This work addresses the automatic generation of the resources required for the assisted creation of domain models according to specialized views of their meta-model. The task of a designer who builds models compliant to a complex domain meta-model is eased if the model editor requests the information according to a specific view of the meta-model based on the conceptualization or the specific construction strategy that the designer uses. With that aim, this work presents 1) the meta-model with which a domain expert formulates the model creation strategy that he envisions, 2) the tool that, from that strategy information, generates the meta-model that drives data introduction and 3) the M2M transformation that generates the final model compliant to the original domain meta-model and that contains the newly introduced data.

This paper presents a model-driven approach for the systematic development of tools for checking the conformity of models when the domain formalization does not only consist of a meta-model but also on a set of constraints enhancing it. The strategy is built on top of the idea of representing the result of the verification as a model which gathers all the constraint violations found in the model, formulating them in a way that allows their later detailed manifestation, automatic correction or any other potential processing. With that aim, a meta-model for supporting those models describing constraints violations has been designed. The verification is applied by means of an M2M transformation that takes as input the model to verify and generates a model conforming to the designed meta-model. This methodology constitutes the way to accomplish the final objective: designing a strategy for the development of a generic tool for verification, regardless any particular meta-model or constraints set. This is performed through the duality of a model transformation as a processing program but also as a processed artefact (model), by means of the Higher Order Transformation (HOT) technique.

This paper focuses on applying a component-based technology to the integration of applications and services deployed in heterogeneous, distributed and open platforms. The proposed technology extends the Container/Component model, adding new services to the components to facilitate their integration in these platforms. The component can have an arbitrary structure and internal complexity, can be used in different applications, and can also be deployed in different kind of processors without either knowing or modifying their code. The added services provide the technology with support for real-time requirements, and for more dynamic deployment processes, which allows a component to connect itself automatically with others that were already part of the infrastructure, based only on data provided during the deployment process.

This paper presents a strategy to incorporate real-time design and analysis tasks to the development process of component-based applications, keeping the opacity that is inherent to the components paradigm. In this kind of applications, the deployment plans must include the scheduling configuration of the components and the platform resources that guarantees that the timing requirements are met. This configuration is obtained from the analysis of the real-time model of the application, which is automatically generated by composition of real-time metadata provided by the components that form the application and the resources that form the execution platform. These real-time metadata are formulated by the component developers, and managed by the application designers in an opaque way, as it happens with the component's code.

This paper describes a methodology and a framework for building an analyzable real-time model of an object oriented system that is developed using a UML CASE tool. The real-time model is formulated by a new UML view named "MAST RT View". This view allows the designer to gradually build the real-time model according to the phase of the development process, to feed data into the analysis tools, and to bring the relevant timing responses back into the model. The MAST RT View has three models: the processing capacity of the hardware/software platform; the timing behavior of the application logical components; and the workload and the timing requirements of each real-time situation to be analyzed. This view is analyzable by the MAST set of tools, which includes worst-case schedulability analysis and discrete event simulation for hard and soft timing requirements.

We propose a methodology for programming multiprocessor event-driven systems. This methodology is based on two programming levels: the task level, which involves programming the basic actions that may be executed in the system as units with a single control thread; and the job level, on which parallel programs to be executed by the complete multiprocessor system are developed. We also present the structure and implementation of an operating system designed as the programming support for software development under the proposed methodology. The model that has been chosen for the representation of the system software is based on an extended Petri net, which provides a well-established conceptual model for the development of the tasks, thus allowing a totally independent and generic development. This model also facilitates job-level programming, since the Petri net is a very powerful description tool for the parallel program.>

Three object-oriented analysis techniques: Shlaer & Mellor, Coad & Yourdon, and Document-Driven Analysis were evaluated. Criteria for comparison of analysis techniques were developed. These criteria state that an analysis technique should (1) cover data, transformation, and control perspectives of the problem, (2) address large problems through partitioning, bounding the problem, and supporting prototypes and incremental analysis, (3) provide approaches for verification and validation, and (4) support configuration control. A case study in a software engineering class was conducted using the three OOA techniques. Through the case study we found that (1) identifying objects is affected by notation and flexibility of object models, (2) visualizing global data, transformations, and control are necessary to capture end-user’s processes, (3) emphasizing hierarchical structures and third normal form divert the analyst’s attention from analysis to implementation, (4) an explicit representation of relationships is necessary, (5) peer review is useful in improving selection of objects and methods to support end-user processes, and (6) supporting a standard document from OOA products is not easy.

Object-oriented analysis is the activity of understanding a problem domain and developing a specification for it within an object-oriented paradigm. In this paper we propose object-oriented analysis can be viewed as a design task that consists of analysis, synthesis and internal and external completeness and consistency checking. We postulate a blackboard based design framework and propose several alternative theories within this framework. Data from an expert analyst is collected and analyzed for relative explanatory power of the alternative theories. Basic findings are that viewed as a design activity, object-oriented analysis is neither top-down nor completely opportunistic in nature, Rather, (1) analysis (the process of finding objects and processes) and synthesis (constructing the object model and state-transition diagrams) are complementary activities while internal completeness and consistency checking is coupled with synthesis and (2) construction of objects and processes are cyclic and complementary processes. The findings are compared with both descriptive and normative research in automated software design.

Methods of calculating efficiently the performance measures of parallel systems by using unbounded generalized stochastic Petri nets are presented. An explosion in the number of states to be analyzed occurs when unbounded places appear in the model. The state space of such nets is infinite, but it is possible to take advantage of the natural symmetries of the system to aggregate the states of the net and construct a finite graph of lumped states which can easily be analyzed. With the methods developed, the unbounded places introduce a complexity similar to that of safe places of the net. These methods can be used to evaluate models of open parallel systems in which unbounded places appear; systems which are k-bounded but are complex and have large values of k can also be evaluated in an appropriate way. From the steady-state solution of the model, it is possible to obtain automatically the performance measures of parallel systems represented by this type of net.>