Michael Vierhauser

University of Innsbruck | UIBK · Department of Computer Science

Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches have been incorporated into modern learning environments and software engineering (SE) courses and curricula for several years. However, with the significant rise in popularity of large language models (LLMs) in general, and OpenAI’s LLM-powered chatbot ChatGPT in particular in the last year, educators are fa...

Testing and validating Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) in the aerospace domain, such as field testing of drone rescue missions, poses challenges due to volatile mission environments, such as weather conditions. While testing processes and methodologies are well established, structured guidance and execution support for field tests are still weak. Thi...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches have been incorporated into modern learning environments and software engineering (SE) courses and curricula for several years. However, with the significant rise in popularity of large language models (LLMs) in general, and OpenAI's LLM-powered chatbot ChatGPT in particular in the last year, educators are fa...

Assurance of Learning and Competency-Based Education are increasingly important in higher education, not only for accreditation or transfer of credit points. Learning Analytics is crucial for making educational goals measurable and actionable, which is beneficial for program managers, course instructors, and students. While universities typically h...

The Human Machine Teaming (HMT) paradigm focuses on supporting partnerships between humans and autonomous machines. HMT describes requirements for transparency, augmented cognition, and coordination that enable far richer partnerships than those found in typical human-on-the-loop and human-in-the-loop systems. Autonomous, self-adaptive systems in d...

Flight-time failures of small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) can have a severe impact on people or the environment. Therefore, sUAS applications must be thoroughly evaluated and tested to ensure their adherence to specified requirements, and safe behavior under real-world conditions, such as poor weather, wireless interference, and satellite failur...

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become ubiquitous in our everyday life, with security becoming an ever-growing issue as more and more cyber-attack incidents being reported, primarily due to deficiencies in existing security mechanisms. However, while, for example, cloud-based applications, or industrial automation systems of systems possess s...

Software-intensive systems in general and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in particular have drawn considerable attention from both industry and academia in recent years, with companies increasingly adopting Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS). Regardless of the domain in which these systems are deployed, what they have in common is a shift from...

Software vulnerabilities can affect critical systems within an organization impacting processes, workflows, privacy, and safety. When a software vulnerability becomes known, affected systems are at risk until appropriate updates become available and eventually deployed. This period can last from a few days to several months, during which attackers...

In emergency response scenarios, autonomous small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) must be configured and deployed quickly and safely to perform mission-specific tasks. In this paper, we present Drone Response, a Software Product Line for rapidly configuring and deploying a multi-role, multi-sUAS mission whilst guaranteeing a set of safety properties...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are increasingly used in safety-critical scenarios where ensuring their correct behavior at runtime becomes a crucial task. Therefore, the behavior of the CPS needs to be monitored at runtime so that violations of requirements can be detected. With the inception of edge devices that facilitate runtime analysis at the ed...

In the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, as well as in the tunnelling domain, inter‐company processes between partners in different roles in large‐scale construction projects still exhibit great potential towards digitalisation. Thereby, information should be seamlessly shared between partners according to the Building Info...

Context Software is inherently prone to constant change, especially in the source code, making it difficult for developers to keep track of changes performed over time and to fully understand their implications. Objective To this end, we present an Eclipse plug-in for visualizing heterogeneous information, collected from multiple sources, at diffe...

The MAPE-K feedback loop has been established as the primary reference model for self-adaptive and autonomous systems in domains such as autonomous driving, robotics, and Cyber-Physical Systems. At the same time, the Human Machine Teaming (HMT) paradigm is designed to promote partnerships between humans and autonomous machines. It goes far beyond t...

Cyber-Physical Systems are increasingly ubiquitous in our society. With complexity and interconnection, we need new concepts, methods, and tools to systematically leverage data obtained from these systems to better understand, control, and optimize their behavior. Digital Twins have emerged as a new paradigm for the virtual representation of comple...

Zusammenfassung Es gibt zahlreiche Publikationen, die die digitale Transformation im Tief- und Tunnelbau propagieren. Als Lösungsansatz wird dabei immer wieder Building Information Modeling (BIM) genannt und die Umsetzung der digitalen Transformation basierend auf dieser Methodik gefordert. Der prototypische Charakter eines Tunnelbauprojekts erschw...

Many software systems today provide support for adaptation and reconfiguration at runtime, in response to changes in their environment. Such adaptive systems are designed to run continuously and may not be shut down for reconfiguration or maintenance tasks. The variability of such systems has to be explicitly managed, together with mechanisms that...

Safety-critical software systems must be developed using rigorous safety assurance practices. This has led to the phenomenon referred to as the “big freeze” in which the cost, effort, and difficulty of introducing new functionality to an already certified product is prohibitively expensive. However, present day agile processes have greatly matured...

[Context and motivation] Modern software engineering processes have shifted from traditional upfront requirements engineering (RE) to a more continuous way of conducting RE, particularly including data-driven approaches. [Question/problem] However, current research on data-driven RE focuses more on leveraging certain techniques such as natural lang...

The use of semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to support emergency response scenarios, such as fire surveillance and search and rescue, offers the potential for huge societal benefits. However, designing an effective solution in this complex domain represents a "wicked design" problem, requiring a careful balance between trade-offs asso...

Complex software systems evolve frequently, e.g., when introducing new features or fixing bugs during maintenance. However, understanding the impact of such changes on system behavior is often difficult. Many approaches have thus been proposed that analyze systems before and after changes, e.g., by comparing source code, model-based representations...

The growing adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for tasks such as eCommerce, aerial surveillance, and environmental monitoring introduces the need for new safety mechanisms in an increasingly cluttered airspace. In our work we thus emphasize safety issues that emerge at the intersection of infrastructures responsible for controlling the airs...

[Context and motivation] With the rise of cyber-physical systems (CPS), smart ecosystems, and the Internet of Things (IoT), software-intensive systems have become pervasive in everyone’s daily life. The shift from software systems to ubiquitous adaptive software-intensive systems not only affects the way we use software but further has an impact on...

[Context] Complex and heterogeneous software systems need to be monitored as their full behavior often only emerges at runtime, e.g., when interacting with other systems or the environment. Software monitoring approaches observe and check properties or quality attributes of software systems during operation. Such approaches have been developed in d...

Complex software-intensive systems are often described as systems of systems (SoS) due to their heterogeneous architectural elements. As SoS behavior is often only understandable during operation, runtime monitoring is needed to detect deviations from requirements. Today, while diverse monitoring approaches exist, most do not provide what is needed...

Research in the area of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is hampered by the lack of available project environments in which to explore open challenges and to propose and rigorously evaluate solutions. In this "New Ideas and Emerging Results" paper we introduce a CPS research incubator - based upon a system, and its associated project environment, for m...

The growing adoption of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) for tasks such as eCommerce, aerial surveillance, and environmental monitoring introduces the need for new safety mechanisms in an increasingly cluttered airspace. Safety assurance cases (SAC) provide a state-of-the-art solution for reasoning about system and software safety in numerous...

Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) are an emerging application area for many industries including surveillance, agriculture monitoring, and vector-borne disease control. With drastically lower costs and increasing performance and autonomy, future application evolution will more than likely include the use of sUAS swarms. Several largely success...

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving...

Industrial software systems are often systems of systems (SoS) that evolve continuously to meet new customer requirements or to address technological changes. Despite thorough testing of the different contributing parts, the full behavior of SoS only emerges at runtime. The systems in the SoS and their interactions thus need to be continuously moni...

Context and motivation: Complex industrial software systems are often systems of systems (SoS) whose behavior only fully emerges during operation. Techniques such as requirements monitoring thus have to be used to observe such systems at runtime to detect deviations from their requirements. Question/problem: However, the focus of existing monitorin...

The full behavior of complex software systems often only emerges during operation. They thus need to be monitored at run time to check that they adhere to their requirements. Diverse runtime monitoring approaches have been developed in various domains and for different purposes. Their sheer number and heterogeneity, however, make it hard to find th...

Developers of systems of systems (SoSs) face challenges such as heterogeneous, inconsistent, and changing elements; continuous evolution and deployment; decentralized control; and inherently conflicting and often unknowable requirements. In response to these challenges, researchers are developing the ReMinds tool. Engineers can use it to instrument...

[Context] Software systems today often interoperate with each other, thus forming a system of systems (SoS). Due to the scale, complexity, and heterogeneity of SoS, determining compliance with their requirements is challenging, despite the range of existing monitoring approaches. The fragmented research landscape and the diversity of existing appro...

Requirements monitoring approaches support defining and checking the run-time behavior and performance characteristics of complex software systems. However, although numerous monitoring tools have been described in the literature, hardly any empirical studies exist on their usefulness for software engineering practitioners. Empirical data on useful...

Software project artifacts such as source code, requirements, and change logs represent a gold-mine of actionable information. As a result, software analytic solutions have been developed to mine repositories and answer questions such as "who is the expert?," "which classes are fault prone?," or even "who are the domain experts for these fault-pron...

Today's complex software systems are highly variable systems of systems (SoS) that evolve continuously to meet new customer requirements or to address technological changes. Despite thorough testing of the different parts of an SoS, the full behavior often emerges during operation only. The systems and their interactions thus need to be continuousl...

Many software-intensive systems today can be characterized as systems of systems (SoS) comprising complex, interrelated, and heterogeneous systems. The behavior of SoS often only emerges at runtime due to complex interactions between the involved systems and their environment. It is thus necessary to determine unexpected behavior by monitoring SoS...

Complex software-intensive systems are often described as systems of systems (SoS) comprising heterogeneous architectural elements. As SoS behavior fully emerges during operation only, runtime monitoring is needed to detect deviations from requirements. Today, diverse approaches exist to define and check runtime behavior and performance characteris...

In many domains systems need to run continuously and cannot be shut down for reconfiguration or maintenance tasks. Cyber-physical or cloud-based systems, for instance, thus often provide means to support their adaptation at runtime. The required flexibility and adaptability of systems suggests the application of Software Product Line (spl) principl...

In many domains systems need to run continuously and cannot be shut down for reconfiguration or maintenance tasks. Cyber-physical or cloud-based systems, for instance, thus often provide means to support their adaptation at runtime. The required flexibility and adaptability of systems suggests the application of Software Product Line (spl) principl...

Many software systems today are systems of systems (SoS), which are difficult to analyze due to their size, complexity, heterogeneity, and variability. For instance, unexpected behavior of SoS is often caused by the complex interactions between the involved systems and their environment at runtime. Monitoring infrastructures (MIs) provide support f...

When developing large-scale industrial software systems engineers need to instantiate, configure, and deploy diverse reusable components. The number of component instances required depends on customer requirements only known during configuration and is typically unknown when modeling the systems’ variability. Also, the hierarchy of dynamically crea...

An increasing number of software systems today are systems of systems (SoS) that have been developed by diverse teams over many years. Such systems emerge gradually and it is hard to analyze or predict their behavior due to their scale, complexity, and heterogeneity. In particular, certain behavior only emerges at runtime due to complex interaction...

An increasing number of software systems today are verylarge-scale software systems (VLSS) with system-of-systems (SoS) architectures. Due to their heterogeneity and complexity VLSS are dificult to understand and analyze, which results in various challenges for development and evolution. Existing software engineering processes, methods, and tools d...

[Context and motivation] Approaches for requirements monitoring check the compliance of systems with their requirements during operation. [Question/problem] Despite many advances, requirements monitoring remains challenging particularly for very-large-scale software systems (VLSS) with system-of-systems architectures. [Principal ideas/results] In t...

Engineers developing large-scale industrial software systems need to instantiate, configure, and deploy many different types of reusable components. The number of component instances required is typically unknown when defining the systems' architecture and variability but depends on customer requirements only known during configuration. The hierarc...

In industrial software development salespeople, product managers, or technical writers frequently create documents such as offers, contracts, user manuals, or technical documentation. For products that are configured specifically for different customers, the documentation also needs to be adapted to match the product. Such adaptation of documents i...