Alexander Schatten

Integration of heterogeneous engineering environments for the automation systems lifecycle

Production systems will become increasingly complex to handle flexible business processes and systems. Engineering systems and tools from several sources have to cooperate for building agile component-based systems. While there are approaches for the technical integration of component-based industrial automation systems, there is only little work on the effective and efficient integration of engineering tools and systems along the automation systems lifecycle. In this paper we introduce the concept of the “Automation Service Bus” (ASB) based on technical and semantic integration concepts for general software engineering tools and systems. Based on real-world use cases from automation systems engineering we discuss the state of the art, innovation benefits and limitations of the ASB concept, and derive research issues for further work.

Concepts and models for typing events for event-based systems

Event-based systems are increasingly gaining widespread attention for applications that require integration with loosely coupled and distributed systems for time-critical business solutions. In this paper, we show concepts and models for representing, structuring and typing events. We discuss existing event models in the field and introduce the event model of the event-based system SARI for illustrating various typing concepts. The typing concepts cover topics such as type inheritance and exheritance, dynamic type inferencing, attribute types, as well as the extendibility and addressability of events. We show how the typing concepts evolved and depend on the implemented event-based systems which use different approaches for the event processing such as graphical approaches, or approaches, that use Java code, SQL code, or ECA (event-condition-action) rules.

Event Cloud - Searching for Correlated Business Events

Market players that can respond to critical business events faster than their competitors will end up as winners in the fast moving economy. Event-based systems have been developed and used to implement networked and adaptive business environments based on loosely coupled systems. In this paper, we introduce Event Cloud, a system that allows searching for business events in a variety of contexts that also take the relationships between events into consideration. Event Cloud supports knowledge workers in their daily operations in order to perform investigations and analyses based on historical events. It enables users to search in large sets of historical events which are correlated and indexed in a data staging process with an easy-to-use search interface. For improving the search results, we propose an index based ranking system. We present an architecture for the Event Cloud system, which supports a continuous near real-time integration of business events with the aim of decreasing the time it takes to make them available for searching purposes. We have fully implemented the proposed architecture and discuss implementation details.

Defect Prediction using Combined Product and Project Metrics - A Case Study from the Open Source "Apache" MyFaces Project Family

The quality evaluation of open source software (OSS) products, e.g., defect estimation and prediction approaches of individual releases, gains importance with increasing OSS adoption in industry applications. Most empirical studies on the accuracy of defect prediction and software maintenance focus on product metrics as predictors that are available only when the product is finished. Only few prediction models consider information on the development process (project metrics) that seems relevant to quality improvement of the software product. In this paper, we investigate defect prediction with data from a family of widely used OSS projects based both on product and project metrics as well as on combinations of these metrics. Main results of data analysis are (a) a set of project metrics prior to product release that had strong correlation to potential defect growth between releases and (b) a combination of product and project metrics enables a more accurate defect prediction than the application of one single type of measurement. Thus, the combined application of project and product metrics can (a) improve the accuracy of defect prediction, (b) enable a better guidance of the release process from project management point of view, and (c) help identifying areas for product and process improvement.

A Model-Driven Architecture Approach Using Explicit Stakeholder Quality Requirement Models for Building Dependable Information Systems

Decision makers in safety-critical domains rely on data from dependable information systems. Traditional time- and safety-critical information systems, such as traffic management systems, have been using proprietary point-to-point data links, which are very dependable, but also time-consuming and costly to change due to the need to manually adapt a multitude of deployed systems. In this paper we introduce a model-driven architecture (MDA) system approach that describes explicitly stakeholder quality requirements on dependable data links between systems for decision support and generates new system versions that implement these requirements. The MDA approach is expected to a) improve the quality (assurance) of system requirements; b) support more explicit feedback on the quality of intermediate models during systems development; and c) provide better auditing capabilities of the systems development process. Based on an industry case study we describe the MDA concept of the system, the development process, and how software quality can be measured and improved.

Agile Business Process Management with Sense and Respond

Market players that can respond to critical market events faster than their competitors, will end up as winners in the emerging new economy. In order to win the next phase in the never-ending market race, they will also need to integrate their business processes with those of their suppliers and business partners. Additionally, the ability to quickly adjust processes to better respond to ones customers will also become a decisive factor in the new economy. In this paper, we discuss the deficiencies of formal existing process management approaches and propose an agile process management approach based on Sense and Respond loop.RFID technology provides a wireless means to detect and identify objects. In this paper, an RFID assisted object tracking system is developed to track the object movement and further predict object positions in the assembly lines. To overcome the problems of the object tracking accuracy with certain amount of readers with omni directional aerial, a convex model for range-free cooperative object tracking is proposed in the manufacturing assembly lines. Further to enhance the assembly line efficiency, a particle filter model is developed to further process the object tracking results to improve the tracking accuracy. The proposed tracking system can also forecast the movement state of objects in the assembly lines.

Towards an Architectural Framework for Agile Software Development

One of the ideas of agile software development is to respond to changes rather than following a plan. Constantly changing businesses result in changing requirements, to be handled in the development process. Therefore, it is essential that the underlying software architecture is capable of managing agile business processes. However, criticism on agile software development states that it lacks paying attention to architectural and design issues and therefore is bound to engender suboptimal design-decisions. In this paper we propose an architectural framework for agile software development, that by explicitly separating computational, coordinational, and communicational models offers a high degree of flexibility regarding architectural and design changes introduced by agile business processes. The framework strength is facilitated by combining the characteristics and properties of state-of-the-art middleware architectural styles captured in a simple API. The benefit of our approach is a clear architectural design with minimized effects of changes the models have on each other, accompanied by an efficient realization of new business requirements.

Probing and Monitoring of WSBPEL Processes with Web Services

Todays business climate requires organizations to constantly evolve IT strategies to respond to new opportunities or threats. Tracking the achievement of business goals, objectives and strategies is increasingly used to measure and adjust the outcome of business processes. In this paper, we introduce a Web service based approach for probing WSBPEL processes. With our approach organizations are able to automatically extend existing WSBPEL processes with auditing extensions which capture audit information during process execution time. We show how to transform a WSBPEL model into an auditable model which can be used for process monitoring purposes. Based on our experience on building an auditable WSBPEL model, we propose some extensions to the WSBPEL specification

Space-Based Architectures as Abstraction Layer for Distributed Business Applications

For constantly changing businesses, it is essential that the underlying software architecture is capable of managing agile business processes and meeting future business needs. Decoupling between applications and services in distributed systems is addressed by e. g., service-oriented architectures. On the other hand, applications and its underlying middleware are still tightly coupled with respect to the middlewares architectural style. As a result of the tight coupling middleware adaptations introduced due to e. g., new business requirements can affect the application as well. In this paper we propose the concept of space-based architecture (SBA), that allows decoupling distributed applications with respect to the underlying middleware architecture by combining the characteristics and properties of state-of-the-art middleware architectural styles captured in a simple API. The benefit of our approach is minimal application adaptations in case of changing the underlying middleware architectural style, which allows for more efficient realization of new business requirements.

Monitoring the “health” status of open source web‐engineering projects

Purpose – In response to the increasing number of open‐source software (OSS) project initiatives and the increasing demand of OSS products as alternative solutions by industries, it is important for particular stakeholders such as the project host/supporter project‐leading teams, and prospective customers to determine whether a project initiative is likely to be sustainable and is worth supporting. This paper aims to propose a concept of “health” indicators and an evaluation process that can help to get a status overview of OSS projects in a timely fashion and predict project survivability based on the project data available on web repositories.Design/methodology/approach – For initial empirical evaluation of the concept, the indicators are applied to well‐known web‐based OSS projects (Apache Tomcat and Apache HTTP Server) and the results are compared with challenged projects (Apache Xindice and Apache Slide). The results are discussed with OSS experts to investigate the external validity of the indicator...