Software Connectors Research Articles

Social Interaction With Software Connectors and the Function of Facade Component in Secure Application Logic

The paper represents a conceptual study of the social interaction model of ATMs by using integration in a UML model-based design for software architecture that deals with the secure component-based software protection and communication patterns through facade based connector. The facade-based connector is developed separately from software components by using the correct contact pattern between components and the required security patterns that encapsulate the connection with other secure connectors. Each secure connector consists of both security architecture and contact patterns. It is constructed as a composite component even though connectors are usually used by component-based software development to encapsulate the mechanisms of communication with components. This paper addresses the security and privacy issues related to social interaction with the ATM model that may also be encapsulated in the software application logic through a secure facade based connector that is known as a security in a connector based social e-commerce B2c application

Multi-objective optimization method of trimaran hull form for resistance reduction and propeller intake flow improvement

Numerical optimization of a trimaran ship hull form has been carried out through an optimization platform relies on three methods: ship geometry morphing by Free Form Deformation (FFD) approach, high-fidelity viscous Reynolds averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) simulations, and Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm III (NSGA-III) algorithm for optimization progress. Furthermore, a software connector (HEEDS MDO software) manages all the processes involved. The total resistance and propeller intake flow are the objectives of the study, which pertain the study to a multi-objective optimization problem. A surface sensitivity analysis based on an adjoint solver is performed to obtain information about more significant region of the hull. Next, a FFD parametrization technique is implemented in the important introduced region from the adjoint solver. NSGA-III is employed to optimize hull form objectives and to find corresponding optimized variables. Optimum value of the design variables was obtained by trade-off investigation of Pareto optimal designs. The optimization results show a 13.3% resistance reduction and wake coefficient improves 7.58% for the acquired hull form. Asymmetric side hull, the sharper bow shape for an inverted bow, flat bottom in the stern region, suitable side hull arrangement and its length are the modifications of the optimization process.

On interoperability of metadata within RNPLS&T’s Single Open Information Archive

Russian National Public Library for Science and Technology has been developing the Single Open Information Archive (UOIA) to merge all digital full-text resources created or acquired by the Library. The authors examine the issues of interoperability when exchanging metadata between UOIA built on library automation software and open archives using OAI-PMH technology for metadata acquisition. Interoperability in information exchange between different ALIS is provided, for example, through applying SRU/SRW protocol and metadata scheme, while metadata exchange between OA repositories is provided mainly within Dublin Core (DC) scheme. ALIS – OA metadata transmission with transformation into DC results in information loss and prevents unambiguous reverse transformation.For a long time, DSpace has been the most popular software for open digital repositories. This product enables OAI-PMH metadata acquisition in DC and Qualified DC (QDC) formats, and supports Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) standard, which enables to describe aggregated resources. ORE in DSpace enables to collect not only metadata but also connected files and to receive other connected data provided by importing source. DSpace uses rather simple ORE format based on Atom XML that allows binding several files of different functionality with RDF-triplets.The OAI-PMH software connector is designed for RNPLS&T SOIA and enables to present metadata in DC, QDC, MARC21, and ORE formats, which supports interoperability in information exchange with OA repositories with DSpace software. Beside metadata transmission, transmission of various data types is possible, e. g. document text or license information. Further development is to expand format structure to represent associated data, in particular using RDF.

Software connector as software process

Software connector as software process

Software connector as software process

Software connector as software process

Blockchain-enabled supply chain: An experimental study

Despite Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have reduced the information asymmetry and increased the degree of interorganizational collaboration, the companies participating a supply chain are less inclined to share data when information is sensible and partners cannot be fully trusted. In such a context, Blockchain is a decentralized certificate authority that may provide economic and operational benefits but companies operating in a supply chain claim to have little knowledge about Blockchain due to its novelty and to the lack of use cases and application studies.In this work, a software connector has been designed and developed to connect an Ethereum-like blockchain with the enterprises’ information systems to allow companies to share information with their partners with different levels of visibility and to check data authenticity, integrity and invariability over time through the blockchain, thus building trust. In order to explore the potential of deploying the blockchain in a supply chain, a simulation model has been developed to recreate the supply chain operations and integrated with the blockchain through the same software connector to carry out a scenario statistical analysis. Application results shows how blockchain technology is a convenient instrument to overcome collaboration and trust issues in a supply chain, to increase the supply chain overall performance, to minimize the negative consequences of information asymmetry over the echelons of a supply chain but also to discourage companies from any misconduct (e.g. counterfeiting data or low data accuracy).

The Web as a Software Connector: Integration Resting on Linked Resources

The web, seen as a graph of linked resources shared between microservices, can serve as an integration style. It offers unique characteristics and possibilities regarding dataflow, control flow, and other qualities, compared to file transfer, shared databases, remote procedure calls, and asynchronous messaging. Carrying these insights in your toolbox will make you aware of all the options to consider next time you build loosely coupled integrated systems.

Reasoning about software reconfigurations: The behavioural and structural perspectives

Software connectors encapsulate interaction patterns between services in complex, distributed service-oriented applications. Such patterns encode the interconnection between the architectural elements in a system, which is not necessarily fixed, but often evolves dynamically. This may happen in response to faults, degrading levels of QoS, new enforced requirements or the re-assessment of contextual conditions. To be able to characterise and reason about such changes became a major issue in the project of trustworthy software.This paper discusses what reconfiguration means within coordination-based models of software design. In these models computation and interaction are kept separate: components and services interact anonymously through specific connectors encoding the coordination protocols. In such a setting, of which Reo is a paradigmatic illustration, the paper introduces a model for connector reconfigurations, from both a structural and a behavioural perspective.

Documenting Software Architectural Component and Connector with UML 2

Documenting Software Architectural Component and Connector with UML 2

Generic Email Connector for Mobile Devices

With today's technologies focus on mobility and portability, mobile networks suffer more and more from the increasing traffic load. This is due to the fact that millions of email servers are now prompting the network providers to notice their clients when emails are ready to be read using proprietary protocols like MS Exchange. This work improves our existing software connector model by giving the opportunity to use existing protocols such as IMAP, POP3 and so forth. Generic XML-based definition of both the client and the protocol of target system has been introduced. The implementation of a software solution has been done in order to illustrate the work follow of designing a connector based on the model.

Semantic integration of gene expression analysis tools and data sources using software connectors.

BackgroundThe study and analysis of gene expression measurements is the primary focus of functional genomics. Once expression data is available, biologists are faced with the task of extracting (new) knowledge associated to the underlying biological phenomenon. Most often, in order to perform this task, biologists execute a number of analysis activities on the available gene expression dataset rather than a single analysis activity. The integration of heteregeneous tools and data sources to create an integrated analysis environment represents a challenging and error-prone task. Semantic integration enables the assignment of unambiguous meanings to data shared among different applications in an integrated environment, allowing the exchange of data in a semantically consistent and meaningful way. This work aims at developing an ontology-based methodology for the semantic integration of gene expression analysis tools and data sources. The proposed methodology relies on software connectors to support not only the access to heterogeneous data sources but also the definition of transformation rules on exchanged data.ResultsWe have studied the different challenges involved in the integration of computer systems and the role software connectors play in this task. We have also studied a number of gene expression technologies, analysis tools and related ontologies in order to devise basic integration scenarios and propose a reference ontology for the gene expression domain. Then, we have defined a number of activities and associated guidelines to prescribe how the development of connectors should be carried out. Finally, we have applied the proposed methodology in the construction of three different integration scenarios involving the use of different tools for the analysis of different types of gene expression data.ConclusionsThe proposed methodology facilitates the development of connectors capable of semantically integrating different gene expression analysis tools and data sources. The methodology can be used in the development of connectors supporting both simple and nontrivial processing requirements, thus assuring accurate data exchange and information interpretation from exchanged data.

Modeling and co-simulation of a parabolic trough solar plant for industrial process heat

In the present paper a tri-dimensional non-linear dynamic thermohydraulic model of a parabolic trough collector was developed in the high-level acausal object-oriented language Modelica and coupled to a solar industrial process heat plant modeled in TRNSYS. The integration is performed in an innovative co-simulation environment based on the TLK interconnect software connector middleware. A discrete Monte Carlo ray-tracing model was developed in SolTrace to compute the solar radiation heterogeneous local concentration ratio in the parabolic trough collector absorber outer surface. The obtained results show that the efficiency predicted by the model agrees well with experimental data with a root mean square error of 1.2%. The dynamic performance was validated with experimental data from the Acurex solar field, located at the Plataforma Solar de Almeria, South-East Spain, and presents a good agreement. An optimization of the IST collector mass flow rate was performed based on the minimization of an energy loss cost function showing an optimal mass flow rate of 0.22kg/sm2. A parametric analysis showed the influence on collector efficiency of several design properties, such as the absorber emittance and absorptance. Different parabolic trough solar field model structures were compared showing that, from a thermal point of view, the one-dimensional model performs close to the bi-dimensional. Co-simulations conducted on a reference industrial process heat scenario on a South European climate show an annual solar fraction of 67% for a solar plant consisting on a solar field of 1000m2, with thermal energy storage, coupled to a continuous industrial thermal demand of 100kW.

An Orchestrator for Dynamic Interconnection of Software Components

Composing and orchestrating software components is a fundamental concern in modern software engineering. This paper addresses the possibility of such orchestration being dynamic, in the sense that the structure of component's interconnection patterns can change at run-time. The envisaged approach extends previous work by the authors on the use of coalgebraic models for the specification of software connectors.

Using software evolution to focus architectural recovery

Ideally, a software project commences with requirements gathering and specification, reaches its major milestone with system implementation and delivery, and then continues, possibly indefinitely, into an operation and maintenance phase. The software system's architecture is in many ways the linchpin of this process: it is supposed to be an effective reification of the system's technical requirements and to be faithfully reflected in the system's implementation. Furthermore, the architecture is meant to guide system evolution, while also being updated in the process. However, in reality developers frequently deviate from the architecture, causing architectural erosion, a phenomenon in which the initial, "as documented'' architecture of an application is (arbitrarily) modified to the point where its key properties no longer hold. Architectural recovery is a process frequently used to cope with architectural erosion whereby the current, "as implemented" architecture of a software system is extracted from the system's implementation. In this paper we propose a light-weight approach to architectural recovery, called Focus, which has three unique facets. First, Focus uses a system's evolution requirements to isolate and incrementally recover only the fragment of the system's architecture affected by the evolution. In this manner, Focus allows engineers to direct their primary attention to the part of the system that is immediately impacted by the desired change; subsequent changes will incrementally uncover additional parts of the system's architecture. Secondly, in addition to software components, which are the usual target of existing recovery approaches, Focus also recovers the key architectural notions of software connector and architectural style. Finally, Focus does not only recover a system's architecture, but may in fact rearchitect the system. We have applied and evaluated Focus in the context of several off-the-shelf applications and architectural styles to date. We discuss its key strengths and point out several open issues that will frame our future work.

Towards an architectural treatment of software security

Security is a very important concern for software architecture and software components. Previous modeling approaches provide insufficient support for an in-depth treatment of security. This paper argues for a more comprehensive treatment based on software connectors. Connectors provide a suitable vehicle to model, capture, and enforce security. Our approach models security principal, privilege, trust, and context of architectural constituents. Extending our existing architecture description language and support tools, our approach can facilitate describing the security characteristics of an architecture generating enabling infrastructure, and monitoring run-time conformance. Initial results of applying this approach are illustrated through a case study. The contribution of this research is a deeper and more comprehensive treatment of architectural security through software connectors.

The Role of Middleware in Architecture-Based Software Development

Software architectures promote development focused on modular functional building blocks (components), their interconnections (configurations), and their interactions (connectors). Since architecture-level components often contain complex functionality, it is reasonable to expect that their interactions will be complex as well. Middleware technologies such as CORBA, COM, and RMI provide a set of predefined services for enabling component composition and interaction. However, the potential role of such services in the implementations of software architectures is not well understood. In practice, middleware can resolve various types of component heterogeneity — across platform and language boundaries, for instance — but also can induce unwanted architectural constraints on application development. We present an approach in which components communicate through architecture-level software connectors that are implemented using middleware. This approach preserves the properties of the architecture-level connectors while leveraging the beneficial capabilities of the underlying middleware. We have implemented this approach in the context of a component- and message-based architectural style called C2 and demonstrated its utility in the context of several diverse applications. We argue that our approach provides a systematic and reasonable way to bridge the gap between architecture-level connectors and implementation-level middleware packages.

Describing interactions between MSC components: the MSC connectors

The description of the interactions between components play a prominent role in today’s compositional system development strategies. In particular, system family engineering focuses on the description and evolution of interfaces. The communication between the parts of a system, (that is, its components) follows interaction patterns that are expressed in the component-oriented world as software connectors. Message sequence charts (MSCs) are well suited to provide the adequate descriptions for both components and connectors. However, a few new language constructs are required to achieve an adequate description of the component communication. The syntax of these constructs is presented here, together with a brief discussion of their semantics. The interaction of MSC components via an MSC connector is defined by matching the component and connector interface descriptions, based upon a partitioning of the component environment. MSC connectors may be considered as a high-level message construct for the refinement of the communication behaviour, a construct which is still missing in the MSC language. The concepts, originally derived from system family and component oriented software engineering, turn out to be useful as well for interaction abstractions between the smaller MSC language constructs such as operator expressions or plain instances, thus providing a uniform approach to the abstraction of communication features in the MSC language.

Modeling software architectures in the Unified Modeling Language

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a family of design notations that is rapidly becoming a de facto standard software design language. UML provides a variety of useful capabilities to the software designer, including multiple, interrelated design views, a semiformal semantics expressed as a UML meta model, and an associated language for expressing formal logic constraints on design elements. The primary goal of this work is an assessment of UML's expressive power for modeling software architectures in the manner in which a number of existing software architecture description languages (ADLs) model architectures. This paper presents two strategies for supporting architectural concerns within UML. One strategy involves using UML "as is," while the other incorporates useful features of existing ADLs as UML extensions. We discuss the applicability, strengths, and weaknesses of the two strategies. The strategies are applied on three ADLs that, as a whole, represent a broad cross-section of present-day ADL capabilities. One conclusion of our work is that UML currently lacks support for capturing and exploiting certain architectural concerns whose importance has been demonstrated through the research and practice of software architectures. In particular, UML lacks direct support for modeling and exploiting architectural styles, explicit software connectors, and local and global architectural constraints.

Taming architectural evolution

In the world of software development everything evolves. So, then, do software architectures. Unlike source code, for which the use of a configuration management (CM) system is the predominant approach to capturing and managing evolution, approaches to capturing and managing architectural evolution span a wide range of disconnected alternatives. This paper contributes a novel architecture evolution environment, called Mae, which brings together a number of these alternatives. The environment facilitates an incremental design process in which all changes to all architectural elements are integrally captured and related. Key to the environment is a rich system model that combines architectural concepts with those from the field of CM. Not only does this system model form the basis for Mae, but in precisely capturing architectural evolution it also facilitates automated support for several innovative capabilities that rely on the integrated nature of the system model. This paper introduces three of those: the provision of design guidance at the architectural level, the use of specialized software connectors to ensure run-time reliability during component upgrades, and the creation of component-level patches to be applied to deployed system configurations.

Increasing the confidence in off-the-shelf components

The promise of component-based software development is that larger, more complex systems can be built reasonably quickly and reliably from pre-fabricated (“ off-the-shelf”) building blocks. Additionally, such systems can be upgraded incrementally, simply by replacing individual components with their new versions. However, practice has shown that while it may improve certain aspects of an existing component, a new component version frequently introduces unforeseen problems. These problems include less efficient utilization of system resources, errors in the newly introduced functionality, and even new errors in the functionality carried over from the old version. This paper presents an approach intended to alleviate such problems. Our approach is based on explicit software architectures and leverages flexible software connectors in ensuring that component versions can be added and removed in the deployed, running system. Our connectors, called multi-versioning connectors, also unintrusively collect and compare the execution statistics of the running component versions (e.g., execution time and results of invocations). We illustrate our approach with the help of an example application.