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Projects

  • Adaptive Service Agreement and Process Management in Services Grid
    Funded by DEST, this project  involves collaboration with DSTO, Telstra, Everyday Interactive Networks, University of Queensland, Victoria University of Technology and the EU Adaptive Services Grid Consortium. It focuses on enabling flexible, dynamic and robust management of service-oriented application provision processes that are not available in the current generation of services environments. In particular it aims at developing new techniques and software tools for the adaptive service agreement and process management in order to ensure collective functionality, end-to-end QoS, stateful coordination and adaptive provision of complex services. The adaptive service agreement management includes automated service agreement negotiation, lifecycle management, monitoring and profiling, and dynamic re-negotiation. The adaptive service process management includes adaptive process enactment, QoS process monitoring and visualisation, and mediated workflow re-planning. The project targets three different application areas of telecommunication services, smart information environments and multimedia services represented by the Australian industry and government partners.

    Participants:
    Ryszard Kowalczyk
    Jun Han
    James Lin
    Jun Yan
    Albert Yu
    Jian Ying Zhang

  • Compatible Interactions between Software Components
    A key issue in composing software systems from independently developed components is how to ensure that the software components interact with each other in the context of the composite system without violating the original interaction intentions of the individual components.  The interaction intentions of the components are their interaction protocols. This project aims to develop a formal and practical notation for specifying the component interaction protocols, and to develop associated techniques and automatic tools for design-time compatibility checking of component interaction protocols and run-time validation of component interactions against protocol specifications.

    Participants:
    Jun Han
    Yan Jin
    Zheng Li
    Andrew Russo
    Manh Tan Phan
    Ksze Kae Ker

  • Effective Management of Systems Requirements and System Architectures
    This is a joint research project with University College London, UK National Air Traffic Services (NATS) and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. This project aims to develop practical techniques and tool support for the component-based management of system requirements, system architectures and their traceability. A start-up kit for software systems engineering projects has been developed, including an information model, a process guide, a set of document templates and associated tool support. The kit has been used in "live" projects at NATS. Current research focuses on improving the approach and tool and on implementing them with the XML technology.

    Participants:
    Jun Han
    Chan Kai Tan
    Jie Wu, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China
    Wolfgang Emmerich, University College London, UK
    Anthony Finkelstein, University College London, UK
    David Bush,  National Air Traffic Services, UK
     

  • Empirical Study into the Architectural Impact of Object-Oriented Software Evolution
    In this project, we aim to identify and examine the impact of object-oriented software evolution on the system architecture, by studying and analysing at the source code level the successive versions of a number of large-scale object-oriented software systems. The key research issues include selection and definition of architectural metrics, collection and analysis of metrics data from the targeted data set, and identification of architectural evolution patterns.

    Participants:
    Rajesh Vasa
    Jean-Guy Schneider
    Jun Han
     

  • Enterprise System Architectures
    This is a joint research project with the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China. The architecture of an organisation's enterprise systems form  a key part of the organisation's strategic asset. As such, it needs to be managed and leveraged to support the organisation's business objectives. This project aims to develop a framework for the representation and management of enterprise system architectures. The framework provides the basis for an enterprise architecture repository, which is essential to facilitate architecture practice in large organisations.

    Participants:
    Jun Han
    Antony Tang
    Pin Chen, Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), Australia
    Jie Wu, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China
     

  • Enterprise System Integration and Evolution
    This project continues from our research into enterprise system architectures, with a particular focus on leveraging enterprise system architectures in facilitating the integration and evolution of enterprise systems. Key issues addressed include enterprise system evolution scenarios, system interoperability analysis, and enterprise system architecture solutions. Results from these areas form the core of an automated environment/tool for enterprise integration and evolution.

    Participants:
    Jun Han
    Pin Chen, Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), Australia
    Jie Wu, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China
     

  • Forms: A Formal Foundation for Software Composition
    Component-oriented software is an increasingly accepted technology where applications are built as conglomerations of interacting software components. However, existing component models and environments do not fulfill all the needs of software developers, and the lack of an appropriate foundation for specifying the semantics of components and compositional abstractions has been identified as one of the main issues. In collaboration with the Department of Computer Science of Iowa State University, this project tackles this problem by defining a suitable formal foundation for software composition. In particular, we further develop the notion of forms, a special variant of immutable extensible records, and integrate forms into a process calculus. It is expected that the resulting formalism will have the required expressive power to solve the problems of adequately specifying the semantics of components and compositional abstractions.

    Participants:
    Jean-Guy Schneider
    Markus Lumpe, Computer Science Department, Iowa State University, USA
     

  • Ontogenic Adaptation using Role-based Architecture
    As modern computing environments become more open, distributed and pervasive, the software we build for those dynamic environments will need to become more adaptable and adaptive.  This project is developing an object meta-model and software architecture based on the concept of ontogenic adaptation.  The key to ontogenic adaptation is the maintenance of organisational integrity in the midst of structural change and component interchange. The meta-model facilitates the elaboration of organisational descriptions using different types of role. Management roles (control) and functional roles (process) are distinguished. An adaptive software architecture based on the loose-coupling and late-binding such roles and objects is being developed.  Design and
    implementation language mechanisms supporting such an architecture are also being developed.

    Participants:
    Alan Colman
    Lorraine Johnston
    Jun Han
    Karola von Baggo
     

  • Performance Engineering for Component-Based Software
    Performance is a key attribute of software systems, especially of real-time and embedded systems. As these systems are increasingly built  from software components/packages, there is a great need in knowing the performance properties of the software components and being able to analyse the performance properties of the composite systems built using these components. This project aims to develop a model for (1) characterising the performance properties of software components from an interface perspective, and (2) analysing  the performance properties of component-based software systems. The model  forms the basis of performance interface specification for software components and that of performance analysis for component-based systems.

    Participants:
    Ksze Kae Ker
    Jun Han
    Ahmad Kayed
    Jean-Guy Schneider
     

  • Security Engineering for Component-Based Software
    Security is an important attribute of software systems, especially of open distributed software systems. As systems are increasingly assembled from software components/packages, there is an urgent need in being able to know the security properties of the software components and to deduce such properties of the composite systems assembled from these components. This project aims to develop a model for (1) characterising the security properties of software components from an interface perspective, and (2) analysing  the security properties of component-based software systems. The model forms the basis of security interface specification for software components and that of security analysis for component-based systems.

    Participants:
    Jun Han
    Ryszard Kowalczyk
    Artem Vorobiev
    Khaled Khan, Monash University and University of Western Sydney, Australia
    Yuliang Zheng, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
     

  • Rich Service Registry (Funding: ARC, CA; Partners: CA; Duration: Three years)

    Funded by the ARC and CA, this project investigates the next generation of service registries, which will be the centre piece for future enterprise information systems. It supports services management at both design- and run-time.


    Participants
    Jun Han
    Jean-Guy Schneider
    Tim Ebringer
    Rick Harvey
    Tony Rogers
    Tan Manh Phan
    Research Fellow (vacancy)
    PhD Student (vacancy)

  • Proactive Maintenance (Funding: AutoCRC; Partners: Holden; Duration: 3+ years)

    Funded by the AutoCRC, this project investigates software technologies that will increase cars' design quality and reduce their maintenance costs.


    Participants
    Jun Han
    Chengfei Liu
    Jean-Guy Schneider
    Antony Tang
    James Lin
    Nikhil Alave
    Research Fellow (vacancy)

  • Enterprise Systems Simulation Environment (Funding: CA; Partners: CA; Duration: 3 years)

    Funded by CA, this project aims to develop a similation environment for enterprise systems, to allow the large-scale testing of interoperating enterprise systems.

    Participants
    Jun Han
    Jean-Guy Schneider
    Tim Ebringer
    Cameron Hine

  • Towards the Next Generation of Composition Languages
    In recent years, component-oriented software technology has become the major approach to facilitate the development of evolving systems. However, experience has shown that existing component models and environments do not fulfil all the needs of open systems development as they generally only focus on specialized application domains, lack precise semantics for specifying components and compositional abstractions, and do not allow for automated verification of compositions. This project intends to address these problems by implementing a prototype of a next-generation composition environment with a  special focus on customizable, higher-level composition and verification mechanisms. In this context, we also want to define a formal framework for addressing the inherent problem that, in the face of incomplete knowledge of the deployment environment, the correctness of a system of collaborative software components cannot be adequately verified.

    Participants:
    Jean-Guy Schneider
    Markus Lumpe, Computer Science Department, Iowa State University, USA
    Oscar Nierstrasz, Institute for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, University of Berne, Switzerland

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