Scientific publications

Performance is a critical system property of any system, in particular of data-intensive systems, such as image processing systems. We describe a performance engineering method for families of data-intensive systems that is both simple and accurate; the performance of new family members is predicted using models of existing family members.

Partial Networking, as a mechanism for moving-to-sleep and waking-up embedded systems, is beneficial for saving energy within a vehicle (or within other complex distributed systems). Even though a number of models exist which identify benefits of partial networking, they often address rather specific cases.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is opening up new services and is stimulating changes in industries. The lighting industry is also embracing this change by establishing an Internet of Lights (IoL). This article highlights the main benefits and the challenges to face while going towards IoL. To address these challenges and cater to the specific requirements of lighting networks, an IoL reference architecture, Open Architecture for Intelligent Solid State Lighting Systems (OpenAIS), has been proposed.

The timed dataflow model of computation is a useful performance analysis tool for electronic system level design automation and embedded software synthesis. Its determinism gives it strong analyzability properties. Its monotonic temporal behavior provides hard real-time guarantees on throughput and latency.

Service-oriented systems interconnect with other systems in a time critical manner, making their performance vital. For this purpose, we propose an automated performance evaluation approach for service-oriented systems which includes both performance measurement and prediction. The approach makes use of the iDSL language, a domain specific language tailored to modeling service-oriented systems, and the iDSL toolchain to evaluate iDSL models, as follows.

Unclear descriptions of software interfaces between components often lead to integration issues during development and maintenance. To address this, we have developed a framework named ComMA (Component Modeling and Analysis) that supports model-based engineering of components. ComMA is a combination of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) for the specification of interface signatures, state machines to express the allowed interaction behaviour, and constraints on data and timing.

Model-based testing is one of the promising technologies to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of software testing. This paper outlines the evolution of model-based testing based on labelled transition systems, from purely theoretical developments in the eighties to industrially applicable tools now: from canonical testers to practical testers.

The tutorial at CONCUR will provide a practical overview of work undertaken over the last six years in the Multicore Programming Group at Imperial College London, and with collaborators internationally, related to understanding and reasoning about concurrency in software designed for acceleration on GPUs.

Online scheduling of operations is essential to optimize productivity of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) where manufacturing requests arrive on the fly. An FMS processes products according to a particular flow through processing stations. This work focusses on online scheduling of re-entrant FMSs with flows using processing stations where products pass twice and with limited buffering between processing stations.