Building Information Modeling (BIM) has advanced the construction industry from simple 2D/3D CAD to semantically rich, object-oriented, and visually intuitive modeling. However, unlike, e.g., the UML or SysML, BIM's modeling formalisms lack universal applicability and full life cycle coverage, confining its use largely to architectural design. Key trades like building control remain insufficiently integrated, leading to inefficiencies and misaligned design and operational requirements. This paper presents an ecosystem of domain-specific modeling languages (DSML) integrated with BIM, to expand its capabilities to additional trades such as building control. By embedding operational requirements (cf. the building control system installation) during the design phase by integrating them into the BIM model, the subsequent application of model-driven deployment ensures alignment with operational objectives. Validation in a Living Lab at the University of Innsbruck highlights the approach's benefits, including faster commissioning and improved energy efficiency, representing a step toward comprehensive, BIM-based building design and operation.

Threat intelligence sharing offers a promising discipline to bolster knowledge and situational awareness amidst the rapid emergence of new cyber threats. Numerous platforms in the security solutions market enable effective and targeted sharing of threat intelligence among organizations. However, there is limited knowledge of the diffusion and use of threat intelligence platforms within companies, public authorities, and universities worldwide. To meet this challenge, we conducted an exploratory global survey of 118 security experts from companies, public authorities, and universities. Our findings show that threat intelligence sharing platforms are becoming more mature, evidenced by an increase in their prevalence and the utilization of their functionalities within the threat intelligence life cycle.

This paper analyzes Large Language Models (LLMs) with regard to their programming exercise generation capabilities. Through a survey study, we defined the state of the art, extracted their strengths and weaknesses and finally proposed an evaluation matrix, helping researchers and educators to decide which LLM is the best fitting for the programming exercise generation use case. We also found that multiple LLMs are capable of producing useful program-ming exercises. Nevertheless, there exist challenges like the ease with which LLMs might solve exercises generated by LLMs. This paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on the integration of LLMs in education.

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) frameworks empower developers to swiftly define and provision their infrastructure with a single click. However, the domain-specific languages (DSLs) utilized for coding the infrastructure often lean towards provider specificity rather than being application-centric. This results in increased developer effort, as they are compelled to duplicate data when deploying serverless functions across diverse regions and providers within federated FaaS environments. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce CODE, a framework engineered to streamline the deployment of functions in federated FaaS settings. CODE facilitates automatic deployment directly from the storage of any provider, eliminating the need for additional development effort to upload or copy deployment packages between disparate providers. Aligned with the guiding principle of “code once, deploy everywhere”, CODE adopts a three-level hierarchy: function → providers → cloud regions. This architectural approach dramatically reduces the lines of code (LoC) in IaC scripts by up to 9.23× when contrasted with prevailing IaC frameworks such as Terraform and Serverless Framework. Additionally, CODE’s unified storage interface slashes LoC by up to 81.8%, both within CODE itself and when coding functions that use storage from providers such as AWS and GCP. In our comprehensive evaluation, we assessed the correlation between deployment package size and deployment time for various functions within a real-world serverless workflow across four regions of AWS and GCP. Our findings indicate that AWS deployment packages are significantly larger, often in the tens of megabytes, compared to GCP. Despite the larger size, AWS deploys these packages up to 6× faster than GCP.

The assessment of source code in university education is a central and important task for lecturers of programming courses. In doing so, educators are confronted with growing numbers of students having increasingly diverse prerequisites, a shortage of tutors, and highly dynamic learning objectives. To support lecturers in meeting these challenges, the use of automated programming assessment systems (APASs), facilitating formative assessments by providing timely, objective feedback, is a promising solution. Measuring the effectiveness and success of these platforms is crucial to understanding how such platforms should be designed, implemented, and used. However, research and practice lack a common understanding of aspects influencing the success of APASs. To address these issues, we have devised a success model for APASs based on established models from information systems as well as blended learning research and conducted an online survey with 414 students using the same APAS. In addition, we examined the role of mediators intervening between technology-, system- or self-related factors, respectively, and the users' satisfaction with APASs. Ultimately, our research has yielded a model of success comprising seven constructs influencing user satisfaction with an APAS.

In the last couple of years, organizations have demonstrated an increasing willingness to share data, information and intelligence regarding emerging threats to collectively protect against today’s sophisticated cyber attacks. Accordingly, several vendors started to implement software solutions that facilitate this exchange and appear under the name cyber threat intelligence sharing platforms. However, recent investigations have shown that these platforms differ significantly in their functional scope and often only provide threat data instead of the promised actionable intelligence. Moreover, it is unclear to what extent the platforms implement the expected intelligence cycle processes. In order to close this gap, we investigate the state-of-the-art in scientific literature and analyze the functional scope of nine threat intelligence sharing platforms with respect to the intelligence cycle. Our study provides a comprehensive list of software functions that should be implemented by cyber threat intelligence sharing platforms in order to support the intelligence cycle to generate actionable threat intelligence.

The emergence of digital business ecosystems (DBEs) has impacted the industry tremendously. Participating in DBEs enables enterprises to offer their customers a comprehensive product and service portfolio while focusing on its core competencies. Moreover, DBEs allow enterprises to leverage new sales channels and directly access additional markets. The discipline of information technology (IT) governance is responsible to ensure that IT sustains and extends enterprise objectives. However, it is currently unclear how IT governance needs to be adapted and reorganized within DBEs to handle multiple self-contained enterprises. Therefore, we clarify the required IT governance redesign based on the results of interviews with 38 experts from 18 industries. The results reveal how IT governance is currently implemented within the industry and show its required adaptations, reorganizations, and challenges.

The digital transformation affects longstanding business models and leads to competition not only between enterprises but also between supply chains and networks. The concept of digital business ecosystems (DBEs) allows enterprises to concentrate on network co-creation and co-evolution of bundled services and products across enterprise boundaries. This study investigates the status of existing DBEs and their maturity. We interviewed 28 experts, reviewed more than 7,108 publications, and derived a maturity model from the obtained results. This maturity model helps practitioners to identify opportunities for improvement in their collaboration within DBEs and help researchers to assess and compare the current maturity level of existing DBEs.

The ongoing digital transformation affects longstanding business models and creates opportunities for new ones. Business IT alignment plays a crucial role in this digital transformation. Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is designed to support and improve this alignment with the help of enterprise architecture (EA) models. With the introduction of new technologies such as the Internet of Things, companies are seeking new bundled or hybrid business models that combine services and products from different providers. Therefore, enterprises have to shift their focus on the management of business ecosystems. This study aims to provide a precise analysis of a practitioner's perspective to evaluate the relevance and capabilities of inter-enterprise architecture (IEA) models for the management of business ecosystems. We surveyed 268 practitioners in the field of EAM. Our results show compelling insights concerning the relevance of IEA models for the management of business ecosystems. Our analysis outline advantages, challenges, and suggestions for improvement within the industry.

IT Landscape models are representing the real-world IT infrastructure of a company. They include hardware assets such as physical servers and storage media, as well as virtual components like clusters, virtual machines and applications. These models are a critical source of information in numerous tasks, including planning, error detection and impact analysis. The responsible stakeholders often struggle to keep such a large and densely connected model up-to-date due to its inherent size and complexity, as well as due to the lack of proper tool support. Even though modeling techniques are very suitable for this domain, existing tools do not offer the required features, scalability or flexibility. In order to solve these challenges and meet the requirements that arise from this application domain, we combine domain-driven modeling concepts with scalable graph-based repository technology and a custom language for model-level queries. We analyze in detail how we synthesized these requirements from the application domain and how they relate to the features of our repository. We discuss the architecture of our solution which comprises the entire data management stack, including transactions, queries, versioned persistence and metamodel evolution. Finally, we evaluate our approach in a case study where our open-source repository implementation is employed in a production environment in an industrial context, as well as in a comparative benchmark with an existing state-of-the-art solution.

This article introduces a new method for knowledge-based security testing by logic programming and the related tool implementation for model-based non-functional security testing of web applications. Our method helps to overcome the current prevalent focus on functional instead of non-functional (or negative) requirements as well as the required high level of security knowledge when performing non-functional security testing. It addresses issues like considering non-functional requirements for testing, managing the virtually infinite amount of negative security test cases, advancing non-functional security testing away from its prevalent penetration testing-like style, and making non-functional security testing feasible for testers that are not experts in security via a security knowledge base. The method and its model-based tool implementation are evaluated in two studies, which show the method’s effectiveness in detecting vulnerabilities in web applications and thus, also its value in making software system more secure.

Industry 4.0 has become an increasing driver of change in the manufacturing industry. However, companies are struggling with the often risky and expensive IT transformation projects that are needed to reach full automation of the sales, production and logistics cycle. We observed a lack of research on the practice of modeling and planning IT transformations towards Industry 4.0. To form the basis of research in this area, we conducted a series of expert interviews on the topic of enterprise architecture transformation planning in the context of Industry 4.0. As a result, we identified several pressing challenges that need to be addressed by organizations to successfully model, plan, and execute such IT transformations. This paper contributes to theory by identifying problems and potential design artifacts that are able to mitigate these problems.

Establishing and operating an Information Security Management System (ISMS) to protect information values and information systems is in itself a challenge for larger enterprises and small and medium sized businesses alike. A high level of automation is required to reduce operational efforts to an acceptable level when implementing an ISMS. In this paper we present the ADAMANT framework to increase automation in information security management as a whole by establishing a continuous risk-driven and context-aware ISMS that not only automates security controls but considers all highly interconnected information security management tasks. We further illustrate how ADAMANT is suited to establish an ISO 27001 compliant ISMS for small and medium-sized enterprises and how not only the monitoring of security controls but a majority of ISMS related activities can be supported through automated process execution and workflow enactment.

Domain specific languages (DSLs) are widely used in practice and investigated in software engineering research. But so far, language workbenches do not provide sufficient built-in decision support for language design and improvement. Controlled experiments have the potential to provide appropriate, data-driven decision support for language engineers and researchers to compare different language features with evidence-based feedback. This paper provides an integrated end-to-end tool environment to perform controlled experiments in DSL engineering. The experiment environment is built on the basis and integrated into the language workbench Meta Programming System (MPS). The environment not only supports language design but also all steps of experimentation, i.e., planning, operation, analysis & interpretation, as well as presentation & package. The tool environment is presented by means of a running example experiment comparing the time taken to create system acceptance tests for web applications in two different DSLs.

Model-based security testing relies on models to test whether a software system meets its security requirements. It is an active research field of high relevance for industrial applications, with many approaches and notable results published in recent years. This article provides a taxonomy for model-based security testing approaches. It comprises filter criteria (i.e. model of system security, security model of the environment and explicit test selection criteria) as well as evidence criteria (i.e. maturity of evaluated system, evidence measures and evidence level). The taxonomy is based on a comprehensive analysis of existing classification schemes for model-based testing and security testing. To demonstrate its adequacy, 119 publications on model-based security testing are systematically extracted from the five most relevant digital libraries by three researchers and classified according to the defined filter and evidence criteria. On the basis of the classified publications, the article provides an overview of the state of the art in model-based security testing and discusses promising research directions with regard to security properties, coverage criteria and the feasibility and return on investment of model-based security testing. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Large organizations critically rely on their IT infrastructure. So called Enterprise Architecture (EA) models are often created to understand how the IT supports the business and used to optimize the IT and align it with the business. However, the models grow very large and are hard to keep up-to-date. Current approaches focus on automated data collection to tackle this problem, which is not feasible in many situations. In this paper we present a semi-automated EA documentation method and tool support that tackles this problem and takes the organizational contexts into account.

The ever increasing need for businesses to ensure compliance with various laws and regulations as well as internal and external policies increasingly requires businesses to manage a plethora of documentation on different business security requirements. However, business security requirement documentation often suffers from quality deficiencies and faults due to negligence, inconsistencies, conflicts or unclear responsibilities in globally distributed businesses. A key factor to successfully address these deficiencies and to support continuous quality improvement of business security requirements documentation is to know exactly what faults to look for in a structured manner. Based on a think-aloud study, we identify and categorize specific quality deficiencies that can be found in the documentation of business security requirements and classify the faults that might cause them. We conclude by proposing a taxonomy that covers the specification, interaction, and life-cycle faults that are at the root of observable failures in the documentation of business security requirements.

Context: In modern systems, like cyber-physical systems, where software and physical services are interacting, safety, security or performance play an important role. In order to guarantee the correct interoperability of such systems, with respect to functional and non-functional requirements, integration testing is an effective measure to achieve this. Model-based testing moreover not only enables early definition and validation, but also test automation. This makes it a good choice to overcome urgent challenges of integration testing. Objective: Many publications on model-based integration testing (MBIT) approaches can be found. Nevertheless, a study giving a systematic overview on the underlying software paradigms, measures for guiding the integration testing process as well as non-functional requirements they are suitable for, is missing. The aim of this paper is to find and synthesize the relevant primary studies to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current state of model-based integration testing. Method: For synthesizing the relevant studies, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) according to the guidelines of Kitchenham. Results: The systematic search and selection retrieved 83 relevant studies from which data has been extracted. Our review identified three assessment criteria for guiding the testing process, namely static metrics, dynamic metrics and stochastic &random. In addition it shows that just a small fraction considers non-functional requirements. Most approaches are for component-oriented systems. Conclusion: Results from the SLR show that there are two major research gaps. First, there is an accumulated need for approaches in the MBIT field that support non-functional requirements, as they are gaining importance. Second, means for steering the integration testing process, especially together with automation, need to evolve.

Maintaining a high quality enterprise architecture (EA) model that is up-to-date and consistent is a difficult but crucial task. The reasons for this difficulty are the size and complexity of EA models, frequent changes in the architecture and the challenge of collecting EA data from different stakeholders in large organizations. In our research project Living IT-Landscape Models we are working towards a tighter synchronization between EA models and what they represent in the real world, thus increasing the model actuality and consistency. With our previous work we have established semi-automated processes for EA data collection and quality assurance. To support these processes an implementing EAM tool needs to be able work with contextual information that is not typically stored alongside the EA models. In the paper at hand we describe a meta-model that incorporates the required context information and can form the basis for EAM tools that support i) recurring data collection from data sources, ii) maintaining relations from imported elements to their sources, iii) storing actuality related characteristics for triggering updates, and iv) identifying properties used to avoid duplicate entries. Related work has acknowledged the relevance of the problem, however no comprehensive approaches to for automating EA model maintenance have been presented yet.

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM), and in particular IT--landscape management try to model the IT- and business elements of a company, in order to analyze its efficiency towards supporting business goals, optimize business--IT alignment, and to plan future IT--transformation as well as IT--standardization. A major challenge in this field is the elicitation of infrastructure information from run--time systems, e.g., to answer the question which servers provide services to a specific information system. Capturing this data is a time consuming manual task which leads to quickly outdated information. Similar to traditional hardware, cloud infrastructure needs to be documented in an EA modeling order to gain insight on its relationships with business information systems and ultimately the business goals. The aim of our research in this area is the automatic integration of various runtime information sources into an EAM view. The overall goal is to minimize manual work to keep enterprise architecture information up--to--date. This enables enterprise architects to make timely and precise decisions. In this work we focus on how information on the cloud infrastructure can be seamlessly integrated into an EA view. Making the cloud visible for enterprise architects is especially important to meet legal (privacy) requirements, on the storage and processing location of data. We present a conceptual approach for the information integration problem, and introduce our prototypical implementation with the open--source infrastructure cloud implementation Eucalyptus, and the open--source enterprise architecture management tool iteraplan.

The new generation of open networked IT systems poses particular challenges to software engineering due to their evolving nature and their high quality requirements. In particular, the management of service oriented systems requires the integration of perspectives from IT management, software engineering and systems operation and a systematic way to handle changes. In this paper we will present the core ideas of Living Models - a novel paradigm of model-based development, management and operation of evolving service oriented systems. A core concern of Living Models is to support the cooperation of stakeholders from IT management, software engineering and systems operation by providing appropriate model-based abstractions and the fostering of interdependencies. Based on this idea the running services together with their modelling environments constitute the basic unit of quality management and evolution. Living Models provides a coherent view of the quality status of the system (integrating the perspectives of all stakeholders) which evolves together with the running systems. This comes along with a software engineering process in which change is a first-class citizen.

Developing, maintaining and operating large IT- systems is a complex and challenging task. Model-driven approaches can help to manage this complexity. However, during the life time of a system the models are not static but evolve through adaption to system changes or extensions. Therefore also models have to be organised and stored in a structured way. A model repository can manage the evolution of these models. However there are more complex requirements compared to classical source code or document repositories: Different modelling tools are involved, the consistency between models must be maintained, and finally, since various stakeholders are involved, changes must be propagated between models. In this paper we analyse these requirements and elaborate the basic architectural concepts for a Living Models infrastructure that supports the evolution of models.

In this paper we focus on the losses related to information and IT security incidents. The loss dimension in terms of business impacts is often treated only superficially in current standards, best practices and the research literature. The main focus lies often on the impacts on properties of information and services like confidentiality, integrity and availability. We make a step in the direction of filling this gap by developing a more systematic taxonomy of losses. For this purpose publicly announced security incidents have been analysed using cause- consequence diagrams to identify different types of losses. The identified causes of incidents and the resulting types of losses have been classified using an enterprise model to distinguish different levels of abstraction. This exploratory and descriptive research yielded a) a preliminary taxonomy of losses related to security incidents, b) a validation of the enterprise model used as a frame for the analysis and c) different paths of propagation of causes of incidents.

In this paper we extend a model-based approach to security management with concepts and methods that provide a possibility for quantitative assessments. For this purpose we introduce security metrics and explain how they are aggregated using the underlying model as a frame. We measure numbers of attack of certain threats and estimate their likelihood of propagation along the dependencies in the underlying model. Using this approach we can identify which threats have the strongest impact on business security objectives and how various security controls might differ with regard to their effect in reducing these threats.

This paper describes an approach and a tool for testing workflows defined in microsoft's workflow foundation (MS-WF). As an integrative part of the Microsoft-.net 3.0 framework MS-WF was widely accepted as one of the major workflow development tool kits and finds rich industrial application. Lacking testing-facilities in MS-WF and the big demand for testing business critical workflows led to the development of 'Workflow-Inspector (WI), a tool enhancing MS-WF with end-user applicable test-facilities. WI is a joint project among the University of Innsbruck and Telekom Austria.

The usage control model (UCON) has been proposed to augment traditional access control models by integrating authorizations, obligations, and conditions and providing the properties of decision continuity and attribute mutability. Several recent work have applied UCON to support security requirements in different computing environments such as resource sharing in collaborative computing systems and data control in remote platforms. In this paper we identify two individual but interrelated problems of the original UCON model and recent implementations: oversimplifying the concept of usage session of the model, and the lack of comprehensive ongoing enforcement mechanism of implementations. We extend the core UCON model with continuous usage sessions thus extensively augment the expressiveness of obligations in UCON, and then propose a general, continuity-enhanced and configurable usage control enforcement engine. Finally we explain how our approach can satisfy flexible security requirements with an implemented prototype for a healthcare information system.

With respect to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA's) paradigm, the core Role Based Access Control (RBAC) has several limitations. In SOA, permissions to execute web services are not assigned statically to roles but are associated with a set of Perm

In this paper we present a novel approach for the specification of access rights in a service oriented architecture. Being part of the SECTET framework for model driven security for B2B-workflows, our specification language SECTET-PL for permissions is influenced by the OCL specification language and is interpreted in the context of UML models. Concerning the technological side, SECTET-PL specifications are translated into platform independent XACML permissions interpreted by a security gateway.

With respect to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA's) paradigm, the core Role Based Access Control (RBAC) has several limitations. In SOA, permissions to execute web services are not assigned statically to roles but are associated with a set of Permission Assignment Constraints (PAC) upon the fulfilment of which a role is assigned a permission to execute a web service. Further, the RBAC does not support partial inheritance which is an integral requirement in SOA. A major challenge in SOA is the inheritance of permissions associated with PAC in the presence of role hierarchies. This contribution has three objectives. First we propose an extension to Role Based Access Control [29], Constraint based RBAC (CRBAC), in order to make RBAC applicable into the dynamic environment of SOA. We then present SECTET-PL [31], a high-level language for the specification of PAC. Being part of the SECTET-framework for model-driven security for B2B-workflows, SECTET-PL is a policy language influenced by OCL [23] and interpreted in the context of UML models. Finally, using Model Driven Architecture (MDA) [18] paradigm, we describe the integration of business requirements and security requirements at the metalevel. The high-level security (CRBAC) models are transformed to low-level web services standard artefacts with the help of Eclipse Modelling Framework and OpenArchitectureWare.

To guarantee the consistency and integrity of dynamic constraints, this paper extends our Constraint based Role Based Access Control (CRBAC) [1] model for the concept of Administrative RBAC (ARBAC) [14] with the specification of dynamic administrative constraints at a higher level of abstraction. The CRBAC uses SECTET-PL, a predicative language for the specification of access rights based on the concepts of RBAC. SECTET-PL is part of the SECTET-framework for model-driven security for B2B workflows.

The many conflicting technical, organizational, legal and domain-level constraints make the implementation of secure, inter-organizational workflows a very complex task, which is bound to low-level technical knowledge and error prone. The SECTINO project provides a framework for the realization and the high-level management of security-critical workflows based on the paradigm of model driven security. In our case the models are translated into runtime artefacts that configure a target reference architecture based on Web services technologies. In this paper we focus on the global workflow model, which captures the message exchange protocol between partners cooperating in a distributed environments well as basic security patterns. We show how the model maps to workflow and security components of the hosting environments at the partner nodes.

Due to increasing interconnection, IT systems are confronted with more and more attacks. To address this problem, we have to consider security requirements from the beginning of the system development. In early phases of system development, it is common to use a hybrid system view which is based on an object oriented modeling of the application core and the specification of use cases. We present an extension of this process for security-critical systems. We show a methodical approach for the development of security-critical systems and the modeling of security aspects in the application core with an extension of the Unified Modeling Language for secure systems development, UMLsec. Furthermore, we introduce security use cases for the development of security aspects in conjunction with behavioral modeling.

Abstract This paper presents an algebraic semantics schema for object oriented languages including concurrent features. A class, the basic syntactic unit of an object oriented language, in our approach denotes a set of algebras determined by an algebraic specification. This specification describes a system of (possibly active) objects interacting via method calls. Extending other approaches, structured classes are modelled in a fully compositional way. This means that the semantic counterpart of class combinators such as inheritance and clientship are specification combinators. A model of records with sharing allows us to describe typical object oriented features like object sharing, inheritance polymorphism and dynamic binding. For modelling the dynamic behaviour of objects, we rely on an algebraic description of labelled transition systems.