In this paper, we propose a control for a class of multi-agent systems described by diffusion partial differential equations to solve the leader-follower consensus problem. Each group of follower agents changes according to the leader group's formation, obtaining the desired formation by applying boundary control. We use the Lyapunov direct method to prove the system is uniformly ultimately bounded. Numerical simulation results finally show the validity of the proposed control.

Process development and maintenance are fundamental jobs in process-centered engineering, e.g., software process improvement. A lot of methods have been proposed for process modeling, and many of them have dedicated to improve process reuse by means of pattern or template techniques. In this paper, we propose an approach implementing the definition of Process Template Models and Template Customization Models, as well as automated transformation from these two kinds of models to Process Instance Models, therefore facilitating the reuse-based process development. All the models are defined based on the well-accepted Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) modeling language. The generated process instances are standard BPMN models that can be manipulated and executed by all BPMN-compatible mechanisms. We have applied the proposed approach for process development and maintenance in our company, and the working efficiency is improved markedly.

Process definition is the pillar step towards process improvement. An mature (e.g., CMMI level 3 or above) software development organization should define organizational standard processes, and make their projects establish projects' defined processes through tailoring the organizational standard processes. Existing research has proposed various models and formalism for process definition and tailoring. In order to be effective and efficient in the industry fields, one approach needs to make a good balance between formality and usability. In this paper, we present a lightweight framework for establishing organizational and project processes. The framework has a concise set of notions and simple meta-models for the process definition and tailoring, and is compatible with most of the popular models and standards. We also implement a tool supporting process definition, and enactment of the project's defined process by automatically generating project plan template. We have applied the framework and tool in our company for years. The application experience shows that the framework fits the small and medium-sized organization and projects well.

The ultimate aim of business/mission software is to help implement the business value or mission imperatives. For critical business/mission applications, high-level strategies need to play a crucial role in the development and validation of software requirement, so that the requirements and the produced software can closely align with the business/mission objectives and effectively contribute to the business/mission success. In this paper, we propose a strategy-guided method for the development and validation of requirements. We firstly articulate the dimensions of strategy and concept model for connecting strategies and requirements. We then present the approaches for the requirements development and validation, based on the relationship between the elements of strategies and requirements. This strategy-guided method addresses the paradigms for both the market-oriented and customer-specific software development. We also give an example illustrating the strategy perspectives and the resulting requirements.

Software architecture design plays a crucial role for both the software and business success. Most of the existing methods conduct software architecture design driven by the key software requirements, facing the challenges of creating architectures from scratch and aligning with the high-level business goals. In this paper we propose the BASAD (Business And Software Architecture co-Design) method to facilitate alleviating the difficulty of software architecture design and achieving the high-level business goals. The method addresses the business and software architecture design in an integrated process from a systems engineering perspective, leveraging the SysML and UML modeling languages and the automated model transformation from the business architectures to the software architectures, so that provide pragmatic support for the architecture co-design.

Software architectures are considered the key means to manage the complexity of large-scale systems from the high abstraction levels and system-wide perspectives. The traditional software design methodologies and the emerging architecture design methods still fall short of coping with the architectural complexity and difficulty in practice. The recent research on the architecture design decisions mostly focuses on its representation, providing little support for the architecture design task itself. In this paper we propose a decision-oriented architecture design approach ABC/DD, based on the decision-abstraction and issue-decomposition principles specific to the architecture level design of software. The approach models software architecture from the perspective of design decisions, and accomplishes the architecture design from eliciting architecturally significant design issues to exploiting and making decisions on the solutions for these issues. We illustrate the application of the approach with two real-life large-scale software-intensive projects, showing that the decision-oriented approach accommodates the characteristics and demands of the architecture level, and facilitates the design of architecture and the capture of the essential decisions for large complex systems.

Software architectures are considered crucial because they are the earliest blueprints for target products and at the right level for achieving system-wide qualities. Existing methods of architecture design still face the challenge of bridging the gap between software requirements and architectures in practice. The emerging methods that focus on design decisions and rationale provide little support for deriving target architectures. In this paper we propose a decision- centric architecture design approach, which models issues, solutions, decisions, and rationale as the core elements of architecture design and the key notions to direct the derivation of target architectures. The approach transits from requirements to architectures through a process including issue eliciting, solution exploiting, solution synthesizing, and architecture deciding. We implement the automated synthesis of candidate architecture solutions from various issue solutions, and provide a way to capture comprehensive design decisions and rationale during this design process. We finally illustrate the applicability of this approach with a case study.

Mission-critical software claims safe and robust adaptations that comply with rigorous criteria of multiple critical quality attributes. Existing adaptation approaches pay little attention to comprehensively capture mission goals and explicitly specify adaptation requirements. We propose an approach to using scenario-based analysis to elicit and specify the criteria of multiple quality attributes as adaptation invariants, and design corresponding architecture variants as facilities implementing adaptations. We also present how to make adaptation decisions at runtime.