International audience

International audience

Product Line Architecture (PLA) is the main tangible element shared by all products of a Software Product Line (SPL); it covers common functionality and the required variability of SPL products. Responding to industrial practice, this paper proposes a reactive refactoring bottom-up process to build a PLA from existing similar software product architectures of a domain, expressed by UML logical views. An architecture is represented by a connected graph or valid architectural configuration (P, R), where P and R represent components and connectors of the product. This process constructs a graph (RG) for each product, organized by levels, containing intermediate valid configurations or connected induced sub-graphs of (P, R). A candidate PLA is automatically constructed followed by an optimization process to obtain the PLA using the domain quality model. The refactoring process is applied to a case study in the robotics industry domain. Automatic parts of the process are tool supported.

This paper demonstrates the design of a fault- tolerant ubiquitous MM computing system. Our ubiquitous multimodal multimedia (MM) computing system selects the appropriate media and modalities based on the user's context and user's profile. This paper demonstrates the design of a fault-tolerant ubiquitous MM computing system. The requirements analysis is undertaken by considering the quality attributes desired by different stakeholders. We use the attribute-driven design method in the requirement analysis and Architecture Tradeoffs Analysis Method in evaluating the system architecture. In this paper we conduct all tests and explain results through stochastic colored Petri Net specification, citing pre- and postcondition of each scenario.

A design methodology for multimodal-controlled application has been developed using Wizard-of-Oz simulations as the principal mechanism for evaluating and getting input for dialogue design. This methodology may enable multimodal application developers to support dialogues that are optimal with respect to naturalness, especially on a pragmatic level, given the technical restrictions.

This paper proposes a solution based on forward error recovery, oriented towards providing dependability of composite Web services. While exploiting their possible support for fault tolerance (e.g., transactional support at the level of each service), the proposed solution has no impact on the autonomy of the individual Web services, our solution lies in system structuring in terms of co-operative atomic actions that have a well-defined behavior, both in the absence and in the presence of service failures. More specifically, we define the notion of Web Service Composition Action (WSCA), based on the Coordinated Atomic Action concept, which allows structuring composite Web services in terms of dependable actions. Fault tolerance can then be obtained as an emergent property of the aggregation of several potentially non-dependable services. We further introduce a framework enabling the development of composite Web services based on WSCAs, consisting of an XML-based language for the specification of WSCAs.

We propose a new solution to the inverse kinematic problem of redundant robots subject to a set of criteria and constraints. First, a study of existing methods leads us to develop an on-line algorithm based on an adaptive neural network. This solution needs only a few iterations to converge, offers substantially better accuracy, verifies the repeatability propriety for the closed trajectory and avoids the computation of the inverse or pseudoinverse Jacobian matrix. Our approach guarantees a good minimization of any performance criterion subject to either equality or inequality constraints while achieving the end-effector task. Then, our method can solve the inverse kinematic problem of a redundant robot for it to follow a desired trajectory while avoiding moved or fixed obstacles.

An interactive specification development environment is presented in which a number of development methodologies and specification languages can be supported. Within the environment, design concepts and strategies are captured by the application of development operators, i.e. operators which enable the incremental construction and modification of specifications.The focus of this paper is to investigate the language independence feature of the environment, based on the work done in the Esprit project ICARUS. A set of operators enabling an object-oriented approach to specification development are instantiated for both the algebraic specification language Glider and the model-based specification language Z. These operators are illustrated by the development of a case study of a simple card game in both Glider and Z.

A framework allowing the expression of both the incremental construction of a specification and the development process behind the construction (decisions and their rationale) is proposed. A data structure composed of a workplan and the product is introduced and used to model a specification development. The availability of development operators is a critical point of the specification development model. Operators encapsulate general problem solving strategies. Development operators are defined by their parallel action on the workplan, the product, and the links between them. The implementation of the proposed approach requires an environment managing the workplan and the current specification being built. The operators will be chosen via menus dynamically defined according to the current task type.>