Ian Oliver

Cross-Domain Interoperability: A Case Study

We describe a case study of the behaviour of four agents using a space based communication architecture. We demonstrate that interoperability may be achieved by the agents merely describing information about themselves using an agreed upon common ontology. The case study consists of an exercise logger, a game, a mood rendered attached to audio player and phone status observing agents. The desired scenario emerges from the independent actions of the agents.

Anonymous Agent Coordination in Smart Spaces: State-of-the-Art

Development of new technologies brings people new possibilities such as smart spaces. Smart spaces can provide better user experience by allowing a user to connect new devices flexibly and to access all the information in the multi device system from any of the devices. The paper describes work-in-progress performed under a joint project of SPIIRAS and Nokia. The project is aimed at the analysis of existing anonymous agent coordination languages and adaptation of them to coordination of smart space devices.

On-the-fly ontology matching in smart spaces: a multi-model approach

Proper functioning of smart spaces demands semantic interoperability between knowledge processors connected to it. As a consequence it is required to develop models that would enable knowledge processors to translate on-the-fly between the internal and smart space ontologies. This paper presents the developed multi-model approach to the above problem, where the major elements of the selected approach are described in detail.

A Method for Mobile Terminal Platform Architecture Development

We introduce a novel architecture, called the Network-on-Terminal Architecture (NoTA), for mobile terminal platforms. This paper concentrates on the platform development and validation flow adopted for NoTA. Platform requirements are expressed as use cases that are modelled using UML2 with Telelogic’s Tau G2 tool. Models are executable so that use case behaviour can be animated. Use cases are used as test cases in the platform architecture development for which use case information is transferred as execution traces. We use CoFluent Studio tool for platform architecture specification and performance analysis. The use case execution trace is fed into a functional model that represents the computation load. NoTA is service oriented and thus the functional model consists of platform services. The computation and communication resources are modelled with a separate platform architecture model. The tool allows exploring different configurations and allocations of the functional and platform models quickly and provides extensive performance information, including power consumption.

UML-B Specification for Proven Embedded Systems Design

1 An Introduction to Formal Methods.- 2 Formally Unified System Specification Environment with UML, B and SystemC.- 3 Embedded System Design Using the PUSSEE Method.- 4 System Level Modelling and Refinement with EventB.- 5 The UML-B Profile for Formal Systems Modelling in UML.- 6 U2B.- 7 BHDL.- 8 Towards a Conceptual Framework for UML to Hardware Description Language Mappings.- 9 Interface-Based Synthesis Refinement in B.- 10 Refinement of Finite State Machines with Complementary Model Checking.- 11 Adaptive Cruise Control Case Study Design Experiment.- 12 Adaptive Cruise Controller Case Study.- 13 Formal Modelling of Electronic Circuits Using Event-B.- 14 The Echo Cancellation Unit Case Study.- 15 Results of the Mobile Design System Experiment.- 16 UML-B Specification and Hardware Implementation of a Hamming Coder/Decoder.- 17 The PUSSEE Method in Practice.- A1 Evaluation Criteria for Embedded System Design Methods.

Distributed Architecture of a Professional Social Network on Top of M3 Smart Space Solution Made in PCs and Mobile Devices Friendly Manner

The paper proposes a social network solution that has been designed to fit equally well for use at mobile devices, PCs and even other types of consumer electronics. This solution is targeted to become a core element of the personal knowledge space and the design has be been done on top of M3 smart space. The result solution will be able to pre- and post-process the collected information and perform efficient reasoning over and organization of the data. Another key advantage of the proposed social network is that it is primary targeted to support professional social communications within a geo-distributed teams working on the same project. For that the solution proposes a flexible and easily extendable set of additional services, such as a variety of conference call and virtual meeting services with logging service, sharable whiteboard, automatic maintenance of action point lists and calendars and so on. As a result the service provides users with completely new experience.

Transitioning from product line requirements to product line architecture

Software product line development is a compromise between customer requirements, existing product line architectural constraints and commercial needs. Managing variability is the key to a successful product line development. Product line models of requirements and features can be constructed that contain variation points. New products can be driven by making requirement selections from a product line model of requirements but as the product line evolves selections are constrained by the design of the existing product line architecture and the cost of making these changes. We present a set of rules that map the selection constraint values of requirements to the selection constraint values of features which in turn map on to the selection constraint values of architectural assets. We illustrate the application of the rules using a worked example.

Smart Spaces for Ubiquitously Smart Buildings

Building automation is a domain where interoperability between equipment made by different manufacturers is rare. In addition to competing standards, completely proprietary solutions are also common. This is a great challenge for implementing ‘ubiquitously smart buildings’, where building automation systems, user interfaces and services can interact seamlessly. The paper describes how a Semantic Information Broker (SIB) can be used as an enabler of interoperability, where an ecosystem of supplementary services is created through manufacturer-agnostic agents.

Deriving sound inference rules for concept diagrams

The process of designing and modelling an ontology can be difficult, especially if the user finds the syntax to be relatively inaccessible. Providing users with graphical syntax with which they can model and visualise their ontology has the potential to be helpful. Previously, we informally introduced concept diagrams for ontology visualisation and modelling. We present a case study comprising: (a) a set of axioms for an ontology, and (b) a set of theorems that follow from the axioms, together with their proofs. The proofs have been constructed so that they are, in our opinion, of an intuitive style. From these proofs, we derive a set of sound inference rules that can be used to formally reason about ontologies following the same intuitive style. This approach to designing inference rules differs from previous efforts where the primary focus has been on obtaining a set of sound and complete inference rules, rather than on intuitiveness.

Analyzing and Re-structuring Product Line Dependencies

Software product lines have proven to be successful for developing many critical software systems. Sharing thoroughly tested components can greatly improve the quality of individual products. The structuring of commonality and variability in the product line creates dependencies among features and components. Because of the dependencies, individual products may be bloated with features and components not required by the product specification. This increases complexity and resource consumption, affecting product quality negatively. We propose a method for analyzing product line dependencies for identifying unnecessary features. If these features are found, the method also addresses how to correct the situation. Our approach is demonstrated with a running example and our experiences in real industrial cases are discussed.