Ensure: ENsurance of Software evolUtion by Run-time cErtification
Software is an innovation driver in many different domains, e.g., 90% of the innovation in cars is realized by software. Hence, the quality of the software is of utmost importance and needs to be properly addressed during its development. Examples of quality attributes which ENSURE addresses are safety in embedded systems and performance in business information systems. Currently, the quality is usually analysed at design time under non-perfect knowledge about the behaviour of the system and its environment which can result in incorrect analysis results. Another problem is that related models may be developed by different teams, leading to inconsistencies between the models that are only discovered at a later date.
Hence, ENSURE addresses this problem by a holistic model-driven approach, which treats quality evaluation models as first class entities. We focus on probabilistic quality properties, e.g., reliability, availability and safety. We developed an approach for architectural as well as quality evaluation models which supports incremental change propagation between the models. This is achieved by, for example, adding traces which indicate that elements in different models are related. Another approach is to efficiently learn the attributes of the quality evaluation models from the actual running system and an approach to specify the quality properties to analyse using controlled natural language. Complementary to these activities, we empirically studied model-driven engineering and its challenges related to our topics as well as how meta models of modelling languages change over time. We evaluated our approach on the Pick&Place Unit (PPU) case study.
In the future, we will extend our approach by providing automated recommendation support for cases where related models change in parallel using machine learning techniques on the models' histories. The second major extension is to improve the performance of the quality analysis by only analysing the parts of the models that have changed after an update. Finally, we will empirically study and evaluate the results from our approaches with experts from industry as well as on the PPU.
This project is funded by the DFG as part of the Priority Programme 1593 from 2012 until 2019.
Publications
Tool Assisted Model Based Multi Objective Analyses of Automotive Embedded Systems Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Analysis Tools and Methodologies for Embedded and Real-time Systems, 7th of July 2015, Lund, Sweden July 2015 |
Empirische Forschung zu Software-Evolution Informatik-Spektrum, 2015 |
Aligning Qualitative, Real-Time, and Probabilistic Property Specification Patterns Using a Structured English Grammar IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2015 ISSN: 0098-5589 |
Evolution of software in automated production systems - Challenges and Research Directions Journal of Systems and Software, 2015 to be published |
CoWolf - A generic framework for multi-view co-evolution and evaluation of models Proceedings of International Conference on Model Transformation 2015 |
ARCA - Automated Analysis of AUTOSAR Meta-Model Changes Proc. of 7th International Workshop on Modelling in Software Engineering (MiSE¹2015) co-located with ICSE 2015 Florence, Italy, May 16 - 17, 2015 2015 |
Identifying Optimal Sets of Standardized Architectural Features - A Method and its Automotive Application In and , editor, Proc. of the 11th International ACM Sigsoft Conference on the Quality of Software Architectures (QoSA 2015), Montreal, Canada, May 4 - 8 2015 |
Lightweight Adaptive Filtering for Efficient Learning and Updating of Probabilistic Models Proc. of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), May 16-24, Florence, Italy, 2015 |
Evaluating probabilistic models with uncertain model parameters Software & Systems Modeling, :1-21 2014 ISSN: 1619-1366 |
A Generic Framework for Analyzing Model Co-Evolution Proceedings of the Workshop on Models and Evolution co-located with ACM/IEEE 17th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MoDELS 2014), Valencia, Spain. , page 12--21. 2014 |
Assessing the State-of-Practice of Model-Based Engineering in the Embedded Systems Domain In and , editor, Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, 17th International Conference, MODELS 2014, Valencia, Spain, September 28 - October 3 2014 |
Automated User Interaction Analysis for Workflow-Based Web Portals Proc. of the 5th International Conference on Software Business (ICSOB 2014), Paphos, Cyprus 2014 |
Evolution of Long-Term Industrial Meta-Models A Case Study Proc. of the 40th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA), Verona, Italy 2014 |
Quantifying Long-Term Evolution of Industrial Meta-Models - A Case Study Proc. of the IWSM Mensura Conference (2014), Rotterdam, Netherlands 2014 |
Timed Hazard Analysis of Self-healing Systems In , and , editor, Assurances for Self-Adaptive Systems Volume 7740 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science page 112-151. Publisher: Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2013 |
Co-Evolution of Software Architecture and Fault Tree Models: An Explorative Case Study on a Pick and Place Factory Automation System Proc. of the 5th International Workshop on Non-functional Properties in Modeling, September 29, Miami, USA 2013 |
Detecting performance bad smells for Henshin model transformations In , and , editor, Proc. of the 2nd Workshop on the Analysis of Model Transformations (AMT), September 29, Miami, USA 2013 |