Supply chain fraud involving counterfeit or adulterated products presents threats to human health and safety. Quality inspection is a key fraud mitigation tool where inspection planning involves allocating inspection resources across geographically dispersed assets considering both the cost and value of the inspection. I4.0 environments pose further challenges as their heterogeneous and dynamic cyber-physical environment creates a large inspection resource allocation solution space, causing the corresponding analysis to be computationally complex. In this article, we contribute to supporting optimal inspection decisions of dynamic cyber-physical supply chains through the use of structural representations—topologiesof the supply chain, physical premises, and their production context. We present an approach for topology modeling of supply chains and illustrate its use within an adaptive inspection approach, showing that structural information can reduce malicious process discovery times by up to 90%.

Microservice-based applications may include multiple instances of microservices running on containerised infrastructures. These infrastructures pose challenges to digital investigations of security incidents because digital evidence can be destroyed when containers are terminated. Observability techniques are used to facilitate the investigation of incidents in microservice systems. However, existing observability approaches do not address security incidents when there is a need to perform digital forensic investigations. Furthermore, approaches to proactively support digital forensic investigations are limited to security incidents that are known a priori. In this paper, we propose an adaptive observability approach based on game theory. The approach addresses the challenge of implementing forensic-ready microservice systems while considering uncertainties in security incidents. Our approach provides evidence collection capabilities for microservice systems and continually adapts to improve the forensic readiness of microservices. Specifically, the approach uses game theory to model and reason about the interactions between users and microservices, determining the optimal time and manner for observing microservices before the occurrence of security incidents. The performance of the approach has been assessed and compared with other observability approaches. Results of the evaluation indicate that adaptive observability outperforms other observability approaches, with improvements ranging from 3.1% up to 42.50%.

The effective functioning of society is increasingly reliant on supply chains which are susceptible to fraud, such as the distribution of adulterated products. Inspection is a key tool for mitigating fraud, however it has traditionally been constrained by physical characteristics of supply chains such as their size and geographical distribution. The increasingly cyber-physical nature of supply chains, their autonomy, and their data richness, extends their attack surfaces and thus increases opportunities for fraud. However, it also presents new opportunities for increased and dynamic inspection, which in turn requires more targeted and flexible inspection regimes. In this paper we explore opportunities to engineer adaptive inspection of cyber-physical supply chains to support efforts to reduce fraud. Through using structural representations of supply chains (topological models) we propose defining optimal inspection zones. Such zones circumscribe assets of interest to optimise observation while reducing the intrusiveness of inspection. Using a motivating example of adulterated pharmaceuticals and a proof-of-concept tool we illustrate adaptive inspection, and surface challenges to its realisation, such as value metrics, forensic readiness integration and managing contrasting local and global perspectives.

Systems-of-systems are formed by the composition of independently created software components. These components are designed to satisfy their individual requirements, rather than the global requirements of the systems-of-systems. We refer to components that cannot be adapted to meet both individual and global requirements as "defiant" components. In this paper, we propose a "cautious" adaptation approach which supports changing the behaviour of such defiant components under exceptional conditions to satisfy global requirements, while continuing to guarantee the satisfaction of the components' individual requirements. The approach represents both normal and exceptional conditions as scenarios; models the behaviour of exceptional conditions as wrappers implemented using an aspect-oriented technique; and deals with both single and multiple instances of defiant components with different precedence order at runtime. We evaluated an implementation of the approach using drones and boats for an organ delivery application conceived by our industrial partners, in which we assess how the proposed approach help achieve the system-of-systems' global requirements while accommodating increased complexity of hybrid aspects such as multiplicity, precedence ordering, openness and heterogeneity.

A System of Systems (SoS) is an arrangement of useful and independent sub-systems, which are integrated into a larger system. Examples are found in transport systems, nutritional systems, smart homes and smart cities. The composition of component sub-systems into an SoS enables support for complex functionalities that cannot be provided by individual sub-systems on their own. However, to realize the benefits of these functionalities it is necessary to address several software engineering chal-lenges including, but not limited to, the specification, design, construction, deployment, and management of an SoS. The various component sub-systems in an SoS environment are often concerned with distinct domains; are developed by different stake-holders under different circumstances and time; provide distinct functionalities; and are used by different stakeholders, which allow for the existence of conflicting requirements. In this paper, we present a framework to support management of emerging conflicting requirements in an SoS. In particular, we describe an approach to support identification of conflicts between resource-based requirements (i.e. requirements concerned with the con-sumption of different resources). In order to illustrate and evaluate the work, we use an example of a pilot study of an IoT SoS ecosystem designed to support food security at different levels of granularity, namely individuals, groups, cities, and nations.

Software traceability is the ability to relate artefacts created during the life cycle of software development.Traceability is fundamental to support several activities of the software development process such as impact analysis, software maintenance and evolution, verification and validation.Despite the importance and advances in the software traceability area, traceability practice is still a challenge.One of these challenges is concerned with the visualization of traceability information.In this paper, we present D3TraceView, a traceability visualization tool that allows displaying traceability information in different formats depending on the purpose of use of traceability information.The tool supports different types of queries related to the use of traceability information.We use an Air Traffic Control Environment multi-agent system to demonstrate the use of the tool.

Agile methodologies have been introduced as an alternative to traditional software engineering methodologies. However, despite the advantages of using agile methodologies, the transition between traditional and agile methodologies is not an easy task. There are several problems associated with the use of agile methodologies. Examples of these problems are related to (i) lack of metrics to measure the amount of rework that occurs per sprint, (ii) interruption of a project after several iterations, (iii) changes in the requirements, (iv) lack of documentation, and (v) lack of management control. In this paper we present Trace++, a traceability technique that extends traditional traceability relationships with extra information in order to support the transition between traditional and agile software development. The use of Trace++ has been evaluated in two real projects of different software development companies to measure the benefits of using Trace++ to support agile software development.

It is well understood that software development can be a risky enterprise and industrial projects often overrun budget and schedule. Effective risk management is, therefore, vital for a successful project outcome. Design Rule Spaces (DRSpaces) have been used by other researchers to understand why implemented software is error-prone [1, 2]. This industrial case study evaluates whether such spaces are durable, meaningful, and isolating risk containers. DRSpaces were created from UML class diagrams of architectural design artefacts. In our study, object orientated metrics were calculated from the UML diagrams, and compared to the error-proneness of the DRSpace implementation, to determine whether architectural coupling translated into implementation difficulties. A correlation between architectural coupling and error-proneness of DRSpaces was observed in the case study. Software developers were asked to identify DRSpaces they found difficult to implement, in order to understand which factors, other than architectural coupling, were also important. The qualitative results show agreement between the code areas developers found difficult to implement and the error-prone DRSpaces. However, the results also show that architectural coupling is just one risk factor of many. The case study suggests that architectural DRSpaces can be used to facilitate a targeted risk review prior to implementation and manage risk.

Systems-of-Systems (SoS) refer to a new class of software-intensive systems, where their constituent systems work cooperatively in order to fulfill specific missions. Characterized by managerial and operational independence, geographic distribution, evolutionary development, and emergent behavior, SoS bring substantial challenges to the software engineering area. SESoS 2015, held in Florence, Italy, on May 17, 2015, as a joint workshop of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), provided a forum to exchange ideas and experiences, analyze current research and development issues, discuss promising solutions, and to explore inspiring visions for the future of Software Engineering (SE) for SoS.

Software traceability is a sought-after, yet often elusive quality in large software-intensive systems primarily because the cost and effort of tracing can be overwhelming. State-of-the art solutions address this problem through utilizing trace retrieval techniques to automate the process of creating and maintaining trace links. However, there is no simple one- size-fits all solution to trace retrieval. As this paper will show, finding the right combination of tracing techniques can lead to significant improvements in the quality of generated links. We present a novel approach to trace retrieval in which the underlying infrastructure is configured at runtime to optimize trace quality. We utilize a machine-learning approach to search for the best configuration given an initial training set of validated trace links, a set of available tracing techniques specified in a feature model, and an architecture capable of instantiating all valid configurations of features. We evaluate our approach through a series of experiments using project data from the transportation, healthcare, and space exploration domains, and discuss its implementation in an industrial environment. Finally, we show how our approach can create a robust baseline against which new tracing techniques can be evaluated.

The identification of services during the execution of service-based applications to replace services in them that are no longer available and/or fail to satisfy certain requirements is an important issue. In this paper, we present a framework to support runtime service discovery. This framework can execute service discovery queries in pull and push mode. In pull mode, it executes queries when a need for finding a replacement service arises. In push mode, queries are subscribed to the framework to be executed proactively and, in parallel with the operation of the application, to identify adequate services that could be used if the need for replacing a service arises. Hence, the proactive (push) mode of query execution makes it more likely to avoid interruptions in the operation of service-based applications when a service in them needs to be replaced at runtime. In both modes of query execution, the identification of services relies on distance-based matching of structural, behavioral, quality, and contextual characteristics of services and applications. A prototype implementation of the framework has been developed and an evaluation was carried out to assess the performance of the framework. This evaluation has shown positive results, which are discussed in the paper.

Traceability underlies many important software and systems engineering activities, such as change impact analysis and regression testing. Despite important research advances, as in the automated creation and maintenance of trace links, traceability implementation and use is still not pervasive in industry. A community of traceability researchers and practitioners has been collaborating to understand the hurdles to making traceability ubiquitous. Over a series of years, workshops have been held to elicit and enhance research challenges and related tasks to address these shortcomings. A continuing discussion of the community has resulted in the research roadmap of this paper. We present a brief view of the state of the art in traceability, the grand challenge for traceability and future directions for the field.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been recognized as an important paradigm for software engineering. Several organizations are in the process of adopting and evolving SOA deployments. In this paper we present IntelliTrace, an intelligent traceability framework to support impact analysis across different modeling layers of a SOA based system. The framework uses traceability links among different SOA artifacts to analyze the impact that changes in SOA-based systems can have in key performance indicators. The change impact analysis is triggered by different situations such as changes at the service level, business process level, goal level, key performance indicators, and SOA infrastructure. A prototype tool has been implemented in order to illustrate and evaluate the framework. An extensive case study built around an online airline reservation system is used to evaluate the framework.

Service-oriented systems have attracted great interest from industry and research communities worldwide. Service integrators, developers, and providers are collaborating to address the various challenges in the field. PESOS 2010 is a forum for all these communities to present and discuss a wide range of topics related to service-oriented systems. The goal of PESOS was to bring together researchers from academia and industry, as well as practitioners working in the areas of software engineering and service-oriented systems to discuss research challenges, recent developments, novel applications, as well as methods, techniques, experiences, and tools to support the engineering and use of service-oriented systems.

Recently, there has been a proliferation of service-based systems, i.e., software systems that are composed of autonomous services but can also use software code. In order to support the development of these systems, it is necessary to have new methods, processes, and tools. In this paper, we describe a UML-based framework to assist with the development of service-based systems. The framework adopts an iterative process in which software services that can provide functional and nonfunctional characteristics of a system being developed are discovered, and the identified services are used to reformulate the design models of the system. The framework uses a query language to represent structural, behavioral, and quality characteristics of services to be identified, and a query processor to match the queries against service registries. The matching process is based on distance measurements between the queries and service specifications. A prototype tool has been implemented. The work has been evaluated in terms of recall, precision, and performance measurements.

We present a static verification tool (SVT), a system that performs static verification on UML models composed of UML class and state machine diagrams. Additionally, the SVT allows the user to add extra behavior specification in the form of guards and effects by defining a small action language. UML models are checked against properties written in a special-purpose property language that allows the user to specify linear temporal logic formulas that explicitly reason about UML components. Thus, the SVT provides a strong foundation for the design of reliable systems and a step towards model-driven security.

Service discovery has been recognised as an important activity for service-based systems. In this paper we describe a framework for dynamic service discovery that supports the identification of service during the execution time of service-based systems. In the framework, services are identified based on structural, behavioural, quality, and contextual characteristics of a system represented in query languages. The framework supports both pull and push modes of query execution. In the approach, a service is identified based on the computation of distances between a query and a candidate service. A prototype tool has been implemented in order to illustrate and evaluate the framework. The paper also describes the results of a set of experiments that we have conducted to evaluate the work.

In this paper we present a static verification framework to support the design and verification of secure peer-to-peer applications. The framework supports the specification, modeling, and analysis of security aspects together with the general characteristics of the system, during early stages of the development life-cycle. The approach avoids security issues to be taken into consideration as a separate layer that is added to the system as an afterthought by the use of security protocols. The main functionality supported by the framework are concerned with the modeling of the system together with its security aspects by using an extension of UML, modeling of abuse cases to represent scenarios of attackers and assist with the identification of properties to be verified, specification of properties to be verified in a graphical template language, verification of the models against the properties, and visualization of the results of the verification process.

In this paper we describe a platform that supports context aware runtime service discovery. The platform supports service discovery based on structural and behavioural service models as well as complex context related service discovery conditions which are specified in a newly introduced query language. During discovery, context information is obtained through a uniform scheme of calling "context operations" and is subsequently used in the evaluation of service discovery queries.

Software engineering practitioners and researchers continue to face huge challenges in the development, maintenance, and use of software systems. This has been even more prominent with the new paradigm of service oriented computing in which service integrators, developers, and providers need to create methods, tools, and techniques to support cost-effective development and use of dependable services and service oriented applications. This workshop provides a forum for presentations and discussions of topics related to service oriented software engineering paradigm.

No abstract available.

The development of service centric systems has been recognised as an important approach for software system development. In this paper, we present a UML-based tool to identify services that can provide the functionality and satisfy properties and constraints of service centric systems specified during the design phase of the development of these systems and allows for the (re-) formulation of the design models based on the discovered services

The large number and heterogeneity of documents generated during the development of product line systems may cause difficulties to identify common and variable aspects among applications, and reuse of core assets available under the product line architecture. In this paper, we advocate the use of traceability relations to support product line engineering. We present a rule-based approach to allow for automatic generation of traceability relations between feature-based object-oriented documents. The rules are represented in an extension of XQuery and the documents are translated into XML. We present a traceability reference model with the different types of traceability relations and documents identified in our work, and describe our approach for automatic generation of traceability relations. A prototype tool has been developed to demonstrate and evaluate the approach.

The 2nd Workshop on the State of the Art in Automated Software Engineering took place on the 27 th of July 2005, at City University, London - UK. During the workshop there were seven presentations about various aspects concerning the theory and practice of automating the software engineering process. The presentations generated interesting discussions among the participants of the workshop. The title, name of the speaker, and abstract of each presentation are given below in the order that they were presented during the workshop. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the presenters and participants of the workshop who helped make the day possible and interesting. [2] S. Ishtiaq, P. O'Hearn, BI as an Assertion Language for Mutable Data Structures, In the Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, ACM, 2001. [3] J. Reynolds, Separation Logic: A Logic for Shared Mutable Data Structures, In the Proceedings of the 17th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, IEEE, 2002. Recent Evolutions of the Tobias Combinatoria.

Interface descriptions, while adequate for describing relatively simple or uniform functionality, are too abstract to properly describe entities as complex as e-commerce services or feature rich telecommunications services. The web services community has partially acknowledged this, as description languages like WSCL and OWL-S have enriched interface information with additional fragments of component semantics. In this paper, we naturally extend this progression by proposing that services be described by (abstract) executable specification behavioral models instead of, or in addition to, these other descriptive formalisms. Our argument is based on the observation that at least three capabilities, service discovery, validation, and execution monitoring, are enabled or fundamentally improved by this idea. In addition to overviewing OpenModel, our distributed modeling framework, as one possible basis for this approach, we also describe case studies that support our claims, and review the limitations of existing approaches.

Multi-stakeholder distributed systems (MSDS), such as the Internet email and instant messaging systems, and e-business Web service networks, raise new challenges for users, developers, and systems analysts. Traditional requirements engineering, validation, and debugging approaches cannot handle two primary problems of MSDS: the lack of consistent high level requirements and the ignorance problem caused by lack of communication among stakeholders. OpenModel described by R. Hall (2002) addresses this ignorance problem: each MSDS node publishes a behavioral model of itself so that remote stakeholders can reason about their interactions with it. However, stakeholders will typically wish to hold back private state information, such as user identities and cryptographic keys. An OpenModel-based validation tool must tolerate missing information and yet still give useful analyses where possible. These paper overviews OMV, a novel approach to validation in the face of partial information based upon symbolic simulation of OpenModel models. We briefly illustrate our studies of the OMV tool in the domains of email and instant messaging.

During the development of large and complex systems it is important to ensure consistency between requirements and design specifications in order to guarantee that the system being developed meets the specified requirements, or to support the reuse of existing software systems or components. We propose a knowledge base approach to assist with consistency checking of design specifications, represented as UML models, against functional requirements specifications, expressed in natural language. Our approach is goal-driven where the requirements and design specifications are represented in the knowledge base as axioms, which define goals. In order to demonstrate and evaluate the approach a prototype tool has been implemented. This tool has been designed to provide a general platform for managing consistency between software artefacts generated during different phases of software system development.

The use of the Unified Modelling Language (UML) during systems development has been growing in scale and complexity, often resulting in inconsistent specifications. We present a knowledge base goal-driven approach for consistency management of UML specifications represented as axioms which define goals. We propose an inference procedure as a flexible pattern-based abduction used to build and morph paths based on the specifications. The approach involves a two-step interaction process between the specifications: observation and comparison. Prototypes of the knowledge base engine and of a tool to map UML specifications in XMI format (eXtensible Metadata Interchange) to the knowledge base have been developed to demonstrate and evaluate the approach.

The latest Internet markup languages support the representation of structured information and vector graphics. In this paper we describe how these languages can be used to publish software engineering diagrams on the Internet. We introduce BOX, a portable, distributed and interoperable approach to browsing UML models with off-the-shelf technology. Our approach to browsing UML models leverages XML and related specifications, such as the Document Object Model (DOM), the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) and the Vector Markup Language (VML). BOX translates a UML model that is represented in XMI into VML. VML can be directly displayed in Internet browsers, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5. BOX enables software engineers to access and review UML models without the need to purchase licenses of tools that produced the models. BOX has been successfully evaluated in two industrial case studies. The case studies used BOX to make extensive domain and enterprise object models available to a large number of stakeholders over corporate intranets and the Internet. We show how XML and the BOX architecture can be applied to other software engineering notations. We also argue that the approach taken in BOX can be applied to other domains that have already started to adopt XML and have a need for graphic representation of XML information. These include browsing gene sequences, chemical molecule structures and conceptual knowledge representations. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.