal with pure public information. The majority of data on a web server is publicly readable and available to all users, but these users should not be capable to change the data on the web server. In this application, the need for security checks during reads from disk seems like a waste of CPU cycles. The real security need for web servers seems to be the security of write accesses, not read accesses. In this paper, we propose code generation, Class identification and Modeling for web applications through UML 2.0. Further we propose Security Performance flexibility model for the same to maintain the balance between security and performance for web applications.

Automotive real-time operating systems

Automotive embedded systems have become very complex, are strongly integrated, and the safety-criticality and real-time constraints of these systems raise new challenges. Distributed system development, short time-to-market intervals, and automotive safety standards (such as ISO 26262 [8]) require efficient and consistent product development along the entire development lifecycle. The automotive OSEK/VDX standard provides an architecture for distributed real-time units in vehicles and a language aiming in specifying the configuration of real-time OSEK operating systems. The aim of this paper is to enhance a model-driven system-engineering framework with the capability of generating OS configurations from existing high level control system information. Furthermore, to enable the possibility to update stored information from OSEK Implementation Language (OIL) files and support round-trip engineering of real-time operating system (RTOS) configurations. This enables the seamless description of automotive RTOS, from system level requirements to software implementation and therefore ensures consistency and correctness of the configuration. To that aim, a bidirectional tool bridge is proposed based on OSEK OIL exchange format files.

Structured development of 3D applications: round-trip engineering in interdisciplinary teams

While structured software development processes are nowadays common-place, 3D applications are often still developed in an ad-hoc and code-centric manner. This state of affairs is somewhat surprising, as there are many benefits to a more structured 3D development process. In particular, model-based techniques with support for iterative development could help to ensure the mutual consistency of the code bases produced by the heterogeneous developer groups, i.e. 3D content developers and programmers. However, a cultural gap exists between 3D content developers and programmers who use completely different tools and terminologies. Common tools for model-driven development, for instance based on UML, are inadequate for the often "creatively oriented" 3D content developers. This paper presents a model-driven approach for the structured development of 3D applications in interdisciplinary teams based on round-trip engineering. Abstract models of the application are specified in SSIML, a DSL tailored for the development of 3D applications. In a forward phase, consistent skeletons of 3D scene models and program code are generated from the SSIML model. In a reverse phase, refinements of both the 3D scene model and program code are abstracted and synchronized to result in an updated SSIML model. This process is repeated in the subsequent iterations. Several examples of 3D application development on diverse platforms including Web, immersive virtual reality, and augmented reality on mobile devices demonstrate the versatility of our approach.

Object-Oriented Analysis and Design for one Algorithm of Computational Geometry: Forward, Reverse and Round-Trip Engineering

Triangulation of the polygon is a fundamental algorithm in computational geometry. This paper considers techniques of object-oriented analysis and design as a new tool for solving and analyzing convex polygon triangulation. The triangulation is analyzed from three aspects: forward, reverse and round-trip engineering. We give a suggestion for improving the obtained software solution of the polygon triangulation algorithm using technique that combines UML modeling and Java programming.

Towards Security Assurance in Round-Trip Engineering: A Type-Based Approach

Security assurance is a property that ensures that the application code behaves consistently with the access control policy specified at the design level. Security assurance proofs are valid as long as software engineers do not modify the generated code. This assumption does not hold in Round-Trip Engineering, since programmers may modify the generated code and the models are automatically re-generated. This paper proposes a round-trip engineering approach for access control that preserves security assurance both when generating code from models and vice versa. The approach is to extend programming languagesʼ typing mechanisms with additional rules that ensure consistency between models and code, even when code is arbitrarily modified by programmers. This paper presents a formal description of the solution and an initial sketch of the required proofs of correctness. Ongoing work is the development of a prototype to automate most of the process and its validation in a case study.