José M. Troya

• Institute Director at University of Malaga

Recently, wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) technology has been also applied for monitoring critical infrastructure protection (CIP). These newapplications make more demanding requirements of WSANs and therefore it is necessary to develop algorithms that can manage the communications and route the information from each sensor node to the s...

One of the most important challenges of this decade is the Internet of Things (IoT), which aims to enable things to be connected anytime, anyplace, with anything and anyone, ideally using any path/network and any service. IoT systems are usually composed of heterogeneous and interconnected lightweight devices that support applications that are subj...

Mobile systems must cope with continuous context changes, making them an ideal fit with dynamic software product lines (DSPLs), which enable product adaptation at run time. In this DSPL-based process, devices upload only a small reconfiguration plan rather than the entire variability model, and providers manage diversity without disrupting the base...

Application-level access control is an important requirement in many distributed environments. For instance, in new scenarios such as e-commerce, access to resources by previously unknown users is an essential problem to be solved. The integration of Privilege Management Infrastructure (PMI) services in the access control system represents a scalab...

Wireless Sensor Networks are composed of devices of reduced size, self-powered and with wireless transmission capabilities. Because of these features this technology has been recognised as promising for a large variety of monitoring and surveillance applications. Moreover, WSNs have been identified as having the potential to become an integral part...

It has been more than 30 years since the first research into Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks appeared. However, WSANs are still not a ubiquitous technology due to several factors which include a lack of Quality of Service (QoS) support or the absence of high level programming models. New applications with heterogeneous QoS requirements where WSA...

Context: Architecture description languages (ADLs) are a well-accepted approach to software architecture representation. The majority of well-known ADLs are defined by means of components and connectors. Architectural connectors are mainly used to model interactions among components, specifying component communication and coordination separately. H...

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) are likely to become a pervasive technology in the near future due to the special characteristics of these devices and to the great number of applications where it can be applied. One of these applications is the critical infrastructure protection (CIP). In fact, WSANs have actually been identified as havi...

The use of formal description techniques (FDTs), and specifically SDL, has emerged as an interesting way of designing embedded real time distributed systems (ERTDSs) taking into account the increasing complexity of this kind of system. The communication platform for these ERTDSs should be included at the design stage in order to consider the behavi...

AspectSBASCO is a new programming environment that integrates modern technologies (i.e. software components, parallel skeletons and aspects) to support the development of parallel and distributed scientific applications. This multi-paradigm approach provides high-level parallelism, reusability, interoperability and a clearer separation of concerns....

SBASCO provides a new programming model for parallel and distributed numerical applications which exploits the combination of software components and skeletons. This paper presents an extension to both the model and implementation of SBASCO, so that the notion of aspect is applied in conjunction with the original paradigms. The objective is to achi...

The open distributed processing (ODP) computational viewpoint describes the functionality of a system and its environment in terms of a configuration of objects interacting at interfaces, independently of their distribution. Quality of service (QoS) contracts and service level agreements are an integral part of any computational specification, whic...

Component-based development is a key technology in the development of software for modern real-time systems. However, standard component models and tools are not suitable for this type of system, since they do not explicitly address real time, memory or cost constraints. This paper presents a new predictable component model for real-time systems (U...

Anonymity has been formalized and some metrics have been defined in the scope of anonymizing communication channels. In this paper, such formalization has been extended to cope with anonymity in those scenarios where users must anonymously prove that they own certain privileges to perform remote transactions. In these types of scenarios, the author...

A hybrid approach for learning reactive behaviours is presented in this work. This approach is based on combining evolutionary algorithms (EAs) with the A* algorithm. Such combination is done within the framework of Dynastically Optimal Forma Recombination, and tries to exploit the positive features of EAs and A* (e.g., implicit parallelism, accura...

This paper presents tuple channel model (TCM), a new coordination model for parallel and distributed programming. Our proposal is based on the use of tuple channels (TCs) to model the communication and synchronization of different activities. TCs are multi-point channels that allow complex data structures to be communicated among multiple producers...

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) constitute a new pervasive technology and currently one of the most interesting fields of research. WSANs have two major challenges: coordination mechanisms for both sensor-actor and actor-actor interactions, and real-time communication to perform correct and timely actions. This paper introduces a middlew...

Currently, Web-based applications are no longer monolithic and isolated systems but, rather, distributed applications that need to interoperate with third-party systems, such as external Web services, LDAP repositories or legacy applications. When one component provides a service that the Web application requires, it is often not possible to bind t...

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) constitute a new pervasive and ubiquitous technology. They have been successfully used in various application areas and in future computing environments, WSNs will play an increasingly important role. However, programming sensor networks and applications to be deployed in them is extremely challenging. It has traditi...

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) constitute a new pervasive technology. WSANs have two major requirements: coordination mechanisms for both sensor-actor and actor-actor interactions, and real-time communication to perform correct and timely actions. This paper introduces TC-WSANs, a high-level coordination model that addresses these two r...

The development of complex simulators with multiple simulation models running in a distributed way is a difficult task where communication plays a main role, particularly in cases where real-time constraints exist. This paper presents distributed simulators for nuclear power plants with communication based on Real-time CORBA, a middleware for real-...

SUMMARY This paper presents a nuclear power plant simulator kernel based on the high performance computing-oriented Common Component Architecture (CCA). The approach takes advantage of both the component-based software development and the e-cient execution of parallel simulation models. The use of components improves the software life cycle and fac...

The increasing complexity of large-scale distributed applications is driving the Software Engineering community to adopt new software technologies for the development of distributed systems. In this sense, the emergence of component-based software engineering represents a significant advance towards assembling applications by plugging in pre-fabric...

This paper discusses the use of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) to support the parallelization of scientific code. The idea is to develop parallelism concerns in separate aspects so that the weaving process can inject the code structures which allow the sequential scientific core to be executed in parallel. A series of advantages can initially be...

SUMMARY This paper proposes the application of modern component-based technologies to the development of nuclear power plant simulators. On the one hand, as a signiflcant improvement on previous simulators, the new kernel is based on the Common Component Architecture (CCA). The use of such a high performance computing-oriented component technology,...

This paper is a case study on the use of a high-level, aspect- oriented programming technology for the modelling of the communica- tion and interaction scheme that afiects the set of components of a par- allel scientiflc application. Such application uses domain decomposition methods and static grid adaptation techniques in order to obtain the nume...

Entry consistency is a weak memory consistency model that makes possible the efficient implementation of distributed shared memory (DSM) languages and systems. In this paper we study a way an entry consistency based memory model can be integrated into concurrent object-oriented languages. One problem to be solved is how to satisfy the entry consist...

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) constitute an emerging and pervasive technology that is attracting increased interest for a wide range of applications. WSANs have two major requirements: coordination mechanisms for both sensor-actor and actor-actor interactions, and real-time communication to perform correct and timely actions. Additiona...

In this paper we have defined an open framework to support open distributed applications where anonymous transactions based on user privileges play an important role. The goal of the framework is to provide a basis to the application level, and is presented from an open and general perspective where many different implementation schemes can fit. Mo...

The SBASCO programming environment provides the devel- oper of parallel and distributed applications with high-level programming capabilities. This is achieved as a result of the combination of two tech- nologies: algorithmic skeletons and software components. This paper is a case study on the use of SBASCO. Speciflcally, we present a scientiflc ap...

An extension of an object oriented concurrent logic language for a flexible and rapid prototyping of new neural network models and its simulation is proposed. The environment combines the logic and object oriented paradigms. On one hand the declarative expressiveness of the logic languages allows a natural representation of connectivity in neural m...

Purpose To provide a cryptographic protocol for anonymously accessing services offered on the web. Such anonymous accesses can be disclosed or traced under certain conditions. Design/methodology/approach The “traceable signature” scheme was used in conjunction with the “privilege management infrastructure”. Findings The cryptographic primitive pr...

The last decade marked the first real attempt to turn software development into engineering through the concepts of Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, with the goal of creating high-quality parts that could be joined together to form a functioning system. One of the most critical processes in...

This paper shows a multisequential model to exploit OR parallelism on distributed memory systems. It presents an implementation of the incremental copy mechanism oriented to distributed systems and a novel distributed scheduler is also proposed. WAM modifications to support the proposed model are very simple. The system has been implemented on a 16...

The execution of a concurrent logic program on a distributed system is very dependent on the program granularity and the communication costs. We present a framework based on the abstract interpretation technique to obtain information about these program characteristics and show how its execution time can be improved using the analysis. The method p...

Wireless sensor networks are potentially one of the most important technologies of this century. Sensor nodes must carry out a coordinated cooperative effort in order to transmit the required data. This paper introduces TCMote, a new coordination model to facilitate application development over ad hoc sensor networks. Our proposal is based on a (hi...

The usage of formal description techniques (FDTs), and specifically SDL, has arisen as a promising way of dealing with the increasing complexity of embedded real time distributed systems. An important issue that must be taken into account is the predictability of the temporal behaviour of this kind of system including communications. In this sense,...

Organizations need to develop formally analyzed systems in order to achieve well-known formal method benefits. In order to study the security of communication systems, we have developed a methodology for the application of the formal analysis techniques, commonly used in communication protocols, to the analysis of cryptographic protocols. In partic...

This paper presents a parallel, component-oriented nuclear power plant simulator kernel. It is based on the high-performance computing oriented Common Component Architecture. The approach takes advantage of both the component paradigm and the parallel execution of simulation models. This way, the maintenance, evolution and efficiency of a simulator...

Component-based software development (CBSD) represents a significant advance towards assembling systems by plugging in independent and (re)usable components. On the other hand, aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) is presently considered as a possible technology to improve the modularity and adaptability of complex and large-scale distribute...

Distributed systems are complex and, consequently, their design and development is not an easy task. In order to manage such complexity, it is not enough the use of the appropriate software technologies. Additionally, software developers need to differentiate clearly the several concepts used at different levels of the development (application doma...

Middleware development in the growing and promising field of sensor networks is a major challenge in order to facilitate the programmer task and bridge the gap between the applications and the hardware. This paper presents a new middleware for wireless sensor networks based on the Coordination paradigm. The middleware is thought to support both an...

Aspect-oriented programming enables developers to capture in separated aspect modules concerns that are spread over different components in a system. This paper is an attempt to apply this paradigm to high performance computing. Besides achieving the usual advantages of improved modularity, more reusable code that is easier to develop and maintain,...

We consider the problem of inferring a genetic network from noisy data. This is done under the Temporal Boolean Network Model. Owing to the hardness of the problem, we propose an heuristic approach based on the combined utilization of evolutionary algorithms and other existing algorithms. The main features of this approach are the heuristic seeding...

The protection of software applications is one of the most important problems to solve in information security because it has a crucial effect on other security issues. We can find in the literature many research initiatives that have tried to solve this problem, many of them based on the use of tamperproof hardware tokens. This type of solution de...

The development of training environments for the operations and maintenance of nuclear power plants is a long process where many components are not reused due to specific characteristics of each power plant. This paper presents an environment formed by a simulation kernel with a set of tools aiming at building reusable components. The simulators ar...

The widespread use of the Internet has favored the development of distributed multi-agent systems. The development of agent-based applications is carried out with Agent-Oriented Software Engineering methods, techniques and tools. Although there are several different platforms and methodologies for software agents design, the lack of flexible agent...

We present in this work a wide spectrum of results on analyzing the behavior of parallel heuristics (both pure and hybrid) for solving optimization problems. We focus on several evolutionary algorithms as well as on simulated annealing. Our goal is to offer a first study on the possible changes in the search mechanics that the algorithms suffer whe...

In this paper we address the physical parallelization of a very efficient genetic algorithm (GA) known as gradual distributed real-coded GA (GD-RCGA). This search model naturally provides a set of eight subpopulations residing in a cube topology having two faces for promoting exploration and exploitation. The resulting technique has been shown to y...

The concept of quality is used largely in software development through models in order to improve and certify software products as well as to determine process maturity. The approaches used to specify quality models are oriented toward product or process. However, different studies have treated simultaneously development process maturity and produc...

The Internet facilitates the creation of new markets, which has motivated the development of new technologies for e-commerce. The increasing number of e-markets poses a big challenge to designers of e-commerce services. Agent-based applications are the most appropriate for merchandising because software agents are suitable for automating tedious ta...

This paper focus on two security services for internet ap- plications: authorization and anonymity. Traditional authorization solu- tions are not very helpful for many of the Internet applications; however, attribute certificates proposed by ITU-T seems to be well suited and provide adequate solution. On the other hand, special attention is paid to...

Component-based software development (CBSD) has gained recognition as one of the key technologies for the construction of high-quality, evolvable, large complex systems in a timely and affordable manner. In CBSD, the development effort becomes one of gradual discovery about the components, their capabilities and the incompatibilities that arise whe...

Current agent architectures provided by MAS platforms impose some limitation that affect the development of the functionality of software agents from scratch, placing little emphasis on (re)configuration and (re)use. This paper presents a software agent architecture development approach using a component and aspect–based architecture that promotes...

SBASCO is a new programming environment for the development of parallel and distributed high-performance scientific applications. The approach integrates both skeleton-based and component technologies. The main goal of the proposal is to provide a high-level programmability system for the efficient development of numerical applications with perform...

The growing complexity in the development of Web-based services in general, and multimedia services in particular, makes necessary the application of sound development methods. New multimedia devices, coding algorithms, network protocols, etc., are continually appearing but, unfortunately, current solutions for developing multimedia applications do...

In order to study the security systems, we have developed a methodology for the application to the analysis of cryptographic protocols of the formal analysis techniques commonly used in communication protocols. In particular, we have extended the design and analysis phases with security properties. Our proposal uses a specification notation based o...

Component-based development is a key technology in the development of software for modern embedded systems. However, standard component models and tools are not suitable for this type of systems, since they do not explicitly address real-time, memory or cost constraints. This work presents a new predictable component model for embedded systems toge...

Security services are essential for ensuring secure communications. Typically no consideration is given to security requirements during the initial stages of system development. Security is only added latter as an afterthought in function of other factors such as the environment into which the system is to be inserted, legal requirements, and othe...

Architecture description languages deal with the description, analysis and reuse of software architectures. This paper describes DAOP-ADL, a component- and aspect-based language to specify the architecture of an application in terms of components, aspects and a set of plug-compatibility rules between them. With the aim of connecting the specificati...

Architecture description languages deal with the description, analysis and reuse of software architectures. This paper describes DAOP-ADL, a component- and aspect-based language to specify the architecture of an application in terms of components, aspects and a set of plug-compatibility rules between them. With the aim of connecting the specificati...

Software Agents are becoming one of the most important approaches for developing open distributed systems. Interoperability is a critical issue to develop open and flexible agent-based applications, as it would make reusability possible across heterogeneous agent systems. Agent interoperability can be achieved through the use of FIPA standardized s...

The validity of a general template for transmitting recombination operators is established, and a sufficient condition to ensure the independence of the pieces of information manipulated in the process from the particulars of the operator is given.

The last decade marked the first real attempt to turn software development into engineering through the concepts of Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components. The idea is to create high-quality parts and join them together to form a functioning system. One of the most critical processes in CBSD is th...

Web services are the newest trend in information technology, being considered the most used alternative for building distributed open systems. Although currently Web services involve a single client-server access, the market is demanding cooperative Web services to provide a global solution. Recently software agents appear as a good option that can...

Nowadays, it is widely accepted that critical systems have to be formally analyzed to achieve well-known benefits of formal methods. To study the security of communication systems, we have developed a methodology for the application of the formal analysis techniques commonly used in communication protocols to the analysis of cryptographic ones. In...

This paper describes domain interaction patterns, a pattern-based, high level coordination language, which provides a new way of integrating task and data parallelism. Coordination patterns are used to express task parallelism among a collection of data parallel High Performance Fortran (HPF) tasks. Patterns specify the interaction among domains in...

Distributed systems usually contain objects with heterogeneous security requirements that pose important challenges for the underlying security mechanisms and especially in access control systems. Access control in distributed systems often relies on centralised security administration. Existing solutions for distributed access control do not provi...

This paper analyzes the detection of stagnation states in iterated local search algorithms. This is done considering elements such as the population size, the length of the encoding and the number of observed non-improving iterations. This analysis isolates the features of the target problem within one parameter for which three di#erent estimations...

The Frequency Assignment Problem (FAP) is a very important problem of practical interest. This work compares several evolutionary approaches to this problem, based both in the forma analysis framework, and in the decoder paradigm. All approaches are studied from the point of view of two different quality measures of assignments: the number of disti...

Traditional IDLs were defined for describing the services that objects offer, but not those services they require from other objects, nor the relative order in which they expect their methods to be called. Some of the existing proposals try to add protocol information to object interfaces, but most of them fail to do so in a modular way. In this pa...

A framework for hybridizing evolutionary algorithms with the branch-and-bound algorithm (B&B) is presented in this paper. This framework is based on using B&B as an operator embedded in the evolutionary algorithm. The resulting hybrid operator will intelligently explore the dynastic potential (possible children) of the solutions being recombined, p...

The usage of object-oriented methodologies in conjunction with formal description techniques has arisen as a promising way of dealing with the increasing complexity of embedded real-time systems. These methodologies are currently well supported by a set of tools that allow the specification, simulation and validation of the functional aspects of th...

The usage of formal description techniques (FDTs) has arisen as a promising way of dealing with the increasing complexity of embedded real-time systems. However, FDTs do not take into account non-functional aspects, such as the time requirements, that are especially important in the context of this kind of system. In this paper, we present how to i...

The Semantic Web, also known as the Web of meaning, is considered the new generation of the Web. Its objective is to enable computers and people to work in cooperation. A requisite for this is encoding data in forms that make web contents (meaning, semantics) more understandable by algorithmic means. In this paper, we present the application of sem...

Distributed systems usually contain objects with heterogeneous security requirements that pose important challenges on the underlying security mechanisms and especially in access control systems. Access control in distributed systems often relies on centralized security administration. Existing solutions for distributed access control do not provid...

One of the most important features of XML Web services is that they can be easily accessed over the Internet, but this makes them vulnerable to a series of security threats. What makes security for web services so challenging is their distributed and heterogeneous nature. In this sense, this paper presents an access control system for Web services....

Component-based software development is gaining recognition as the key technology for the construction of high-quality, evolvable, large software systems in timely and affordable manners. In this new setting, interoperability is one of the essential issues, since it enables the composition of reusable heterogeneous components developed by different...

Interaction of citizens and private organizations with Public Administrations can produce meaningful benefits in the accessibility, efficiency and availability of documents, regardless of time, location and quantity. Although there are some experiences in the field of e-government there are still some technological and legal difficulties that avoid...

This paper analyzes some technical and practical issues concerning the heterogeneous execution of parallel genetic algorithms (PGAs). In order to cope with a plethora of different operating systems, security restrictions, and other problems associated to multi-platform execution, we use Java to implement a distributed PGA model. The distributed PGA...

JACO is a Java-based runtime system designed to study techniques for implementing concurrent objects in distributed systems. The use of Java has allowed us to build a system that permits to combine heterogeneous networks of workstations and multiprocessors as a unique metacomputing system. An alternative to Java is Microsoft's .NET plat-form, that...

The Web now offers an exceptional infrastructure for the development of distributed collaborative services and applications. However, most of the existing applications only make use of the Web access and visualization facilities, without exploiting its distributed-processing potential capabilities. Web technologies are currently more focused on the...

Aspect-Oriented Programming separates in a new dimension, named aspect, those features that are spread over different components in a system. In this paper we present a Dynamic AO Framework where software components and aspects are first-order entities composed dynamically at runtime according to the architectural information stored in middleware l...

In this paper we develop a study on several types of parallel genetic algorithms (PGAs). Our mo- tivation is to bring some uniformity to the proposal, comparison, and knowledge exchange among the traditionally opposite kinds of serial and parallel GAs. We comparatively analyze the properties of steady-state, generational, and cellular genetic algor...

This paper presents BCL, a border-based coordination language focused on the solution of numerical applications. Our approach provides a simple parallelism model. Coordination and computational aspects are clearly separated. The former are established using the coordination language and the latter are coded using HPF (together with only a few exten...

Security is nowadays the most important point to be improved in e-commerce environments. Inside this area, smartcards can be used for many different purposes, ranging from user identification to payment mechanisms. The ticketing service is one of the most attractive added-value services for customers. Sale, storage and use of electronic tickets ena...

A UML profile for a system or an application is a standard means for expressing the semantics of this system or application using a set of predefined extensions to UML. UML profiles allow all stakeholders of a system to share a common graphical notation and vocabulary, and permit more precise specifications and better documentation on how to use an...

Component-based software development is gaining recognition as the key technology for the construction of high-quality, evolvable, large software systems in a timely and affordable manner. Component search and service matching have become two of the key issues involved in this process. However current proposals addressing these issues are based on...

Security is a very relevant aspect in the implementation of most digital libraries. Two important security issues in these systems are distributed access control and secure content distribution. This paper presents a system that provides these two features for digital libraries. The system is based on the combination of the use of an external autho...