Software Components, Architectures and Reuse
J.UCS Special Issue
Cláudia Werner
(Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ, Brazil
werner@cos.ufrj.br)
Flavio Oquendo
(European University of Brittany - UBS/VALORIA, France
flavio.oquendo@univ-ubs.fr)
The aim of this special issue is to report the state of research
and practice on the theme of software components, architectures, and
reuse. This special issue is comprised of selected, extended
peer-reviewed papers presented at the 2nd Brazilian Symposium on
Software Components, Architectures, and Reuse (SBCARS 2008), held in
Porto Alegre, Brazil, 20-22 August, 2008 (http://www.inf.pucrs.br/sbcars2008/en/),
and papers selected following an open, international Call for
Papers.
The call for this special issue received 14 submissions from
co-authors of 12 countries (Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, France, Germany,
Great Britain, India, Ireland, Portugal, Sweden, Tunisia, and
USA). Half of the submissions were extended and revised versions of
papers accepted for SBCARS 2008.
Each of the 14 submissions was reviewed by 3 reviewers. In total, 42
reviewers (3 reviewers per paper - 1 paper per reviewer)
participated in the reviewing process. They are well-known researchers
in the area, coming from 13 countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada,
France, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, The
Netherlands, USA, and Venezuela).
After a thorough reviewing process, 7 submissions were selected to
provide revised versions based on the reviewers
recommendations. These revised versions were then checked by the
corresponding reviewers and 5 high-quality papers were finally
selected to be included in this special issue, of which 3 are extended
and revised versions of SBCARS papers. They present high-quality
research carried out by co-authors from Brazil, Canada, Ireland, and
Portugal.
Contents of this Issue
The first paper, entitled "An Approach for
Estimating Execution Time Probability Distributions of Component-based
Real-Time Systems" (R. Perrone, R. Macêdo, G. Lima,
V. Lima), addresses Component-Based Development (CBD). It presents a
methodology for estimating probability distributions of execution time
in the context of such systems, where no access to component internal
code is assumed.
In order to evaluate the proposed methodology,
experiments were conducted with components, and related compositions,
implemented over CIAO and ARCOS, where CIAO is a real-time
component-based middleware and ARCOS a software framework devoted to
the construction of real-time control and supervision applications,
developed over CIAO. The collected experimental data show that the
proposed approach is a good approximation for component execution time
probability distributions.
The second paper, entitled "Distribution
Pattern-driven Development of Service Architectures"
(R. Barrett, C. Pahl), addresses Service-Oriented Architectures
(SOA). It presents a distribution pattern-driven approach to service
composition and architecting, where architectural configurations or
distribution patterns express how a composed system is to be deployed
in a distributed environment. It develops, based on a catalog of
patterns, a UML-compliant framework, which takes existing Web service
interfaces as its input and generates executable Web service
compositions based on distribution patterns chosen by the software
architect.
The third paper, entitled "Checking
Semantics Equivalence of MDA Transformations in Concurrent
Systems" (P. Barbosa, F. Ramalho, J. Figueiredo,
A. Júnior, A. Costa, L. Gomes), addresses Model Driven
Architecture (MDA). Based on previous work extending the standard MDA
architecture, supporting formal verification of semantics preserving
transformations of Platform Specific Models (PSM), it presents how the
extended MDA architecture copes with the correctness verification of
horizontal model transformations involving Platform Independent Models
(PIM) of concurrent systems. The proposed approach is supported by
four formal techniques: behavioral equivalence relation, category
theory, bisimulation, and model-checking. This set of techniques
allows the analysis of semantics equivalence between system model
before and after transformation enabling the decomposition of the
system model into a set of concurrent sub-models, considered as
components. The validation of the approach occurs in a net splitting
operation, where PIMs are defined as Petri nets models according to
the PNML metamodel with transformations representing formal operations
in this domain.
The fourth paper, entitled "A Flexible Strategy-Based
Model Comparison Approach: Bridging the Syntactic and Semantic
Gap" (K. Oliveira, K. Breitman, T. Oliveira), addresses Model
Driven Development (MDD). It discusses the importance of model
comparison as one of the pillars of MDD and proposes an innovative,
flexible, model comparison approach, based on the composition of
matching strategies. The proposed approach is implemented by a match
operator that combines syntactical matching rule, synonym dictionary,
and typographic similarity strategies to a semantic, ontology-based
strategy. By relying on ontologies, that are semantically richer and
have greater expressive power than UML models and can be formally
verified for consistency, the proposed approach provides more
reliability and accuracy to model comparison. It is presented in the
format of a workflow that provides guidance to users and facilitates
the inclusion of new matching strategies and evolution.
Finally, the fifth paper, entitled "Assessment of the Design
Modularity and Stability of Multi-Agent System Product Lines"
(C. Nunes, U. Kulesza, C. Sant'Anna, I. Nunes, A. Garcia, C. Lucena),
addresses Product Lines (PL) for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). It
presents a quantitative study on the design modularity and stability
of an evolving MAS-PL, which was built following the reactive product
line adoption approach.
The product line was developed and evolved
based on several versions of a conference management web-based
system. The evaluation is carried out through a series of change
scenarios related to new agency features, which are agent
characteristics that enhance the system with autonomous behavior. The
quantitative study consists of a systematic comparison between two
different versions of the MAS-PL based on a MAS-specific platform,
i.e. JADE, relying on well-known modularity and change impact metrics.
Reviewers for this Issue
Eduardo Almeida, CESAR/RiSE, Brazil
Yamine Ait Ameur, University of Poitiers, France
Muhammad Ali Babar, LERO, Ireland
Dharini Balasubramaniam, University of St. Andrews, Great Britain
Thais Vasconcelos Batista, UFRN, Brazil
Nelly Bencomo, Lancaster University, Great Britain
Paulo Borba, UFPE, Brazil
Regina Braga, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil
Rosana Braga, ICMC-USP, Brazil
Renato Cerqueira, PUC Rio, Brazil
Ivica Crnkovic, Mälardalen University, Sweden
Carlos Cuesta, Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain
Khalil Drira, LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France
Laurence Duchien, INRIA and University of Lille, France
Gledson Elias, UFPB, Brazil
Katrina Falkner, University of Adelaide, Australia
Fabiano Cutigi Ferrari, ICMC-USP, Brazil
Régis Fleurquin, University of South Brittany/VALORIA & INRIA, France
Willian Frakes, Virginia Tech, USA
Alessandro Garcia, Lancaster University, Great Britain
Itana Maria de Souza Gimenes, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Brazil
Patricia Lago, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Nicole Levy, University of Versailles St-Quentin en Yvelines, France
Antónia Lopes, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Francisca Losavio, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Venezuela
Patricia Machado, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, Brazil
Eliane Martins, UNICAMP, Brazil
Paulo Masiero, Universidade de São Paulo/ICMC, Brazil
Silvio Meira, CESAR, Brazil
Paulo Merson, Software Engineering Institute, USA
Carlo Montangero, University of Pisa, Italy
Leonardo Murta, UFF, Brazil
Toacy Oliveira, University of Waterloo, Canada
Mourad Oussalah, LINA Laboratory, CNRS UMR, France
Claus Pahl, Dublin City University, Ireland
Jennifer Pérez, Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Spain
Paulo Pires, UFRN, Brazil
Antonio Francisco Prado, Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil
Claudia Raibulet, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Isidro Ramos, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain
Cecilia Rubira, UNICAMP, Brazil
Cláudia Werner
Flavio Oquendo
Brazil/France, May 2009
|