Architecture-based reasoning about performability in component-based systems

Professor Heinz Schmidt

Centre for Distributed Systems and Software Engineering, Monash University

Date and time: 11.30am - 12.30pm, Friday 24th November, 2006

Venue: 12.05.02 (Building 12, Level 5, Room 2)

Abstract:

Architecture description languages (ADLs) have been successful in modelling, design and prescription of software functionality. With the UML2 standardisation of architectural models and with ADL and UML2 plugins widely available for integrated development environments, such as the open-source Eclipse platform for example, architecture-based and model-driven approaches shift the balance of software engineering ever more from programming to systems design and contribute to programming language technology becoming a commodity.

However scalable component-based architectural models of extra-functional properties such as reliability, availability and timeliness -- as required in the design and verification of safety-critical real-time distributed control systems and increasingly in mission-critical software-intensive networked and grid-enabled systems -- are still presenting great challenges to researchers and practitioners.

In our research centre at Monash in collaboration with industrial partners and other universities, we have been developing compositional dynamic models for such extra-functional properties. Our models are based in automata theory and the theory of Petri nets. They draw on rich interface protocol annotations and combine coordination of autonomous parallel components with parameterisation and architectural variation. We model abstract dependencies in the interaction or message flows between components and combine static modelling with runtime measurements in architectural dependency networks. Such dependencies include probabilistic worst-case resource bounds (such as, for example, worst-case time) conditional on failure probabilities.

Our architectural dependency networks are implemented in a system called RADL (short for reliable ADL). RADL has been used in industrial applications for the analysis of large-scale real-world systems. This talk focuses on the architectural dependency networks and a combination of timing and reliability analysis for software engineering in industrial automation technology.

About the speaker:

Heinz Schmidt is Professor of Software Engineering at Monash University, Australia, where he directs the Monash Centre for Distributed Systems and Software Engineering. He has over 25 years experience with object-oriented and component-based languages, systems and software in practice, research and training. Heinz has published over 120 refereed articles and papers, supervised over 25 higher-degree students and lectures in software engineering, distributed and parallel systems. Before joining Monash, Heinz held positions at the German National Research Centre for Computer Science, the International Computer Science Institute of the UC Berkeley in California, and the CSIRO and ANU in Canberra. Heinz has consulted with and conducted collaborative research with a number of international companies including ABB, IBM, DIGITAL, SIEMENS, OTI and others. Heinz is Adjunct Professor at the Maelardalen Real-Time Research Centre in Vesteras, Sweden and a member of the European FP6 Excellence Network in Embedded Systems Design (Components and Real-Time Analysis Clusters).

Seminar Organisation

Seminars are free and open to the general public. No booking is necessary. If you are interested in giving a presentation in this seminar series, or to make suggestions for speakers, please contact Xiaodong Li, the seminar co-ordinator.