This paper describes the project Quality-for-ASIS, aiming at the development of an extensive testing facility for ASIS implementations. First the specific problems and requirements are presented. After a section about the basic concepts of ASIS and after a short introduction to testing, the designs and implementations for testing important subsets of ASIS are described. Finally, adequacy coverage statistics for a test set based on the ACVC compiler validation suite are provided.

Modern incremental and iterative software engineering processes advocate to build software systems by first creating a highly simplified and abstract model of the system which is then moved by applying a series of model improvements toward implementation. Models of software systems at any level of abstraction should contain, besides structural information, a precise description of the expected system behavior. This paper formalizes relations between models of the same system at different levels of abstraction, classifies approaches for describing behavior of system operations, and investigates how these system operation descriptions can be kept synchronized with frequent changes of the system's structure.

This paper describes a software architecture for industrial robots used in manufacturing equipment. In order to achieve software portability, the application software is dissociated from the low-level robot controller software. The interaction between these two pieces of software is achieved by a portable application programming interface (API) for industrial robots. We discuss the requirements for such an API, and propose a design called PINROB.

Existing software engineering methods tend to have a strong focus on functional requirements, ignoring more or less non-functional concerns, such as middleware-specific concerns, which have to be addressed sooner or later when designing and implementing distributed systems. Following an MDA approach to software development, the Enterprise Fondue method proposes a hierarchy of UML profiles as a means for addressing middleware-specific concerns at different MDA-levels of abstraction, along with model transformations to incrementally refine existing design models according to the proposed profiles. Tool support is provided through the Parallax framework, which assists developers in the Enterprise Fondue refinement process and enables them to modularize middlewarespecific crosscutting concerns into aspect-promoting Eclipse plug-ins.

This document describes an implementation of secure communication for distributed applications in Ada 95. It explains the basics of cryptography and introduces the problem of key exchange. After a brief description of distributed systems in Ada 95, the modular structure of the implementation and the way it handles key distribution is presented.

This article is about the implementation of the Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) for the GNAT Ada 95 compilation system (ASIS-for-GNAT). It discusses implementation problems and their solutions. It explains the interaction of ASIS-for-GNAT with GNAT and its internal data structures. Finally, it describes the current state of ASIS-for-GNAT.

It is becoming more and more evident that the major hindrance to the proliferation and adoption of the MDA vision in the large is the current lack of tool support. Parallax, based on aspect-oriented support and through a well-defined system of plug-ins, addresses this issue by providing a framework that enables developers to incorporate middleware-specific concerns in their designs, and to view their enhanced designs through a prism of middleware platforms and see how middleware-specific concerns are actually implemented at the code level. Moreover, developers and middleware vendors can contribute and enrich Parallax by implementing and providing the community with new plug-ins for their favorite middleware infrastructures.

When dealing with distributed systems, one of the most important problems that has to be addressed is concurrency. Distributed systems are inherently concurrent, distributed objects being implicitly "shared" between all participating clients, and explicit concurrency control must be enforced if consistency is to be preserved. From an MDA perspective to software development, we show in this paper how concurrency resulting from distribution can be inferred in an automatic way, provided that a small set of design conventions are strictly adhered to. A simple PIM-level concurrency profile is considered in order to illustrate how the inference algorithm evolves on a concrete example and how an initial distributed design is automatically refined according to the proposed concurrency profile.

This article describes the approach taken to implement the Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) for the GNAT Ada compiler. The paper discusses the main implementation problems and and their solution. It also describes the current state of the implementation.

The era of distributed systems is upon us. Middleware-specific concerns, and especially the distribution concern, which is the core of any middleware-mediated application, are addressed every day in all sorts of enterprise systems. However, object-oriented UML designs offer a very limited perspective on what exactly is distributed, how exactly the distribution is achieved, and where exactly distributed services are located. In order to answer these questions, the MDA-compliant Enterprise Fondue method proposes a hierarchy of UML profiles as a means for addressing the distribution concern at three different MDA-levels of abstraction. Model transformations are provided to incrementally refine existing design models according to the proposed profiles. For the last phase of the Enterprise Fondue process, code generation for specific middleware infrastructures is supported through the Parallax framework. The CORBA technology is used for illustrating the entire approach on a concrete example.

In this paper, we study the applicability of SVG to SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems. One of the main purposes of a SCADA application is to provide an operator with the graphical interface needed to monitor and control the production processes in an industrial plant. Currently, most SCADA systems are based on bitmap graphics or proprietary vector formats to build the operator's interface. We investigate here the advantages and some of the emerging technical challenges of using a web standard such as SVG for developing the graphical components of a SCADA system and how to connect these components to the data sources that determine their appearance.

The IEC 61346 standard establishes general principles for structuring the information of technical systems. The present document discusses the ideas shown in the standard, emphasizing the fact that some parts of it are ambiguous and can lead to different interpretations of the basic concepts. Consequently, we derive a concrete interpretation of the standard that tries to remove the ambiguities. We will apply this interpretation to the development of an industrial software platform for building automation applications.

The purpose of the paper is to present our approach for specifying system behavior during analysis, part of the Fondue software development method.The approach is exemplified on a case study, a Drink Vending Machine (DVM).It is based on Operation Schemas and a Protocol Model.The Protocol Model describes the temporal ordering of the system operations by an UML protocol statemachine.An Operation Schema describes the functionality of a system operation by pre-and postconditions; they are written in the Object Constraint Language (OCL), with a few amendments and extensions.Our approach offers a middle ground between the informal descriptions of Use Cases and the solution-oriented models of object interaction in UML.We believe that declarative behavioral specification techniques, like the one proposed in this paper, lead to more confidence in the quality of the software because they allow one to reason about system properties.