Scientific publications

System designers need to have insight in the response times of service systems to see if they meet performance requirements. We present a high-level evaluation technique to obtain the distribution of services completion times. It is based on a high-level domain-specific language that hides the underlying technicalities from the system designer.

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 analysability properties. It is expressive enough to cover a large class of applications and platforms. The trend however, in both embedded applications and their platforms is to become more dynamic, reaching the limits of what the model can express and analyse with tight performance guarantees.

Abstract Probabilistic logics combine the expressive power of logic with the ability to reason with uncertainty. Several probabilistic logic languages have been proposed in the past, each of them with their own features. We focus on a class of probabilistic logic based on Sato's distribution semantics, which extends logic programming with probability distributions on binary random variables and guarantees a unique probability distribution.

Modern lighting systems are configurable systems-of-systems that have to operate in an environment that they cannot fully control. These systems have to guarantee the continuation of their functionality regardless of the events in their environment. As testing and simulation are not able to identify all possible interactions of a lighting system and its environment we propose a model checking approach to analyze a lighting system’s robustness.

Cost-effective mobile healthcare must consider not only technological performance but also the division of responsibilities between the patient and care provider, the context of the patient’s condition, and ways to implement patient decision support and tailored interaction.

This book discusses various aspects, challenges, and solutions for developing systems-of-systems for situation awareness, using applications in the domain of maritime safety and security. Topics include advanced, multi-objective visualization methods for situation awareness, stochastic outlier selection, rule-based anomaly detection, an ontology-based event model for semantic reasoning, new methods for semi-automatic generation of adapters bridging communication gaps, security policies for systems-of-systems, trust assessment, and methods to deal with the dynamics of systems-of-systems in run-time monitoring, testing, and diagnosis.

Today’s embedded systems have to operate in a wide variety of dynamically changing environmental circumstances. Adaptivity, the ability of a system to autonomously adapt itself, is a means to optimise a system’s behaviour to accommodate changes in its environment. It involves making in-product trade-offs between system qualities at system level.

Deliver “actionable” intelligence instead of just raw information – this is what the Metis research project pursues for supporting operational work in domains characterized by constantly evolving situations with a diversity of entities, complex interactions and high-level uncertainty in the information gathered.

This document addresses the way an architect can do his work. It shows many tools that belong to the architect toolkit: The CAFCR model, tools per 5 views (Customer Objectives, Application, Functional, Conceptual and Realization), Qualities, Story telling and Reasoning in multiple dimensions.

Model-based testing allows the creation of test cases from a model of the system under test. Often, such models are difficult to obtain, or even not available. Automata learning helps in inferring the model of a system by observing its behaviour. The model can be employed for many purposes, such as testing other implementations, regression testing, or model checking.