Jose-Miguel Horcas

• Doctor of Information Technologies
• Postdoc researcher at University of Malaga

Feature models are the de facto standard for modelling variabilities and commonalities in features and relationships in software product lines. They are the base artefacts in many engineering activities, such as product configuration, derivation, or testing. Concrete models in different domains exist; however, many are in private or sparse reposito...

Data visualization aims to convey quantitative and qualitative information effectively by determining which techniques and visualizations are most appropriate for different situations and why. Various software solutions can produce numerous visualizations of the same data set. However, data visualization encompasses a wide range of visual configura...

Emergent application domains, such as cyber–physical systems, edge computing or industry 4.0. present a high variability in software and hardware infrastructures. However, no single variability modeling language supports all language extensions required by these application domains (i.e., attributes, group cardinalities, clonables, complex constrai...

Challenging domains of the future such as Smart Cities, Cloud Computing, or Industry 4.0 expose highly variable systems with colossal configuration spaces. The automated analysis of those systems’ variability has often relied on SAT solving and constraint programming. However, many of the analyses have to deal with the uncertainty introduced by the...

For the last ten years, software product line (SPL) tool developers have been facing the implementation of different variability requirements and the support of SPL engineering activities demanded by emergent domains. Despite systematic literature reviews identifying the main characteristics of existing tools and the SPL activities they support, th...

When configuring a software product line, finding a good trade-off between multiple orthogonal quality concerns is a challenging multi-objective optimisation problem. State-of-the-art solutions based on search-based techniques create invalid configurations in intermediate steps, requiring additional repair actions that reduce the efficiency of the...

Context Web engineering involves managing a high diversity of artifacts implemented in different languages and with different levels of granularity. Technological companies usually implement variable artifacts of Software Product Lines (SPLs) using annotations, being reluctant to adopt hybrid, often complex, approaches combining composition and ann...

When configuring a software product line, finding a good trade-off between multiple orthogonal quality concerns is a challenging multi-objective optimisation problem. State-of-the-art solutions based on search-based techniques create invalid configurations in intermediate steps, requiring additional repair actions that reduce the efficiency of the...

Resource sharing and mass storage in server farms provided by cloud platforms save huge amounts of energy. However, optimizing energy consumption at the server room is not enough, being desirable to perform energy optimization of cloud services at the application level. In cloud computing a tailored configuration of services is deployed for each cl...

Web applications development involves managing a high diversity of files and resources like code, pages or style sheets, implemented in different languages. To deal with the automatic generation of custom-made configurations of web applications, industry usually adopts annotation-based approaches despite the majority of studies encourage the use of...

Context The energy consumption of mobile devices is increasing due to the improvement in their components (e.g., better processors, larger screens). Although the hardware consumes the energy, the software is responsible for managing hardware resources such as the camera software and its functionality, and therefore, affects the energy consumption....

The lack of mature tool support is one of the main reasons that make the industry to be reluctant to adopt Software Product Line (SPL) approaches. A number of systematic literature reviews exist that identify the main characteristics offered by existing tools and the SPL phases in which they can be applied. However, these reviews do not really help...

Multi-agent systems have proved to be a suitable technology for developing self-adaptive Internet of Things (IoT) systems, able to make the most appropriate decisions to address unexpected situations. This leads to new opportunities to use multi-agent technologies to develop all kinds of cyber–physical systems, which usually encompass a high divers...

Web applications development involves managing a high diversity of files and resources like code, pages or style sheets, implemented in different languages. To deal with the automatic generation of custom-made configurations of web applications, industry usually adopts annotation-based approaches even though the majority of studies encourage the us...

Software systems have a strong impact on the energy consumption of the hardware they use. This is especially important for cyber-physical systems where power consumption strongly influences the battery life. For this reason, software developers should be more aware of the energy consumed by their systems. Moreover, software systems should be develo...

Human drivers naturally adapt their behaviour depending on the traffic conditions, such as the current weather and road type. Autonomous vehicles need to do the same, in a way that is both safe and efficient in traffic composed of both conventional and autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we demonstrate the applicability of a reconfigurable vehicle...

Context: Quality attributes play a critical role in the architecture elicitation phase. Software Sustainability and energy efficiency is becoming a critical quality attribute that can be used as a selection criteria to choose from among different design or implementation alternatives. Energy efficiency usually competes with other non-functional req...

The Common Variability Language (CVL) has become a reference in the specification and resolution of variability in the last few years. Despite the multiple advantages of CVL (orthogonal variability, architecture variability resolution, MOF-compliant, standard proposed,...), several approaches require extending and/or modifying the CVL approach in d...

Functional quality attributes (FQAs) are those quality attributes that, to be satisfied, require the incorporation of additional functionality into the application architecture. By adding an FQA (e.g., security) we can improve the quality of the final product, but there is also an increase in energy consumption. This paper proposes a solution to he...

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the percentage of global emissions attributable to Information Systems is expected to further increase in the coming years, due to a proliferation of Internet-connected devices omnipresent in our daily lives (e.g., electric meters, wearable devices, etc.). Although software systems do not directly co...

One of the most important challenges of this decade is the Internet of Things (IoT) that pursues the integration of real-world objects in the virtual world of the Internet. One property that characterises IoT systems is that they have to react to variable and continuous changes. This means that IoT systems need to work as self-managed systems to ef...

Ensuring the security requirements of an application is not a straightforward task. Security properties (e.g., confidentiality, anonymity) need to be satisfied in different ways in different parts of the same application. Software architects are usually required to manually define security components and their dependencies with the base application...

Security policies are enforced through the deployment of certain security functionalities within the applications. When the security policies dynamically change, the associated security functionalities currently deployed within the applications must be adapted at runtime in order to enforce the new security policies. INTER-TRUST is a framework for...

The quality of a software system can be measured by the extent to which it possesses a desired combination of quality attributes (QAs). While some QAs are achieved implicitly through the interaction of various functional components of the system, others (e.g., security) can be encapsulated in dedicated software components. These QAs are known as fu...

There are some Quality Attributes (QAs) whose variability is addressed through functional variability in the software architecture. Separately modelling the variability of these QAs from the variability of the base functionality of the application has many advantages (e.g., a better reusability), and facilitates the reconfiguration of the QA varian...

Some quality attributes can be modelled using software components, and are normally known as Functional Quality Attributes (FQAs). Applications may require different FQAs, and each FQA (e.g., security) can be composed of many concerns (e.g., access control or authentication). They normally have dependencies between them and crosscut the system arch...

INTER-TRUST is a framework for the specification, negotiation, deployment and dynamic adaptation of interoperable security policies, in the context of pervasive systems where devices are constantly exchanging critical information through the network. The dynamic adaptation of the security policies at runtime is addressed using Aspect-Oriented Progr...

The authors wish to update the Acknowledgments in their paper published in Sensors [1], doi:10.3390/s150305251, website: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/15/3/5251. [...]

Providing security and privacy to wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) is very challenging, due to the heterogeneity of sensor nodes and their limited capabilities in terms of energy, processing power and memory. The applications for these systems run in a myriad of sensors with different low-level programming abstractions, limited capabilities and differe...

Security policies are enforced through the deployment of certain security functionalities within the applications. Applications can have different levels of security and thus each security policy is enforced by different security functionalities. Thus, the secure deployment of an application is not an easy task, being more complicated due to the ex...

The security policies of an application can change at runtime due to several reasons, as for example the changes on the user preferences, the lack of enough resources in mobile environments or the negotiation of security levels between the interacting parties. As these security policies change, the application code that copes with the security func...

Quality attributes that add new behavior to the functional software architecture are known as functional quality attributes (FQAs). These FQAs are applied to pieces of software from small components to entire systems, usually crosscutting some of them. Due to this crosscutting nature, modeling them separately from the base application has many adva...

In this paper, we combine the Common Variability Language (CVL) and the ATL Transformation Language to customize and incorporate a generic security model into any application that requires security. Security spans a large set of concerns such as integrity, encryption or authentication, among others, and each concern needs to be incorporated into th...

In the last few years several new programming techniques for achieving a better separation of concerns have been defined. One of the most accepted has been Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). Those attending this tutorial will learn how to improve the modularization, maintainability and evolution of secure applications by using AOP to achieve a bett...

Functional Quality Attributes (FQAs) are quality attributes that have strong functional implications and so can be easily modeled by software components. Thus, we use an aspect-oriented software product line approach, to model the commonalities and variabilities of FQAs from the early stages of the software development. However, FQAs cannot be mode...