Electrical submersible pumps are devices frequently used in off-shore oil exploration. Vibration signals analysis and expert systems technology are used for detecting faults on these motor pumps. Fault diagnosis classifiers may need to be updated or expanded. This paper proposes a domain specific language for enabling non-programmer engineers to create and adjust rule-based fault diagnosis classifiers of electrical submersible pumps.

Self-adaptive software systems monitor their operation and adapt when their requirements fail due to unexpected phenomena in their environment. This article examines the case where the environment changes dynamically over time and the chosen adaptation has to take into account such changes. In control theory, this type of adaptation is known as Model Predictive Control and comes with a well-developed theory and myriad successful applications. The article focuses on modeling the dynamic relationship between requirements and possible adaptations. It then proposes a controller that exploits this relationship to optimize the satisfaction of requirements relative to a cost function. This is accomplished through a model-based framework for designing self-adaptive software systems that can guarantee a certain level of requirements satisfaction over time by dynamically composing adaptation strategies when necessary. The proposed framework is illustrated and evaluated through two simulated systems, namely, the Meeting-Scheduling exemplar and an E-Shop.

The use of Requirements at Runtime (RRT) is an emerging research area. Many methodologies and frameworks that make use of requirements models during the execution of software can be found in the literature, but very few of them use ontologies to ground the models that are used at runtime. In this paper, we introduce the Runtime Requirements Ontology (RRO), a domain ontology that intends to represent the nature and context of RRT. Following a well-known Ontology Engineering method, we evaluate RRO using verification and validation techniques.

We have been witnessing growing interest in systems that can adapt their behavior to deal with deviations between their performance and their requirements at run-time. Such adaptive systems usually need to support some form of a feedback loop that monitors the system's output for problems and carries out adaptation actions when necessary. Being an important feature, adaptivity needs to be considered in early stages of development. Therefore, adopting a requirements engineering perspective, we have proposed an approach and a framework (both called Zanshin) for the engineering of adaptive systems based on a feedback loop architecture. As part of our framework's evaluation, we have applied the Zanshin approach to the design of an adaptive computer-aided ambulance dispatch system, whose requirements were based on a well-known case study from the literature. In this paper, we report on the application of Zanshin for the design of an adaptive computer-aided ambulance dispatch system, presenting elements of the design, as well as the results from simulations of run-time scenarios. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Complexity is now one of the major challenges for the IT industry [1]. Systems might become too complex to be managed by humans and, thus, will have to be self-managed: Self-configure themselves for operation, self-protect from attacks, self-heal from errors and self-tune for optimal performance [2]. (Self-)Adaptive systems evaluate their own behavior and change it when the evaluation indicates that it is not accomplishing the software's purpose or when better functionality and performance are possible [3]. To that end, we need to monitor the behavior of the running system and compare it to an explicit formulation of requirements and domain assumptions [4]. Feedback loops (e.g., the MAPE loop [2]) constitute an architectural solution for this and, as proposed by past research [5], should be a first class citizen in the design of such systems. We advocate that adaptive systems should be designed this way from as early as Requirements Engineering and that reasoning over requirements is fundamental for run-time adaptation. We therefore propose an approach for the design of adaptive systems based on requirements and inspired in control theory [6]. Our proposal is goal-oriented and targets softwareintensive socio-technical systems [7], in an attempt to integrate control-loop approaches with decentralized agents inspired approaches [8]. Our final objective is a set of extensions to state-of-the-art goal-oriented modeling languages that allow practitioners to clearly specify the requirements of adaptive systems and a run-time framework that helps developers implement such requirements. In this 2-page abstract paper, we summarize this approach.

Web application development has long evolved from CGI scripting in structured programming languages to a whole new discipline called Web Engineering. Today, large and complex distributed systems are being built for the web, mostly with the use of frameworks or a container-based architecture. This paper proposes a method for the design of Web applications based on the use of frameworks, including a modeling language that extends UML to build diagrams that specifically depict framework-related components.