Modern digital systems pose risks to humans, society, and the environment. There is a flourishing of guidelines, recommendations, laws, and regulations, but also of standards that try to regulate and alleviate the lack of good practices for the governance, management, and quality of AI systems. However, having just a mark certifying that the system passed some checks is not enough and is fragile to the ethics washing problem. The objective of this work is to go beyond compliance to standards toward an ethics label that enables users to understand the impact of systems on human, societal, and environmental values, both during system development and usage. To build the ethics label, we analyze guidelines, recommendations, laws and regulations, and quality standards. We validate the proposed ethics label through (i) a proof-of-concept application to the social assistive robotics domain, and (ii) interviews with experts from both academia and industry. We contribute an ethics label for modern digital systems that promote transparency and user awareness, and enable users to select systems that meet their subjective ethical preferences. We discuss the problem of ethics washing and propose an ethics label as a means to foster transparency and raise user awareness.

Background. Autonomous systems, whether AI-enabled or not, are ubiquitous and pervasive in our daily lives. While their adoption and use bring many benefits, they also pose significant ethical challenges. Objective. The objective of this work is to contribute a reference architecture for ethical-aware autonomous systems, focusing on their interaction and collaboration with humans, being them proactive, reactive or passive in the interaction with the systems. Method. To define the architecture, we analyzed scientific papers in the field, guidelines and recommendations, as well as laws and regulations. We then applied this acquired knowledge to build the reference architecture. The results of this work were validated through expert interviews and a scenario-based evaluation. Results. We contribute (i) a definition of ethical-aware autonomous systems, (ii) requirements for ethical-aware autonomous systems, and (iii) a reference architecture for ethical-aware autonomous systems. Our reference architecture is intended to help system and software engineers to design autonomous or intelligent systems that should interact and operate with humans in ethically sensitive contexts such as healthcare, social robotics, and assistive technologies. Conclusion. We believe that this work will assist software architects and engineers in designing and developing autonomous systems that should interact and collaborate with humans while respecting values important to individuals, society, and the environment.

The presence of autonomous systems is growing at a fast pace and it is impacting many aspects of our lives. Designed to learn and act independently, these systems operate and perform decision-making without human intervention. However, they lack the ability to incorporate users’ ethical preferences, which are unique for each individual in society and are required to personalize the decision-making processes. This reduces user trust and prevents autonomous systems from behaving according to the moral beliefs of their end-users. When multiple systems interact with differing ethical preferences, they must negotiate to reach an agreement that satisfies the ethical beliefs of all the parties involved and adjust their behavior consequently. To address this challenge, this paper proposes RobEthiChor , an approach that enables autonomous systems to incorporate user ethical preferences and contextual factors into their decision-making through ethics-based negotiation. RobEthiChor features a domain-agnostic reference architecture for designing autonomous systems capable of ethic-based negotiating. The paper also presents RobEthiChor-Ros , an implementation of RobEthiChor within the Robot Operating System (ROS), which can be deployed on robots to provide them with ethics-based negotiation capabilities. To evaluate our approach, we deployed RobEthiChor-Ros on real robots and ran scenarios where a pair of robots negotiate upon resource contention. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the system in realizing ethics-based negotiation. RobEthiChor allowed robots to reach an agreement in more than 73 % of the scenarios with an acceptable negotiation time (0.67s on average). Experiments also demonstrate that the negotiation approach implemented in RobEthiChor is scalable.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software engineering (SE) tools for tasks that extend beyond code synthesis, including judgment under uncertainty and reasoning in ethically significant contexts. We present a fully automated framework for assessing ethical reasoning capabilities across 16 LLMs in a zero-shot setting, using 30 real-world ethically charged scenarios. Each model is prompted to identify the most applicable ethical theory to an action, assess its moral acceptability, and explain the reasoning behind their choice. Responses are compared against expert ethicists’ choices using inter-model agreement metrics. Our results show that LLMs achieve an average Theory Consistency Rate (TCR) of 73.3% and Binary Agreement Rate (BAR) on moral acceptability of 86.7%, with interpretable divergences concentrated in ethically ambiguous cases. A qualitative analysis of free-text explanations reveals strong conceptual convergence across models despite surface-level lexical diversity. These findings support the potential viability of LLMs as ethical inference engines within SE pipelines, enabling scalable, auditable, and adaptive integration of user-aligned ethical reasoning. Our focus is the Ethical Interpreter component of a broader profiling pipeline: we evaluate whether current LLMs exhibit sufficient interpretive stability and theory-consistent reasoning to support automated profiling.

Abstract Autonomous intelligent systems are known as artificial intelligence software entities that can act on their own and can take decisions without any human intervention. The communication between such systems to reach an agreement for problem-solving is known as automated negotiation. This study aims to systematically identify and analyze the literature on automated negotiation from four distinct viewpoints: (1) the existing literature on negotiation with focus on automation, (2) the specific purpose and application domain of the studies published in the domain of automated negotiation, (3) the input, and techniques used to model the negotiation process, and (4) the limitations of the state of the art and future research directions. For this purpose, we performed a systematic mapping study (SMS) starting from 73,760 potentially relevant studies belonging to 24 conference proceedings and 22 journal issues. Through a precise selection procedure, we identified 50 primary studies, published from the year 2000 onward, which were analyzed by applying a classification framework. As a result, we provide: (a) a classification framework to analyze the automated negotiation literature according to several parameters (e.g., focus of the paper, inputs required to carry on the negotiation process, techniques applied, and type of agents involved in the negotiation), (b) an up-to-date map of the literature specifying the purpose and application domain of each study, (c) a list of techniques used to automate the negotiation process and the list of input to carry out the negotiation, and (d) a discussion about promising challenges and their consequences for future research. We also provide a replication package to help researchers replicate and verify our systematic mapping study. The results and findings will benefit researchers and practitioners in identifying the research gap and conducting further research to bring dedicated solutions for automated negotiation.

As testified by new regulations like the European AI Act, worries about the human and societal impact of (autonomous) software technologies are becoming of public concern. Human, societal, and environmental values, alongside traditional software quality, are increasingly recognized as essential for sustainability and long-term well-being. Traditionally, systems are engineered taking into account business goals and technology drivers. Considering the growing awareness in the community, in this article, we argue that engineering of systems should also consider human, societal, and environmental drivers. Then, we identify the macro and technological challenges by focusing on humans and their role while co-existing with digital systems. The first challenge considers humans in a proactive role when interacting with digital systems, i.e., taking initiative in making things happen instead of reacting to events. The second concerns humans having a reactive role in interacting with digital systems, i.e., humans interacting with digital systems as a reaction to events. The third challenge focuses on humans with a passive role, i.e., they experience, enjoy or even suffer the decisions and/or actions of digital systems. The fourth challenge concerns the duality of trust and trustworthiness, with humans playing any role. Building on the new human, societal, and environmental drivers and the macro and technological challenges, we identify a research roadmap of digital systems for humanity. The research roadmap is concretized in a number of research directions organized into four groups: development process, requirements engineering, software architecture and design, and verification and validation.

This paper briefly outlines a high-level architecture of a context-aware ethics-based negotiation approach in which autonomous systems utilize user ethical profiles, together with contextual factors and user status, to control their autonomy while collaboratively negotiating to reach an ethical agreement that satisfies the ethical beliefs of all parties involved.

Migrating from a legacy monolithic system to a microservice architecture is a complex and time-consuming process. Software engineers may strongly benefit from automated support to identify a high-cohesive and loose-coupled set of microservices with proper granularity. The automated approach proposed in this paper extracts microservices by using graph clustering and combinatorial optimization to maximize cohesion and minimize coupling. The approach performs static analysis of the code to obtain a graph representation of the monolithic system. Then, it uses graph clustering to detect high-cohesive communities of nodes using the Louvain community algorithm. In parallel, the tool clusters the domain entities (i.e., classes representing uniquely identifiable concepts in a system domain) within bounded contexts to identify the required service granularity. Finally, it uses combinatorial optimization to minimize the coupling, hence deriving the microservice architecture. The approach is fully implemented. We applied it over four different monolithic systems and found valuable results. We evaluated the identified architectures through cohesion and coupling metrics, along with a comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches based on features such as granularity level, number of produced services, and methods applied. The approach implementation and the experimental results are publicly available.

Internet of Things (IoT) products provide over-the-net capabilities such as remote activation, monitoring, and notifications. An associated mobile app is often provided for more convenient usage of these capabilities. The perceived quality of these companion apps can impact the success of the IoT product. We investigate the perceived quality and prominent issues of smart-home IoT mobile companion apps with the aim of deriving insights to: (i) provide guidance to end users interested in adopting IoT products; (ii) inform companion app developers and IoT producers about characteristics frequently criticized by users; (iii) highlight open research directions. We employ a mixed-methods approach, analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data. We assess the perceived quality of companion apps by quantitatively analyzing the star rating and the sentiment of 1,347,799 Android and 48,498 iOS user reviews. We identify the prominent issues that afflict companion apps by performing a qualitative manual analysis of 1,000 sampled reviews. Our analysis shows that users’ judgment has not improved over the years. A variety of functional and non-functional issues persist, such as difficulties in pairing with the device, software flakiness, poor user interfaces, and presence of issues of a socio-technical impact. Our study highlights several aspects of companion apps that require improvement in order to meet user expectations and identifies future directions.

Abstract Modern technologies and emerging wireless communication solutions in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) world are empowering the spread of the most disparate ready‐to‐use software services distributed over the globe and accessed by an increasing number of users. This state of affairs encourages the development of systems based on the reuse of existing services through composition approaches, notably choreographies. Also Public Administrations are driven towards a digitalization process which exploits composition approaches to build complex and interoperable systems that can be remotely accessed by citizens and authorities. However, an automatic support is needed in order to realize the service composition and the distributed coordination logic that enforces the correct choreography realization. Moreover, the need for building dynamic and user‐centered systems calls for the realization of choreographies capable to adjust their behavior to the surrounding context. This work presents our proposal for addressing the choreography realization problem, by describing an automated process for the synthesis of choreography‐based systems. The synthesized systems are location‐aware and able to adapt the services' interaction according to the user's needs and context conditions. We show and evaluate our approach at work on a real use case scenario in the Public Administration domain.

Software companies have an interest in reaching the maximum amount of potential customers while, at the same time, providing a frictionless experience. Desktop web app frameworks are promising in this respect, allowing developers and companies to reuse existing code and knowledge of web applications to create cross-platform apps integrated with native APIs. Despite their growing popularity, existing challenges in employing these technologies have not been documented, and it is hard for individuals and companies to weigh benefits and pros against drawbacks and cons.In this paper, we address this issue by investigating the challenges that developers frequently experience when adopting desktop web app frameworks. To achieve this goal, we mine and apply topic modeling techniques to a dataset of 10,822 Stack Overflow posts related to the development of desktop web applications. Analyzing the resulting topics, we found that: i) developers often experience issues regarding the build and deployment processes for multiple platforms; ii) reusing existing libraries and development tools in the context of desktop applications is often cumbersome; iii) it is hard to solve issues that arise when interacting with native APIs. Furthermore, we confirm our finding by providing evidence that the identified issues are also present in the issue reports of 453 open-source applications publicly hosted on GitHub.

Summary Service choreographies support a distributed composition approach that is based on the specification of the external interaction of the participant services in terms of flows of message exchanges, given from a global perspective. When developing distributed service‐based applications, different services are produced by different teams; at the same time, such choreographies can also interact with third‐party services, hence leading to the reuse of black‐box services. Enforcing a global coordination logic across the many in‐house and third‐party services to correctly realize the specified choreography is a nontrivial endeavor. Automatic support is then desirable. In this article, we present an integrated development and run‐time environment for choreography‐based systems, which covers all the development activities, including specification, code synthesis, automatic deployment, enactment, and monitoring on the Cloud. We focus on providing a practical solution, that is, applicable by the community and considering technological standards used in the industry. We report the results of an experiment that we conducted with a use case in the in‐store marketing and sales domain. Results confirm confidence in the approach and show that the platform can be applied in practical contexts.

With the emerging connected automated vehicles, 5G and Internet of Things (IoT), vehicles and road infrastructure become connected and cooperative, enabling Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS). C-ITS are transport system of systems that involves many stakeholders from different sectors. While running their own systems and providing services independently, stakeholders cooperate with each other for improving the overall transport performance such as safety, efficiency and sustainability. Massive information on road and traffic is already available and provided through standard services with different protocols. By reusing and composing the available heterogeneous services, novel value-added applications can be developed. This paper introduces a choreography-based service composition platform, i.e. the CHOReVOLUTION Integrated Development and Runtime Environment (IDRE), and it reports on how the IDRE has been successfully exploited to accelerate the reuse-based development of a choreography-based Urban Traffic Coordination (UTC) application. The UTC application takes the shape of eco-driving services that through real-time eco-route evaluation assist the drivers for the most eco-friendly and comfortable driving experience. The eco-driving services are realized through choreography and they are exploited through a mobile app for online navigation. From specification to deployment to execution, the CHOReVOLUTION IDRE has been exploited to support the realization of the UTC application by automatizing the generation of the distributed logic to properly bind, coordinate and adapt the interactions of the involved parties. The benefits brought by CHOReVOLUTION IDRE have been assessed through the evaluation of a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

The Android OS market is experiencing a growing share globally. It is becoming the mobile platform of choice for an increasing number of users. People rely on Android mobile devices for surfing the web, purchasing products, or to be part of a social network. The large amount of personal information that is exchanged makes privacy an important concern. As a result, the trustability of mobile apps is a fundamental aspect to be considered, particularly with regard to meeting the expectations of end users. The rigidities of the Android permission model confine end users into a secondary role, offering the only option of choosing between either privacy or functionalities. In this paper, we aim at improving the trustability of Android apps by proposing a user-centric approach to the flexible management of Android permissions. The proposed approach empowers end users to selectively grant permission by specifying (i) the desired level of permissions granularity and (ii) the specific features of the app in which the chosen permission levels are granted. Four experiments have been designed, conducted, and reported for evaluating it. The experiments consider performance, usability, and acceptance from both the end user's and developer's perspective. Results confirm confidence on the approach.

Background: Novel frameworks for the development of desktop applications with web technologies have become popular. These desktop web app frameworks allow developers to reuse existing code and knowledge of web applications for the creation of cross-platform apps integrated with native APIs. Aims: To date, desktop web app frameworks have not been studied empirically. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by characterizing the usage of web frameworks and providing evidence on how beneficial are their pros and how impactful are their cons. Method: We conducted an empirical study, collecting and analyzing 453 desktop web apps publicly available on GitHub. We performed qualitative and quantitative analyses to uncover the traits and issues of desktop web apps. Results: We found that desktop web app frameworks enable the development of cross-platform applications even for teams of limited dimensions, taking advantage of the abundant number of available web libraries. However, at the same time, bugs deriving from platform compatibility issues are common. Conclusions: Our study provides concrete evidence on some disadvantages associated with desktop web app frameworks. Future work is required to assess their impact on the required development and maintenance effort, and to investigate other aspects not considered in this first research.

Model-driven engineering (MDE) promotes automated model transformations along the entire development process. Guaranteeing the quality of early models is essential for a successful application of MDE techniques and related tool-supported model refinements. Do these models properly reflect the requirements elicited from the owners of the problem domain? Ultimately, this question needs to be asked to the domain experts. The problem is that a gap exists between the respective backgrounds of modeling experts and domain experts. MDE developers cannot show a model to the domain experts and simply ask them whether it is correct with respect to the requirements they had in mind. To facilitate their interaction and make such validation more systematic, we propose a methodology and a tool that derive a set of customizable questionnaires expressed in natural language from each model to be validated. Unexpected answers by domain experts help to identify those portions of the models requiring deeper attention. We illustrate the methodology and the current status of the developed tool MOTHIA, which can handle UML Use Case, Class, and Activity diagrams. We assess MOTHIA effectiveness in reducing the gap between domain and modeling experts, and in detecting modeling faults on the European Project CHOReOS.

This document is a summary paper reporting on the IEEE Services 2015 Visionary Track on Service Composition for the Future Internet (SCFI 2015).

Formal methods offer an effective means to assert the correctness of software systems through mathematical reasoning. However, the need to formulate system properties in a purely mathematical fashion can create pragmatic barriers to the application of these techniques. For this reason, Dwyer et al. invented property specification patterns which is a system of recurring solutions to deal with the temporal intricacies that would make the construction of reactive systems very hard otherwise. Today, property specification patterns provide general rules that help practitioners to qualify order and occurrence, to quantify time bounds, and to express probabilities of events. Nevertheless, a comprehensive framework combining qualitative, real-time, and probabilistic property specification patterns has remained elusive. The benefits of such a framework are twofold. First, it would remove the distinction between qualitative and quantitative aspects of events; and second, it would provide a structure to systematically discover new property specification patterns. In this paper, we report on such a framework and present a unified catalogue that combines all known plus 40 newly identified or extended patterns. We also offer a natural language front-end to map patterns to a temporal logic of choice. To demonstrate the virtue of this new framework, we applied it to a variety of industrial requirements, and use PSPWizard, a tool specifically developed to work with our unified pattern catalogue, to automatically render concrete instances of property specification patterns to formulae of an underlying temporal logic of choice.

Summary of the IEEE First International Workshop on Service Orchestration and Choreography for the Future Internet (OrChor 2014)

Choreographies are an emergent Service Engineering (SE) approach to compose together and coordinate services in a distributed way. A choreography formalizes the way business participants coordinate their interactions. The focus is not on orchestrations of the work performed within them, but rather on the exchange of messages between these participants. The problems usually addressed when considering a choreography-based specification of the system to be realized are realizability check, and conformance check. In this paper we describe the CHOReOSynt tool, which has been conceived to deal with an additional problem, namely, automated choreography enforcement. That is, when the goal is to actually realize a service choreography by reusing third-party services, their uncontrolled (or wrongly coordinated) composite behavior may show undesired interactions that preclude the choreography realization. CHOReOSynt solves this problem by automatically synthesizing additional software entities that, when interposed among the services, allow for preventing undesired interactions. Screencast: http://choreos.disim.univaq.it/downloads/

Software is increasingly produced according to a certain goal and by integrating existing software produced by third-parties, typically black-box, and often provided without a machine readable documentation. This implies that development processes of the next future have to explicitly deal with an inherent incompleteness of information about existing software, notably on its behaviour. Therefore, on one side a software producer will less and less know the precise behaviour of a third party software service, on the other side she will need to use it to build her own application. In this paper we present an innovative development process to automatically produce dependable software systems by integrating existing services under uncertainty and according to the specied goal. Moreover, we (i) discuss important challenges that must be faced while producing the kind of systems we are targeting, (ii) give an overview of the state of art related to the identied challenges, and finally (iii) provide research directions to address these challenges.

In the next future we will be surrounded by a virtually infinite number of software applications that provide computational software resources in the open Globe. This will radically change the way software will be produced and used. Users will be keen on producing their own piece of software, by also reusing existing software, to better satisfy their needs, therefore with a goal oriented, opportunistic use in mind. The produced software will need to be able to evolve, react and adapt to a continuously changing environment, while guaranteeing dependability. The strongest adversary to this view is the lack of knowledge on the software's structure, behavior, and execution context. Despite the possibility to extract observational models from existing software, a producer will always operate with software artifacts that exhibit a degree of uncertainty in terms of their functional and non functional characteristics. We believe that uncertainty can only be controlled by making it explicit and by using it to drive the production process itself. In this paper, we introduce a novel paradigm of software production process that explores available software and assesses its degree of uncertainty in relation to the opportunistic goal G, assists the producer in creating the appropriate integration means towards G, and validates the quality of the integrated system with respect to G and the current context.

In this paper we present a static analysis approach for inspecting Java programs and characterizing them with respect to their resource consumption in a given execution environment. We target, in particular, resource constrained devices that are characterized by resource scarcity and limited computational power. The focus of this paper is on a parametrical abstract resource analyzer that performs the actual analysis and is supported by a resource model that allows us to abstract application behavior in terms of its resource needs. The presented components are integrated in a larger framework that provides a complete system for reasoning and adapting Java programs with respect to heterogeneous contexts.

SYNTHESIS is a tool for automatically assembling correct and distributed component-based systems. In our context, a system is correct when it is deadlock-free and performs only specified component interactions. In order to automatically synthesize the correct composition code, SYNTHESIS takes as input an high-level behavioural description for each component that must form the system to be built and a specification of the component interactions that must be enforced in the system. The automatically derived composition code is implemented as a set of distributed component wrappers that cooperatively interact with each other and with their wrapped components in order to prevent possible deadlocks and make the composed system exhibit only the specified interactions. The current version of SYNTHESIS supports two possible development platforms: Microsoft COM/DCOM, and EJB (Enterprise Java Beans).

Building a distributed system from third-party components introduces a set of problems, mainly related to compatibility and communication. Our approach to solve these problems is to build an adaptor which forces the system to exhibit only a set of safe or desired behaviors. By exploiting an abstract and partial specification of the global behavior that must be enforced, we automatically build a centralized adaptor. It mediates the interaction among components by both performing the specified behavior and, simultaneously, avoiding possible deadlocks. However in a distributed environment it is not always possible or convenient to insert a centralized adaptor. In contrast, building a distributed adaptor might increase the applicability of the approach in a real-scale context. In this paper we show how it is possible to automatically generate a distributed adaptor by exploiting an approach to the definition of distributed IDS (Intrusion Detection Systems) filters developed by us to increase security measures in component based systems. Firstly, by taking into account a high level specification of the global behavior that must be enforced, we synthesize a behavioral model of a centralized adaptor that allows the composed system to only exhibit the specified behavior and, simultaneously, avoid possible unspecified deadlocks. This model represents a lower level specification of the global behavior that is enforced by the adaptor. Secondly, by taking into account the synthesized adaptor model, we generate a set of component filters that validate the centralized adaptor behavior by simply looking at local information. In this way we address the problem of mechanically generating correct and distributed adaptors for real-scale component-based systems.