Gabriella Gigante

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.

Dependability issues in visual-haptic interfaces

Dependability of a system is commonly referred to its reliability, its availability and its maintenability (RAM), but when this concept is applied to user interfaces there is no common agreement on what aspects of user-system interaction are related to a satisfactory RAM level for the whole system. In particular, when dealing with haptic systems, interface dependability may become a crucial issue in medical and in military domains when life-critical systems are to be manipulated or where costly remote control operations are to be performed, like in industrial processes control or in aerospace/automotive engineering and manufacturing. This paper discusses the role of dependability in haptic user interfaces, aiming to the definition of a framework for the assessment of the usability and dependability properties of haptic systems and their possible correlations. The research is based on the analysis of a visual-haptic-based simulator targeted to maintenance activity training for aerospace industry which is taken as a case study. As a result, we propose a novel framework able to collect and then process relevant interaction data during the execution of haptic tasks, enabling to analyze dependability vs. usability correlations.

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.

Optimal Configuration Model of a Fleet of Unmanned Vehicles for Interoperable Missions

It is largely recognized that many missions may be easily performed by unmanned vehicles both in military and in civil domain. Literature shows a large inventory of their applications with operational and logistical challenges. Comparing different types of missions, a multi-vehicle approach is able to guarantee better performances and minimum costs, as long as they are coordinated. Thus, the problem to guarantee the better platform configuration to perform the mission becomes architecting the best fleet. This paper proposes an approach to identify the best fleet to perform an envelope of missions, by transforming the architecting activity in an optimization problem. A classification of unmanned vehicles missions and the formal definition of the problem are proposed.

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.

A SVM-based detection approach for GPS spoofing attacks to UAV

Today, the necessity of strong cyber security measures is self-evident. The proliferation of cyber attacks is causing increasing damage to companies, governments and individuals and it is not just the number of cyber security attacks that is increasing: the severity of these attacks is on the rise as well. In particular, aviation systems and Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems are of highest importance in terms of safety and security. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to the detection of Global Positioning System (GPS) spoofing attack to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based on the analysis of state estimation using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) as a tool for the anomaly detection.

Risk Assessment to Support Liability Allocation Performed by the System GUI Analysis

Main productive, administrative and social organizations represent interconnected socio-technical systems, namely, complex systems constituted by technical artifacts, social artifacts and humans. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a system interaction approach which allows different actors (human, software, …) of involved organizations to interact with each other by manipulating graphical objects. Often, these complex systems require sophisticated interfaces characterized by dynamic components which can provide information about system behavior. In this paper we present a research in progress, related to the integration of a paradigm borrowed by risk theory, within a tool for the evaluation of software systems through the analysis of visual components of its interface. The idea is to support organizations to define and properly allocate liability among system actors in order to identify recurring errors to possibly evaluate a potential reengineering of the system.

Sampling UAV Most Informative Diagnostic Signals

Detecting and diagnosing failures of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles during their mission is a key challenge for their effective deployment. On-board diagnostic systems are able to provide a huge amount of information about the state of the vehicle during the flight, by monitoring sensors, software, and hardware components. However, the ability of processing such data in an online manner is a serious obstacle to a timely detection and diagnosis of failures. This paper proposes a method to progressively focus the data collection on signals providing the most reliable information about the system failure probability, so as to reduce considerably the number of false alarms and/or undetected failures, and to ease the online data processing. We set a simulation experiment showing that the proposed approach is able to select the most informative subset of signals in few iterations in an effective and efficient way.

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.