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The aim of this paper is to explore new metaphors for interaction design on tabletop system. Tabletop systems are shared horizontal surface for co-located collaboration, which leads to original problems when designing interactions. We propose two metaphors based on the paper: the peeling metaphor, and the slot metaphor, and then suggest a way of using them to design new interactions for solving some of the problems of tabletop systems: documents organization, documents transmission and documents duplication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many design activities depend on communicative activities around collaboratively produced prototypes. A common communication practice in producing text documents is to add annotation in the form of comments. Previous research indicates that electronic paper-prototyping can be used to rapidly create simple prototypes of interactive systems, such as websites. Little is known, however, about how to provide and maintain variety of communication channels around such electronic paper-prototypes to enable end-users and other stakeholders to contribute to design dialogues. This paper presents Gabbeh, an electronic paper-prototyping tool, and reports on an evaluation using the tool in a simulated design exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite significant advances in the development of model checking, it remains a difficult task in the hands of experts to make it scale to the size of industrial systems. A key step in achieving scalability is to "divide-and-conquer", that is, to break up the veri.cation of a system into smaller tasks that involve the verification of its components. Assume-guarantee reasoning [9, 11] is a widespread "divide-and-conquer" approach that uses assumptions when checking individual components of a system. Assumptions essentially encode expectations that each component has from the rest the system in order to operate correctly. Coming up with the right assumptions is typically a non-trivial manual process, which limits the applicability of this type of reasoning in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Content preparation is essential for web design [25]. The objective of this paper is to establish a theoretical foundation for the development of methods to evaluate the effectiveness of content preparation in information technology operations. Past studies identify information as the dominant concern of users, and delivery mechanism as a secondary concern [20]. The best presentation of the wrong information results in a design with major usability problems and does not aid the user in accomplishing his task. This paper shifts the focus of existing usability evaluation methods. It attempts to fill the void in usability literaoture by addressing the information aspect of usability evaluation. Combining the strengths of content preparation and usability evaluation yields major implications for a broad range of IT uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the progress of Internet technology and the increase of distributed information on networks, the present knowledge management has been based more and more on the performance of various experienced users. In addition to the increase of electronic documents, the use of paper documents has not been reduced because of their convenience. This paper describes a method of tracking paper document locations and contents using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. This research also focused on the expression of a task process and the seamless structuring of related electronic and paper documents as a result of task knowledge formalization using information organizing. A system is proposed here that implements information organization for both Web documents and paper documents with the task model description and RFID technology. Examples of a prototype system are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Papers in HCI play different roles, whether to inspire, solve industrial problems or further the science of HCI. There is a potential conflict between the different views, and a danger that different forms of validity are assumed by author and reader — deliberately or accidentally. This paper reviews some of the issues in this complex area and makes practical recommendations. In particular, the paper introduces the term "cross-validity" to help make explicit the issues, problems and means to tackle them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The regulation of multiagent systems may be approached from different stand-points. In this paper I will take the perspective of using a certain type of devices, electronic institutions, to regulate agent interactions. Furthermore, in this paper I am concerned with the tasks of design and construction of actual electronic institutions and I will explore some of the empirical aspects that one may encounter in such activities. More specifically, I will focus on those empirical aspects that are characteristic of electronic institutions rather than those that may be typical of multi-agent systems development in general or other types of software engineering. I use three examples of actual electronic institutions that show different and complementary features in order to motivate a number of distinctions that may be used to treat empirical features in a systematic way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Requirements engineering research has been conducted for over 40 years. It is important to recognize the plethora of results accumulated to date to: (a) improve researchers' understanding of the historical roots of our field in the real-world and the problems that they are trying to solve, (b) expose researchers to the breadth and depth of solutions that have been proposed, (c) provide a synergistic basis for improving those solutions or building new ones to solve real-world problems facing the industry today, and d) increase practitioner awareness of available solutions. A detailed meta-analysis of the requirements engineering literature will provide an objective overview of the advances and current state of the discipline. This paper represents the first step in a planned multi-year analysis. It presents the results of a demographic analysis by date, type, outlet, author, and author affiliation for an existing database of over 4,000 requirements engineering publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 13th Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ'07) will take place in the beautiful city of Trondheim, Norway on the 11th and 12th June 2007. As with most previous years, REFSQ'07 is affiliated with CAiSE. However, REFSQ'07 is significantly larger than in previous years, both in terms of the number of submissions and the size of the programme. 27 papers will be presented, plus a keynote address by Klaus Pohl, and parallel sessions will be necessary to make the programme possible within two days. However, the essential highly interactive and participatory nature of the REFSQ 'brand' will be retained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a small case study is presented to illustrate our conceptual understanding of a task-based requirements process. We argue that sub-models as known in model-based design (e.g. task models, dialog models) support the reflection about an existing work situation at a conceptual level and allow a formal specification of requirements. However, it is also shown that the integration of complementary analysis approaches facilitates a richer consideration of social as well as technical aspects. An intertwined creation of models differing in their focus and in the degree of abstraction and formality supports a more effective requirements elicitation and elaboration. In addition, the paper discusses some crucial issues in task- and model-based design such as the ‘myth' of generalised task models, the different roles of task and dialog models, or the influence of intentions on models of current situations. We hope to contribute to a further clarification of the problem space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a community such as conferences, numerous service providers and service users exist, and people interact using contexts. With the improvements in context-awareness computing and mobile computing technologies, human-computer interactions for exchanging contexts started increasing. In this paper, we introduce some interaction techniques such as tag interaction and service discovery interaction using a mobile device to provide an efficient user interface to exchange contexts in a conference room. We identified typical situations in which these interactions can be used in a paper, poster session, and for providing individual information among the attendees. We analyzed the two interaction techniques to be suitable to improve the interactions for exchanging contexts in a conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes and adaptations are always necessary after the deployment of a multiagent system (MAS), as well as of any other type of software systems. Some of these changes may be simply perfective and have local impact only. However, adaptive changes to meet changed situations in the operational environment of the MAS may have global impact on the overall design. In this paper, we analyze the issue of continuous design change/adaptation in a MAS organization, and the specific problem of how to properly model/design a MAS so as to make it ready to adaptation. Following, the paper focuses on the Gaia methodology and analyzes - also with the help of an illustrative example - its suitability in supporting and facilitating adaptive changes in MASs organizations, and its advantages and limitations with this regard over a number of different agent-oriented methodologies. Keywords: Agent Oriented Methodologies, Design for Change, Adaptive Organizations, Methodologies Evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes some results of a project that studied how multimedia can help the worker in an assembly task. The test case was a deep-cut assembly of a grid-anode for a cathodic protection system. A multimedia tool was implemented and compared with the conventional support method for the same task. The tool helps the worker by providing training and background information. During the task the tool acts as a guide and a set of well-defined instructions. The comparison of the methods was done by means of a field experiment. The results show that the use of the implemented tool helps to produce a slight increase to the quality of the work. However, the execution time of the work was not better when using the multimedia tool. According to a user questionnaire done in the test situation, the multimedia tool was more useful and easier to use, and gave the users more confidence than the conventional support method. It can be said that the use of multimedia support helps the worker to produce better quality in the task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a test development method, named OTK, that is aimed at optimizing compiler testing. The OTK method is based on constructing a model of optimizer's input data. The method allows developing tests targeted to testing a chosen optimizer. A formal data model is constructed on the basis of an abstract informal description of an algorithm of the optimizer under test. In the paper, we consider in detail the process of analyzing an optimization algorithm and building a formal model. We also consider in outline the other part of the method, test selection and test running. The OTK method has been successfully applied in several case studies, including test development for several different optimizing compilers for modern architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiple viewed search engine presented here retrieves documents of an indicated search area and displays a matrix of the distribution of the clustering from two aspects of the retrieval result. The search engine provides a visual and semantic bird's-eye view of the entire retrieval result. In addition, the characteristic words of each cluster are displayed in the matrix, and supports narrowing of the search. Furthermore, it is possible to immediately change the analysis criteria or the number of clusters and to use a zooming function. Thus, various retrieval conditions for a query can be attempted immediately and continuously. As a case study, this paper performs several analyses on the electronic journal Zoological Science using a multiple viewed search engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mizar, unlike in most other proof assistants, the types are not part of the foundations of the system. Mizar is based on untyped set theory, which means that in Mizar expressions are typed but the values of those expressions are not. In this paper we present the Mizar type system as a collection of type inference rules. We will interpret Mizar types as soft types, by translating Mizar's type judgments into sequents of untyped first order predicate logic. We will then prove that the Mizar type system is correct with respect to this translation in the sense that each derivable type judgment translates to a provable sequent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering component interactions is a major challenge in the development of large-scale, open systems. In the realm of multiagent system research, organizational abstractions have been proposed to overcome the complexity of this task. However, the gap between these modeling abstractions, and the constructs provided by todays agent-oriented software frameworks is still rather big. This paper reports on the multiagent programming framework, which provides executable constructs for each of the organizational, ACL-based modeling abstractions of the theory. Setting out from a components and connectors perspective on the elements of the metamodel, their executions semantics is defined and instrumented on top of the JADE platform. Moreover, a systematic reuse approach to the engineering of interactions is put forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the AgentAssebly architecture and specifically the agent framework platform component of the architecture. An introduction is given to the work covered in the paper and previous work (see [1]) this paper is based upon. Then an in-depth discussion is rendered on the agent framework platform provided by the AgentAssembly architecture. The paper concludes with some remarks on the research presented and future aims of the ongoing research project. Keywords: Agent programming languages, frameworks, and toolkits meta-modeling and meta reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a very hard optimization problem in the field of operations research. It has been shown to be NP-hard, and is an often-used benchmark for new optimization techniques. This paper pro- poses an improved multi-agent approach for solving large TSP. This proposed approach mainly includes three kinds of agents with different function. The first kind of agent is conformation agent and its function is generating the new solution continuously. The second kind of agent is optimization agent and its function is optimizing the current solutions group. The third kind of agent is refining agent and its function is refining the best solution from the beginning of the trial. At same time, there are many sub-agents in each kind of agent. These sub-agents accomplish the task of its superior agent cooperatively. At the end of this paper, the experimental results have shown that the proposed hybrid approach has good performance with respect to the quality of solution and the speed of computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large IT company is creating a generic architecting process. Since the company has set an objective to achieve Maturity Level 3 of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), the process needs to comply with the relevant requirements set by the CMMI. This paper presents the elicitation of such requirements, and the resulting set of requirements. It analyzes their potential impact on generic architecting processes found in literature. It turns out that many key architectural concepts are at best loosely defined in the CMMI. CMMI is strong in support of the development-related architecting activities, but gives only indirect support for other architecting activities, particularly in a product development context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the study of the equational theory of the semantics in van Glabbeek's linear time - branching time spectrum over the language BCCSP, a basic process algebra for the description of finite synchronization trees. It offers an algorithm for producing a complete (respectively, ground-complete) equational axiomatization of any behavioral congruence lying between ready simulation equivalence and partial traces equivalence from a complete (respectively, ground-complete) inequational axiomatization of its underlying precongruence—that is, of the precongruence whose kernel is the equivalence. The algorithm preserves finiteness of the axiomatization when the set of actions is finite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a human-robot interface in networked and multi-sensored environments. The human robot interface is an essential part of intelligent robotic system. Through the human robot interface, human being can interact with the robot. Especially, in multi-sensored environment, the human robot interface can be developed with remarkably extended functionality. Generally, handheld device such as PDA is a suitable for human robot interface because of its mobility and network ability. In this paper, we select PDA as device of human robot interface. In the implemented framework, the robot user can monitor what happens in multi-sensored environment and control the mobile robot easily and intuitively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial safety can be regarded as a major issue of industrial environments nowadays. This is why industries are currently spending huge amounts of resources to improve safety in all levels by reducing risks of causing damages to equipment, human injuries or even fatalities. This paper describes how Virtual Reality, Human Factors and Rule-based technologies are used in the framework of the VIRTHUALIS Integrated Project towards industrial training, safety management and accident investigation. The paper focuses mainly on the VR system specification and basic modules, while at the same time it presents the main system modules that synthesize the tool as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal methods constitute a means of developing reliable and correctly behaving software based on a specification. In scenarios where information technology is used as a foundation to enable human communication, this is, however, not always enough. Successful interaction between humans often depends on the concept of trust, which is different from program correctness. In this paper, we present a framework for integrating trust into a formal development process, allowing for the construction of formally correct programs for communication, embracing trust as a central concept. We present a coordination language for use with action systems, taking a modular approach of separating trust aspects from other functionality. We also believe that our work can be adapted to modelling other aspects beside trust. Throughout the paper, we employ a case study as a testbed for our concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The TCP/IP/Ethernet protocol is considered not suitable for use in real-time control systems. It deals with a lack of time determinism, which characterizes fieldbuses. Nevertheless several corporations propose networking based on the TCP/IP/Ethernet even for control purposes with some modifications of the standard however. This paper examines possibility of application of the TCP/IP/Ethernet communication without modifications (introducing also Internet as one of tested cases) for feedback control purposes. Experimental investigations have been performed in four stages. In the beginning tests of network properties, including tests of transmission time and packet loss measurements have been performed. Three following stages show experimental testing of feedback control, when TCP/IP transmission occurs between PI controller and control plant. Three representative platforms have been chosen for testing: LabVIEW, RSLogix and Simatic. The main and original contribution presented in this paper is design and construction of three test stands as well as methodology of testing experiments. Standard control over analog channel has been also presented as comparison. The results of testing show acceptable performance of control via TCP/IP/Ethernet networking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By a domain we mean a universe of discourse. Typical examples are (partially) man-made universes of discourse - such as Air Traffic, Airports, Financial Services (banks, insurance companies, securities trading [brokers, traders, stock exchanges]), Health Care (hospitals etc.), Secure IT Systems (according to Intl. ISO/IEC Standard 17799), The Market (consumers, retailers, wholesalers, producers, "the supply chain"), Transportation (road, air, sea and/or rail transport), etc. We shall outline how one might describe such (infrastructure component) domains, informally and formally - what the current descriptional limitations appear to be, and, hence, the prospects for future research as well as practice. The current paper is based on Part IV, Chaps. 8-16 of [3]. The volume is one of [1,2,3]. The aim of this paper is to suggest a number of areas of domain theory and methodology research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of the conscious experience of love is a puzzle to people all around the world. Many of us want to understand our love in order to make it more sustainable. An application developed for this purpose is presented in this paper: Rose is a self-evaluation application that aims to help individuals evaluate and understand the many dimensions of their love. Rose is freely available on the Internet. In this paper, we summarize the results of everybody who has taken part in the on-line self-evaluation using this application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Timely traffic identification is critical in network security monitoring and traffic engineering. Traditional methods using well-known ports, protocols and precise signature matching are no longer accurate with the proliferation of new applications. Recently, applying pattern recognition methods to classify network application traffic based on the flow parameters (e.g. port, flow duration, etc.) has become increasing popular. However, many methods developed in the previous works are either too complex to be applied in real-time, or suffer from lower accuracy due to the insufficient knowledge of the application. In this paper, we first give an overview on the developments of pattern recognition methods as traffic classification tools. We then develop two separate pattern recognition methods: one with supervised learning, and one with un-supervised learning, and apply them to classify traffic captured from a campus backbone network. The supervised learning method (an optimized SVM method) yields approximately 99.41% accuracy for the collected traffic. The un-supervised learning method (an entropy based clustering method) gets the average accuracy of 92.41% for the top 20 traffic generating hosts during the same time period. Performance test on a single PC with 3GHz Pentium 4 processors and 1GB of memory show that both methods can handle more than 10000 network flows per second, close to real time requirements for many situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reasoning about functional programs is simpler than reasoning about their imperative counterparts. However, finding bugs in lazy functional languages has been more complex until quite recently. The reason was that not much work was done on developing practical debuggers. Fortunately, several debuggers exist nowadays. One of the easiest to use Haskell debuggers is Hood, whose behavior is based on the concept of observation of intermediate data structures. However, although using Hood can be simple when observing some structures, it is known that it can be hard to understand how it works when dealing with complex situations. In this paper, we formalize the behavior of the Hood debugger by extending Sestoft's natural semantics. Moreover, we also indicate how to derive an abstract machine including such debugging information. By doing so, we do not only provide a formal foundation, but we also provide an alternative method to implement debuggers. In fact, we have already implemented a prototype of the abstract machine commented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we extend $\mathcal{HOTL}$ (Hypotheses and Observations Testing Logic) to provide a formal framework to test timed systems. The main idea underlying $\mathcal{HOTL}$ is to infer whether a set of observations (i.e., results of test applications) allows to claim that the IUT conforms to the specification if a specific set of hypotheses is assumed. In this paper we adapt $\mathcal{HOTL}$ to cope with the inclusion of time issues. In addition, we show the soundness and completeness of the new framework, that we call $\mathcal{THOTL}$, with respect to a general notion of timed conformance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of video games is a complex software engineering activity bringing together large multidisciplinary teams under stringent constraints. While much has been written about how to develop video games, there has been as yet little attempt to view video game development from a quality perspective, attempting to enumerate the quality attributes that must be satisfied by game implementations, and to relate implementation techniques to those quality attributes. In this paper, we discuss desired quality attributes of 3D computer games, and we use the development of our own Life is a Village game to illustrate architectural tactics that help achieve these desired qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A persistent computing system is a reactive system that functions continuously anytime without stopping its reactions even when it needs to be maintained, upgraded, or reconfigured, it has some trouble, or it is attacked. However, the requirement that a computing system should run continuously and persistently is never taken into account as an essential and/or general requirement by traditional system design and development methodologies. As a result, there is no clearly defined standard to be used for measuring the reactability of a computing system. This paper proposes the first method to measure the reactability of a persistent computing system in a unified way. The paper introduces the notion of reactive processing path among components and shows that the reactive processing paths can be used to measure the reactability of a persistent computing system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a process-algebraic approach to specification and refinement of workflow processes. In particular, we model both specification and implementation of workflows as CSP processes. CSP's behavioural models and their respective refinement relations not only enable us to prove correctness properties of an individual workflow process against its behavioural specification but also allows us to design and develop workflow processes compositionally. Moreover, coupled with CSP is an industrial strength automated model checker FDR, which allows behavioural properties of workflow models to be proved automatically. This paper details some CSP models of van der Aalst et al.'s control flow workflow patterns, and illustrates behavioural specification and refinement of workflow systems with a business process scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key issue with Web Services (WS) is the verification and validation (V&V) of services to build trust between service providers and service users. This paper proposed a test-broker architecture so that all stakeholder within WS can contribute to improve the testing of the services. The test broker supports the submission, indexing, and querying of test artifacts such as test cases, defect reports and evaluations. It can also provide the services for the test generation, test coordination, and distributed testing services. The DCV&V (Decentralized, Collaborative, Verification and Validation) framework is proposed with a set of distributed and collaborated test brokers dedicated to different V&V tasks to enable scalable and flexible test collaborations. The paper explores the concept of design-by-contract and applies the principle to DCV&V. It identifies two categories of testing contracts including TSC (Testing Service Contracts) and TCC (Test Collaboration Contracts). It illustrates the application of TSC with contract-based test generation based on WS OWL-S specification. It elaborates TCC with the analysis of the test artifacts definitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes a transformational approach for the specification and formal verification of concurrent and real-time systems.At upper level, one system is specified using the timed process algebra RT-LOTOS. The output of the proposed transformation is a Time Petri net (TPN). The paper particularly shows how a TPN can be automatically constructed from an RT-LOTOS specification using a compositionally defined mapping. The proof of the translation consistency is sketched in the paper and developed in[1]. The RT-LOTOS to TPN translation patterns formalized in the paper are being implemented. in a prototype tool. This enables reusing TPNs verification techniques and tools for the profit of RT-LOTOS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper ascribes a formal semantics to advice weaving in AspectJ. Since the version 1.1, AspectJ language is developed using bytecode weaving, which combines aspects and classes to produce ".class" files that run in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). In AspectJ, advice weaving is done statically by inserting the advice functionality in some regions of the code. These regions are join points that are declared using pointcuts. In this paper, we focus only on static pointcuts, i.e., pointcuts that correspond directly to locations in the bytecode. AspectJ dynamic pointcuts such as target, this, and cflow are not in the focus of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past twenty-five years or so Saddleback search has been used as an paradigm of how methods of formal program construction can quickly lead to a simple and effective algorithm for searching an ordered table. In this paper we revisit the problem and show that saddleback search is not in fact the best algorithm when one dimension of the table is much smaller than the other. The paper is structured in the form of a classroom discussion involving a teacher and four very clever students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has an introductory nature. It sets the scene for the three papers in the thematic session "Structured Data Tools". We discuss interaction and coordination in general and look more specifically at the XML data format and the dataflow driven coordination language Reo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In UML 2.0 sequence diagrams have been considerably extended and are now fundamentally better structured. Interactions in sequence diagrams can be structured using so-called interaction fragments, including alt (alternative behaviour), par (parallel behaviour), neg (forbidden behaviour), assert (mandatory behaviour) and ref (reference another diagram). The operator ref in particular greatly improves the way diagrams can be decomposed. In previous work we have given a semantics to a subset of sequence diagrams using labelled event structures, a true-concurrent model that naturally captures alternative and parallel behaviour. In this paper, we expand that work to address refinement and show how to obtain a refined model by means of a powerful categorical construction over two categories of labelled event structures. The underlying motivation for this work is reasoning and verification of complex scenario-based inter-object behavioural models. We conclude the paper with a discussion on future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how to refine a Gaia design by applying agent-oriented extensions of UML. First, we show how the Gaia Interaction model can be improved by applying the first two layers of the Agent Interaction Protocol (AIP) of AUML. Second, Gaia Agent and Service models are refined by applying the AIP's third layer combined with Extended UML Class Diagrams. Third, Gaia Organisational Structure is enriched by applying the Aalaadin model. The final aim of the whole process is to obtain a more concrete design closer to implementation. We demonstrate how the refinement process can be applied to the development of an agent-based system for conference management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to enable the intelligent agents to be aware of the dynamic business requirements and strategies, and cooperate with other agents in a stable and explicit way, a policy and contract extended BDI logic (called BGIPDC logic) has been proposed, by integrating contracts and policies into traditional BDI model. On the basis of BGIPDC logic, this paper proposes a model of agent architecture as a concrete realization of it, called PDC-agent. PDC-agent is an extension of traditional BDI agent, by adding a policy engine, a contract engine and a goal maintenance component into agent's interpreter. Besides, PDC-agent has two characteristics. First, the operation of PDC-agent is based on an event-driven mechanism. Various events drive the components of the interpreter. Second, the representation of PDC-agent is on the basis of ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the medical domain, there is a tendency to standardize health care by providing medical guidelines as summary of the best evidence concerning a particular topic. Based on the assumption that guidelines are similar to software, we try to carry over techniques from software engineering to guideline development. In this paper, we show how to apply formal methods, namely interactive verification to improve the quality of guidelines. As an example, we have worked on a guideline from the American Academy of Pediatrics for the management of jaundice in newborns. Contributions of this paper are as follows: (I) a formalized model of a nontrivial example guideline, (II) an approach to verify properties of medical guidelines interactively, and (III) verification of a first example property.This work has been partially funded by the European Commission's IST program, under contract number IST-FP6-508794 Protocure II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) involves automated trans-formations between software models defined in different languages at different abstraction levels. This paper takes an MDA approach to integrate a formal modeling language (Object-Z) with an informal modeling language (UML) via model transformation. This paper shows how formal and informal modeling languages can be cooperatively used in the MDA framework and how the trans-formations between models in these languages can be achieved using an MDA development environment. The MDA model transformation techniques allow us to have a reusable transformation between formal and informal modeling languages. The integrated approach provides an effective V&V technique for the MDA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present movement in the adoption of agile methodologies as a contemporary approach to the management of the software development processes has seen a growing trend towards the selection of relevant practices from the agile family as opposed to the adoption of specific methods. This paper reports work-in-progress of a proposed novel modeling technique for tailoring methodologies to a particular environment using the family of methodologies approach. The tool is being applied by one software development organisation in Southern Africa and the partial results are included in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Source repositories are a promising database of information about software projects. This paper proposes a tool to extract and summarize information from CVS logs in order to identify whether there are differences in the development approach of Agile and non-Agile teams. The tool aims to improve empirical investigation of the Agile Methods (AMs) without affecting the way developers write code. There are many claims about the benefits of AMs; however, these claims are seldom supported by empirical analysis. Configuration management systems contain a huge amount of quantitative data about a project. The retrieval and part of the analysis can be automated in order to get useful insights about the status and the evolution of the project. However, this task poses formidable challenges because the data source is not designed as a measurement tool. This paper proposes a tool for extracting and summarizing information from CVS (Concurrent Versions System) repositories and a set of analysis that can be useful to identify common or different behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how System Metaphor delivers a coherent system of names that carry more information than unrelated names would. Keywords: Extreme Programming, Metaphor, Names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extreme programming (XP) has been introduced in various scenarios primarily because some in industry argued for a move away from what they feel are rigid documentation-based development techniques. This has usually taken place with experienced developers. This paper describes attempts by researchers from the University of Sheffield to introduce XP to relatively inexperienced student developers. This paper describes some of the important findings and provides evidence relating to common problems encountered when students attempt to adjust to XP. Keywords: Extreme Programming, Agile Methods, Empirical Software Engineering [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-adaptive systems are capable of changing their behaviour at runtime to meet target constraints. An important research question is how quality of service models can inform runtime adaptation. This paper presents a solution to the problem by application of control theory to improve performance of queued systems by means of architectural adaptation. In a paper presented at the previous year's QoSA conference, we showed how Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average techniques can be utilized to forecast how Quality of Service (QoS) characteristics are likely to evolve in the near future. This is particularly important in cases where systems can be adapted to counter QoS constraint violations. In this paper, we show how, given a similar type of QoS characteristic forecasts, strategies of architectural adaptation can be implemented that pre-emptively avoid QoS violations. The novelty of our approach is that we use classical control theory to ensure that our adaptation strategies are stable, in the sense that they do not oscillate between choices. We provide a description of how our control theoretic model can be implemented using context-based interception in .NET via model driven engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constraint Programming (CP) technology has been extensively used in Random Functional Test Generation during the recent years. However, while the existing CP methodologies are well tuned for traditional combinatorial applications e.g. logistics or scheduling, the problem domain of functional test generation remains largely unexplored by the CP community and many of its domain specific features and challenges are still unaddressed. In this paper we focus on the distinctive features of CP for the random functional test generation domain and show how these features can be addressed using a classical CP engine with custom extensions. We present some modeling and solving problems arising in this context and propose solutions. In particular, we address the way of model building in the problem domain of test generation which we refer to as multi-layer modeling. In this context we introduce constraint patterns of composite variable, implied condition and implied composite variable condition, define their semantics and propose schemes for their CSP modeling. The paper also addresses specific problems arising at the solving stage in the problem domain of random test generation. We propose solutions to these problems by means of custom random search algorithms. This approach is illustrated on the examples of the disjunction constraint and conditional variable instantiation. The latter algorithm addresses the feature of dynamic modeling required in the test generation task. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach we present experimental results based on the implementation using ILOG Solver as a CP engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Probabilistic correctness is an important aspect of reliable systems. A soft real-time system, for instance, may be designed to tolerate some degree of deadline misses under a threshold. Since probabilistic systems may behave differently from their probabilistic models depending on their current environments, checking the systems at runtime can provide another level of assurance for their probabilistic correctness. This paper presents a statistical runtime verification for probabilistic properties using statistical analysis. However, while this statistical analysis collects a number of execution paths as samples to check probabilistic properties within some certain error bounds, runtime verification can only produce one single sample. This paper provides a technique to produce such a number of samples and applies this methodology to check probabilistic properties in wireless sensor network applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]