Richard Mordinyi

Engineering project management using the Engineering Cockpit: A collaboration platform for project managers and engineers

Automation Systems Engineering projects typically depend on contributions from several engineering disciplines. While available software tools are strong in supporting each individual engineering discipline, there is very little work on engineering process management and monitoring across multi-discipline engineering projects. In this paper, we present the Engineering Cockpit, a social-network-style collaboration platform for automation system engineering project managers and engineers, which provides a role-specific single entry point for project monitoring, collaboration, and management. We present a prototype implementation of the Engineering Cockpit and discuss its benefits and limitations based on the feedback of our industry partners. Major results are that the Engineering Cockpit increases the team-awareness of engineers and provides project-specific information across engineering discipline boundaries.

SAMOA - A Semi-Automated Ontology Alignment Method for Systems Integration in Safety-Critical Environments

The integration of heterogeneous data sources with even heterogeneous semantic meanings poses a challenge for data and system integrators. Ontology Alignment (OA) tries to identify similarities between heterogeneous ontologies and to automatically create suitable mappings for transformation. However, the usage of standard OA approach for safety-critical domains needs further investigation.In this paper, we describe a semi-automated ontology alignment approach (SAMOA) well-suitable for integration scenarios of safety-critical applications. The major contribution of our approach is the modeling differentiation between individual system knowledge and generic domain-specific knowledge.We evaluate our approach by providing a typical use case example from the Air Traffic Management (ATM) domain. In addition we analyze to what extent the SAMOA approach can be supported by state-of-the-art OA approaches.

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.

Semantic Service Matchmaking in the ATM Domain Considering Infrastructure Capability Constraints

In a service-oriented environment business processes flexibly build on software services provided by systems in a network. A key design challenge is the semantic matchmaking of business processes and software services in two steps: 1. Find for one business process the software services that meet or exceed the BP requirements; 2. Find for all business processes the software services that can be implemented within the capability constraints of the underlying network, which poses a major problem since even for small scenarios the solution space is typically very large. In this chapter we analyze requirements from mission-critical business processes in the Air Traffic Management (ATM) domain and introduce an approach for semi-automatic semantic matchmaking for software services, the “System-Wide Information Sharing” (SWIS) business process integration framework. A tool-supported semantic matchmaking process like SWIS can provide system designers and integrators with a set of promising software service candidates and therefore strongly reduces the human matching effort by focusing on a much smaller space of matchmaking candidates. We evaluate the feasibility of the SWIS approach in an industry use case from the ATM domain.

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.

Semantic Event Correlation Using Ontologies

Complex event processing (CEP) is a software architecture paradigm that aims at low latency, high throughput, and quick adaptability of applications for supporting and improving event-driven business processes. Events sensed in real time are the basic information units on which CEP applications operate and react in self-contained decision cycles based on defined processing logic and rules. Event correlation is necessary to relate events gathered from various sources for detecting patterns and situations of interest in the business context. Unfortunately, event correlation has been limited to syntactically identical attribute values instead of addressing semantically equivalent attribute meanings. Semantic equivalence is particularly relevant if events come from organizations that use different terminologies for common concepts. In this paper, we introduce an approach that uses semantic technologies, in our case ontologies, for the definition of event correlations to facilitate semantic event correlation derived from semantic equivalence, inherited meaning, and relationships between different terms or entities. We evaluate the practical application of three types of semantic correlation based on use cases that are relevant to the real-world domain of industrial production automation. Major results of the evaluation show that semantic correlation enables functions for CEP that traditional syntactic correlation does not allow at all.

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.

Foundations for a Model-Driven Integration of Business Services in a Safety-Critical Application Domain

Current architectures for systems integration provide means for forming agile business processes by manually or dynamically configuring the components.However, a major challenge in the safety-critical Air Traffic Management (ATM) domain is to interconnect business services taking into account service level agreements regarding the underlying network infrastructures. In such domains, manual configuration is forbidden due to the resulting error-prone and time-consuming tasks, while dynamic configuration is not allowed due to nondeterministic decision making. In this paper we propose a model-driven system configuration approach (MDSC),which explicitly models the components of the network infrastructures and their capabilities to automatically generate a logical network configuration. Based on an industry application example, we show the feasibility of the proposed integration platform in the ATM domain and discuss the advantages and limitations.

Extending mechatronic objects for automation systems engineering in heterogeneous engineering environments

Mechatronics is a multidisciplinary field of engineering combining disciplines like mechanical, electronic or software engineering, in order to design and manufacture useful products. Nowadays, mechatronic engineering is well-supported either by using integrated tool suites providing a homogeneous approach to engineering, or by relying on established tool chains consisting of a set of engineering tools connected using a common data exchange format. However, in practice neither tool suites nor tool chains have become a de facto standard in engineering, leading to tedious and often manual integration efforts required to combine specific engineering tools or tool suites. This paper presents an engineering tool integration framework that allows the definition and usage of mechatronic objects originating from heterogeneous engineering tools, so-called “engineering objects”. These engineering objects can additionally include project and organizational information, thus enabling exhaustive engineering process management and monitoring. The presented approach is evaluated in an industrial case study from the hydro power plant engineering domain. Major results are engineering objects that can include heterogeneous data, such as project or organization-specific information, thus enabling automated and therefore more efficient synchronization between the involved engineering disciplines, as well as added-value applications, like project monitoring or quality assured data import and export.

An Extensible Space-Based Coordination Approach for Modeling Complex Patterns in Large Systems,

Coordination is frequently associated with shared data spaces employing Linda coordination. But in practice, communication between parallel and distributed processes is carried out with message exchange patterns. What, actually, do shared data spaces contribute beyond these? In this paper we present a formal representation for a definition of shared spaces by introducing an “extensible tuple model”, based on existing research on Linda coordination, some Linda extensions, and virtual shared memory. The main enhancements of the extensible tuple model comprise: means for structuring of spaces, Internet- compatible addressing of resources, more powerful coordination capabilities, a clear separation of user data and coordination information, support of symmetric peer application architectures, and extensibility through programmable aspects. The advantages of the extensible tuple model (XTM) are that it allows for a specification of complex coordination patterns.