Jean-Michel Bruel

Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse · Modèles, Aspects, Composants pour des Architectures à Objets Team (MACAO)

The concept of ideal workspace for software developers is being researched widely through individual and grouped studies. Such studies rely on the information provided by the participants. However, an individual’s perception of an ideal space might not align with the space in which they are actually productive. Therefore, it is necessary to further...

A paradox of requirements specifications as dominantly practiced in the industry is that they often claim to be object-oriented (OO) but largely rely on procedural (non-OO) techniques. Use cases and user stories describe functional flows, not object types. To gain the benefits provided by object technology (such as extendibility, reusability, relia...

The concept of an ideal workspace for software developers is being researched widely through individual and grouped studies. Such studies rely on the information provided by the participants. However, an individual's perception of an ideal space might not align with the space in which they are actually productive. Therefore, it is necessary to furt...

Both Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been challenged for their deployment in real-world applications. Although MBSE remains the focal point of any systems engineering activities, its adoption still faces significant hurdles to demonstrate its return on investment. Recently, AI has received intensive atte...

For the last 20 years, the number of vulnerabili-ties has increased near 20 times, according to NIST statistics. Vulnerabilities expose companies to risks that may seriously threaten their operations. Therefore, for a long time, it has been suggested to apply security engineering-the process of accumulating multiple techniques and practices to ensu...

The aim and scope of this topical issue are aligned with those of the DEVOPS series: to provide the most recent stages of what is being done in the area of software engineering targeting modern software development methods, with particular interest at those aimed at speeding up the development life cycle, while ensuring that the product to be relea...

The use of Model-Based Systems Engineering and early Verification and Validation through simulations offers an effective way to manage the complexity of real-world industrial development projects. However, the modeling and simulation activities are often conducted in parallel, based on a common core of requirements. This can lead to a product model...

Requirements documentation comprehends the challenge of accurately interpreting project details as specified by the client. There is no standard template that ensures that documentation would be evident in all aspects to developers. Furthermore, requirements documentation continuously evolves and has a continuously evolving audience (changes in the...

At the heart of cyber-physical and ambient systems, the user should permanently benefit from applications adapted to the situation and her/his needs. To do this, she/he must be able to configure her/his software environment and be supported as much as possible in that task. To this end, an intelligent “engine” assembles software components that are...

Component-based software engineering is a paradigm that fosters software flexibility and emphasizes composability and reuse of software components. These are runtime units that provide services and, in turn, may require other services to operate. Assembling components consists in binding components’ required services to provided ones to deliver com...

Gamification refers to the exploitation of gaming mechanisms for serious purposes, like learning hard-to-train skills such as modeling. We present a gamified version of Papyrus, the well-known open source modeling tool. Instructors can use it to easily create new modeling games (including the tasks, solutions, levels, rewards...) to help students l...

Despite the increasing attention to formal verification techniques by industry and academia, the programs of Higher Education to this regard still lie behind, and these concepts are not presented to the majority of Computer Science students trained to be future IT specialists. The primary reason is the presumed complexity of the concepts, tools, an...

Despite the increasing attention to formal verification techniques by industry and academia, the programs of Higher Education to this regard still lie behind, and these concepts are not presented to the majority of Computer Science students trained to be future IT specialists. The primary reason is the presumed complexity of the concepts, tools, an...

This article introduces a conceptual reference framework – the Models and Data (MODA) framework – to support a data-centric and model-driven approach for the integration of heterogeneous models and their respective data for the entire life-cycle of socio-technical systems. A pre-print version is available at https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02612087

A major determinant of the quality of software systems is the quality of their requirements, which should be both understandable and precise. Most requirements are written in natural language, good for understandability but lacking in precision. To make requirements precise, researchers have for years advocated the use of mathematics-based notatio...

Model transformations are essential elements of model-driven engineering (MDE) solutions, as they enable the automatic manipulation of models. MDE promotes the creation of domain-specific metamodels, but without proper reuse mechanisms, model transformations need to be developed from scratch for each new metamodel. In this paper, our goal is to und...

Sustainability—the capacity to endure—has emerged as a concern of central relevance for society. However, the nature of sustainability is distinct from other concerns addressed by computing research, such as automation, self-adaptation, or intelligent systems. It demands the consideration of environmental resources, economic prosperity, individual...

This book constitutes revised selected papers of the Second International Workshop on Software Engineering Aspects of Continuous Development and New Paradigms of Software Production and Deployment, DEVOPS 2019, held at the Château de Villebrumier, France, in May 2019. The 15 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from...

This book constitutes invited papers from the First International Workshop on Frontiers in Software Engineering Education, FISEE 2019, which took place during November 11-13, 2019, at the Château de Villebrumier, France. The 25 papers included in this volume were considerably enhanced after the conference and during two different peer-review phases...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 51st International Conference on Software Technology: Methods and Tools, TOOLS 2019, held in Innopolis, Russia, in October 2019. The 19 revised full papers and 13 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. The papers discuss all aspects of soft...

A major determinant of the quality of software systems is the quality of their requirements, which should be both understandable and precise. Natural language, the most commonly used for writing requirements, helps understandability, but lacks precision. To achieve precision, researchers have for many years advocated the use of"formal" approaches t...

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been challenged concerning their successful deployment in real-world applications. In this paper, we aim to contribute a first step towards applying AI for MBSE to optimize the adoption of MBSE and resolve a set of its challenges. Specifically, we present the text­-to-mode...

Requirements engineering is crucial to software development but lacks a precise definition of its fundamental concepts. Even the basic definitions in the literature and in industry standards are often vague and verbose. To remedy this situation and provide a solid basis for discussions of requirements, this work provides precise definitions of the...

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the First International Workshop on Software Engineering Aspects of Continuous Development and New Paradigms of Software Production and Deployment, DEVOPS 2018, hled at the hateau de Villebrumier, France, in March 2018. The 17 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected f...

This paper presents the results achieved while pursuing the verification and validation of a train system behavior at the first steps of development in an industrial context. A method is proposed, supported by preliminary results through the definition and verification of constrained states and preconditions to use cases, as well as a structure for...

Ambient environments consist of components surrounding the user and offering services. Applications can here be composed opportunistically and automatically by an intelligent system that puts together available components. Thus, applications that are a priori unknown emerge from the environment. The problem is in the intelligible presentation to an...

The considerable effort of writing requirements is only worthwhile if the result meets two conditions: the requirements reflect stakeholders' needs, and the implementation satisfies them. In usual approaches, the use of different notations for requirements (often natural language) and implementations (a programming language) makes both conditions e...

Requirements engineering is crucial to software development but lacks a precise definition of its fundamental concepts. Even the basic definitions in the literature and in industry standards are often vague and verbose. To remedy this situation and provide a solid basis for discussions of requirements, this work provides precise definitions of the...

The considerable effort of writing requirements is only worthwhile if the result meets two conditions: the requirements reflect stakeholders’ needs, and the implementation satisfies them. In usual approaches, the use of different notations for requirements (often natural language) and implementations (a programming language) makes both conditions e...

DevOps is increasingly becoming a de facto standard in the industry. Every year, more and more software companies report improvements on their development process and ability to deliver value-added services. The role of Software Engineering professors, teaching boards, and program committees is to take a step back and think over about the skills re...

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) has been challenged concerning its successful adoption in real-world applications. Although MBSE remains to be the focal point of any systems engineering activities, its adoption still faces significant hurdles to demonstrate its return on investment. This paper presents the results of a survey on MBSE adoptio...

Model-Based Systems Engineering and early simulation based Validation & Verification are now key enablers for managing the complexity in the development of modern complex systems like Cyber-Physical Systems. Models provide a formal account of system requirements and design decisions. Model simulation enables both design exploration and design versu...

By nature, Cyber-physical systems are very often subjected to uncertainty events that can occur in their environment. This paper presents the first results of our work on how to deal with environment uncertainty in goal-based requirements engineering. This work is motivated by the fact that current goal-based approaches do not natively allow for un...

By nature, Cyber-physical systems are very often submitted to uncertainty events that can occur in their environment. This paper presents the first results of our work on how to deal with environment uncertainty in goal-based requirements engineering. This work is motivated by the fact that current goal-based approaches do not natively allow for un...

La traçabilité et l'intégration des exigences au court du cycle de vie d'un système infor-matique est un enjeu majeur de l'ingénierie des exigences. En effet, cela permet de s'assurer que le système réponde bien aux attentes du client. Si les méthodes formelles permettent de prouver de telles propriétés, elles restent peu appliquées dans le cas des...

Tracing requirements back to stakeholders and initial documents on one hand, and forward to their corresponding designed system artifacts, on the other hand, are crucial activities. Requirements are often expressed independently from those artifacts and can take several forms: texts or models. This makes hard and tedious the inference of trace link...

Ambient and mobile systems consist of networked devices and software components surrounding human users and providing services. From the services present in the environment, other services can be composed opportunistically and automatically by an intelligent system and proposed to the user. The latter must not only to be aware of existing services...

In recent years, Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems have became a major asset, shaping almost all aspects of human life. Connected objects host physical (e.g., pollution sensing) or software (e.g., positioning on a map, itinerary planning) services. Thanks to artificial intelligence, these basic services can be automatically composed to...

Increasing competition drives organizations to continually seek ways to improve the quality of their products and services, time to market and pricing pressures. Model‐Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) promises many benefits to solve document‐based engineering problems. However, the journey of MBSE adoption relies on several human, financial, organi...

This paper reports on the first Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering for Design-Runtime Interaction in Complex Systems (also called MDE@DeRun 2018) that took place during the STAF 2018 week. It explains the main objectives, content and results of the event. Based on these, the paper also proposes initial directions to explore for further research i...

Ambient and mobile systems consist of networked devices and software components surrounding human users and providing services. From the services present in the environment, other services can be composed opportunistically and automatically by an intelligent system, then proposed to the user. The latter must not only to be aware of existing service...

This paper reports on the first Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering for Design-Runtime Interaction in Complex Systems (also called MDE@DeRun 2018) that took place during the STAF 2018 week. It explains the main objectives, content and results of the event. Based on these, the paper also proposes initial directions to explore for further research i...

This paper advocates the need of a precise definition and consistent use of the notion of states and modes in system engineering and why this is important for the early validation of system behavior. This work is part of a solution developed for Bombardier Transport in order to provide continued validation of a train behavior across all development...

The objective of this poster paper is to investigate on how to deal with environmental uncertainty in goal based requirements engineering. To do so, we explore the introduction of RELAX concepts into SysMLKaos. RELAX is a Requirements Engineering language for Dynamically Adaptive Systems while SysMLKaos is a Goal based Requirements Engineering appr...

This paper reports on a four-year project that aims to raise the abstraction level through the use of model-driven engineering (MDE) techniques in the development of scientific applications relying on high-performance computing. The development and maintenance of high-performance scientific computing software is reputedly a complex task. This compl...

This paper presents a solution for SysML model verification and validation, with a return of experience from its implementation in an industrial context. We present this solution as a way to overcome issues regarding the use of SysML in an industrial context. We contribute by providing a method and a list of the existing challenges and experimentat...

The first workshop specifically devoted to tools supporting Model Driven Engineering was held September 19, 2017 in Austin, Texas, USA. The motivation, scope, objectives, and results of the workshop are summarized. Index Terms-Model-driven Engineering, tools, software and systems modeling I. MOTIVATION The easy availability of high-quality tools wi...

Writing requirements for embedded software is pointless unless they reflect actual needs and the final software implements them. In usual approaches, the use of different notations for requirements (often natural language) and code (a programming language) makes both conditions elusive. To address the problem, we propose to write requirements in th...

A number of formal methods exist for capturing stimulus-response requirements in a declarative form. Someone yet needs to translate the resulting declarative statements into imperative programs. The present article describes a method for specification and verification of stimulus-response requirements in the form of imperative program routines with...

A number of formal methods exist for capturing stimulus-response requirements in a declarative form. Someone yet needs to translate the resulting declarative statements into imperative programs. The present article describes a method for specification and verification of stimulus-response requirements in the form of imperative program routines with...

Development processes for software construction are common knowledge and widely used in most development organizations. Unfortunately, these processes often offer only little or no support in order to meet security requirements. In our work, we propose a methodology to build domain specific process models with security concepts on the foundations o...

Securing critical systems such as cyber physical systems (CPS) is an important feature especially when it comes to critical transmitted data. At the same time, the implementation of security counter-measures in such systems may impact other functional or non-functional concerns. In this context, we propose a model-based approach for securing critic...

In this paper, we synthesize a study aiming at providing industrial feedback, challenges and advanced research on the way Model-Based Systems Engineering can be used to define system requirements as well as system architecture with traceability to system requirements, which are considered as key success factors for the concerned industries.

The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is a popular and standardized UML profile for systems engineering applications. In addition to seven conventional UML diagram types, SysML supports requirement diagrams and tables that can be used to capture requirements, their attributes, and their relationships. However, several important concepts such as goa...

Requirements engineering is a most critical activity in the engineering process of complex cyber-physical systems. To avoid the ambiguity of natural or semi-formal languages and to provide tool support for engineering activities all along a system lifecycle (from scoping studies to system operation and maintenance), EDF has developed FORM-L, a form...

Various disciplines use models for different purposes. While engineering models, including software engineering models, are often developed to guide the construction of a nonexistent system, scientific models, in contrast, are created to better understand a natural phenomenon (i.e., an already existing system). An engineering model may incorporate...

Mechatronic systems play a significant role in different types of industry, especially in transportation, aerospace, automotive and manufacturing. Although their multidisciplinary nature provides enormous functionalities, it is still one of the substantial challenges which frequently impede their design process. Notably, the conceptual design phase...

Security pattern-based system and software engineering (PBSE) approaches aim at building secure software and systems by capturing and reusing artifacts that encapsulate security expert's knowledge called security patterns. In this context, security patterns are selected by developers based on security requirements. On the other hand, security risk...

The complex problems that computational science addresses are more and more benefiting from the progress of computing facilities (simulators, librairies, accessible languages,. .). Nevertheless, the actual solutions call for several improvements. Among those, we address in this paper the needs for leveraging on knowledge and expertise by focusing o...