Francesco Gargiulo

A Semantic Driven Approach for Requirements Verification

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a key discipline for the success of software projects. Consistency, completeness, and accuracy are the requirements quality properties to be guaranteed by the verification task in RE. An overview of the actual trends in RE is briefly summarized, focusing more closely on the requirements verification quality properties. Completeness results is the most difficult property to guarantee. It is hard to capture the software behavior against the whole external context. In the last years, research has focused its attention to the application of semantic Web techniques to the different tasks of RE. The adoption of ontologies seems promising to achieve the proper level of formalism and to argue on quality properties. This paper presents a survey of the main concepts that need to be accounted for requirement verification, and proposes an ontological engineering approach to demonstrate the overlapping of requirements against the external context.

IDES Project: A New Effective Tool for Safety and Security in the Environment

In the region of Campania in south-west Italy there is growing evidence, including a World Health Organization (WHO) study of the region, that the accumulation of waste, illegal and legal, urban and industrial, has contaminated soil, water, and the air with a range of toxic pollutants including dioxins. An effective environmental monitoring system represents an important tool for an early detection of the environmental violations. The IDES Project is a Geo-environmental Intelligence System developed by the CIRA with the contribution of universities and other government bodies and it aims at implementing an advanced software and hardware platform for image, data and document analysis in order to support law enforcement investigations. The IDES main modules are: Imagery Analysis Module to monitor land-use and anthropogenic changes; Environmental GIS Module to fuse geographical and administrative information; Epidemiological domain Module; Semantic Search Module to discover information in public sources like: Blog, Social Network, Forum, Newspapers; This paper focuses on Semantic Search Module and aims to provide the greatest support to the extraction of possible environmental crimes collecting and analyzing documents from online public sources. Unlikely people denounce criminal activity to the authorities. On the other hand many people through blogs, forums and social networks every day expose the status of land degradation. In addition, journalists often, have given the interest of the public, documenting the critical environmental issues. All this unstructured information are often lost due to the difficulty to collect and analyse. The IDES Semantic Search Module is an innovative solution for aggregating of the common uneasiness and thoughts of the people able to transform and objectify the public opinion in human sensors for safety environmental monitoring. In this paper we introduce methods and technologies used in some case studies and, finally, we report some representatives results, highlighting innovative aspects of this applied research.

A semantic driven approach for requirements consistency verification

Consistency and completeness are the main quality attributes to be guaranteed in software development. Software engineering community has largely studied consistency, together with completeness, in the last decade, to improve quality of software products and to reduce costs. Different approaches have been defined to detect and manage inconsistencies in software life cycle. The adoption of ontologies seems promising to achieve the proper level of formalism and to argue on quality properties. This paper presents a survey of the main approaches to consistency in different tasks of software engineering, focusing on the requirement engineering tasks, and proposes an ontological engineering approach to detect inconsistencies among a set of requirements written in natural language.

A Semantic Driven Approach for Consistency Verification Between Requirements and FMEA

Consistency within the system life cycle is difficult to guarantee, due to the cross of different skills and requirements, often expressed by means of different languages. In particular, in safety-critical systems consistency between software requirements and safety analysis requires checks to guarantee that safety engineer needs are feasible and implemented by the system. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a systematic technique to analyze the failure modes of components, evaluating their impact and their mitigation actions, which are procedures to be implemented by operators or by the system itself (usually by the software). Although the actual efforts to centralize system information in a structured way, safety analysis is not tied in a structured manner to other systems, in particular to software. This paper proposes an automatic approach to check consistency between FMEA and software requirements with a bit effort of formalization. The approach models FMEA and software requirements with Resource Description Framework (RDF) triplets and checks their consistency on the basis of consistency rules.

An Efficient Decentralized Multidimensional Data Index: A Proposal.

The main objective of this work is the proposal of a decentralized data structure storing a large amount of data under the assumption that it is not possible or convenient to use a single workstation to host all data. The index is distributed over a computer network and the performance of the search, insert, delete operations are close to the traditional indices that use a single workstation. It is based on k-d trees and it is distributed across a network of peers, where each one hosts a part of the tree and uses message passing for communication between peers. In particular, we propose a novel version of the k-nearest neighbour algorithm that starts the query in a randomly chosen peer and terminates the query as soon as possible. Preliminary experiments have demonstrated that in about 65% of cases it starts a query in a random peer that does not involve the peer containing the root of the tree and in the 98% of cases it terminates the query in a peer that does not contain the root of the tree.

An Analytical Approach for Optimal Resilience Management in Future ATM Systems

The air transportation system is a large-scale socio-technical system and its modelling approaches emphasize the sociological dimension due to the increasing importance of collaborative decision-making processes in the future Air Traffic Management (ATM). Resilience is assuming an increasing importance within ATM, but it is difficult or even impossible to establish the resilience role in realizing the targeted performance levels of an air traffic system. This paper proposes a systematic methodology for resilience management in ATM. It introduces an analytical definition of a resilience metric for an ATM system and formally states the resilience management problem as an optimization problem. Moreover, it describes a strategy for the problem solution and provides some preliminary results in order to quantitatively prove the validity of the methodology.

Simulation Approach to the Resilience Engineering Assessment of the ATM System in Crisis Scenarios

THE increase of traffic density and typology of airspace users and aircraft operations increases the complexity of the current Air Traffic Management system and of its performance, and may lead to significant performance reductions in the presence of unexpected events. After the occurrence of an unexpected event, the analysis of Key Performance Area, such as capacity, efficiency, etc., and shortfalls in their related Key Performance Indicators at local, regional or network wide levels were made selecting the alternative scenarios and comparing them to the planned situation with normal operations. This relies on the working relationship and processes between air transportation network managers and operational Stakeholders especially during the anticipating, reacting and management phases strongly depending on their reactions to mitigate the impact on the system, and to optimize resilience in sector groups based upon the current Air Traffic Management activities. This paper describes an approach to resilience analysis in crisis scenarios, starting from the concept of Resilience Engineering and related metrics in Air Traffic Management system adopted in SESAR WPE2.21 SAFECORAM (Sharing of Authority in Failure/Emergency Condition for Resilience of Air traffic Management) project.

Modeling Approach for Resilience Engineering of the Future ATM System

The Air Traffic Management system is rapidly growing in complexity. In order to limit potential performance reductions of the system, several international research programs were started to develop new operational concepts in order to reorganize and redesign the air traffic management system in a more efficient way. An evaluation of the performance of these new operational concepts may be stated in terms of system resilience. Resilience is an approach to the analysis of the capabilities and the behavior of complex systems under nonnominal conditions. The purpose of this paper is to present the approach proposed in the SESAR JU E2.21 SAFECORAM project for the definition of a quantitative methodology for resilience evaluation of the future ATM system based on the development of a concept for task re-allocation among remaining available resources (humans and/or machines) in offnominal conditions.

Aerospace Information System based on Semantic Technonogies and Ontology Management

This paper describes a semantic search tool based on our experience in using a new lexical domain ontology for aerospace integrated with an open source general purpose ontology to support aerospace engineers in the timely semantic retrieval of the knowledge. The semantic search module represents an integrated tool dedicated to the semantic search, extraction and classification of information and knowledge in aerospace domain. It describes the implementation of a disambiguation algorithm based upon these ontologies and a new interesting graphical user interface for semantic searches is presented. Furthermore, next to the domain ontology, a taxonomy for classifying aerospace documents is also proposed. The document classification algorithm that leverages the deep integration between the proposed lexical domain ontology and taxonomy is also described. Finally, some considerations about the usage of the semantic search module by the side of domain experts, semantic experts or common users are reported.