Moharram Challenger

University of Antwerp | UA · Department of Computer Science

In this paper, we propose to adopt the MDE paradigm for the development of Machine Learning (ML)-enabled software systems with a focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. We illustrate how two state-of-the-art open-source modeling tools, namely MontiAnna and ML-Quadrat can be used for this purpose as demonstrated through a case study. The case...

Model Driven Engineering (MDE), where models are the core elements in the entire life cycle from the specification to maintenance phases, is one of the promising techniques to provide abstraction and automation. However, model management is another challenging issue due to the increasing number of models, their size, and their structural complexity...

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are complex systems interacting with the physical world where instant external changes and uncertain events exist. The Internet of Things is a paradigm that can interoperate with a CPS to increase the CPS’s network and communication capabilities. In the literature, software agents, particularly belief–desire–intention...

Mobile robots allow us to achieve tasks independently from human intervention. Mobile robots follow their long-term goals according to a given way-point while observing the environment and reacting to the uncertain events around them. Therefore, a localization technology such as ultra-wide-band should be used to permit their movement along a path....

As various engineering fields increasingly use modelling techniques, the number of provided models, their size, and their structural complexity increase. This makes model management, including finding these models, with state of the art very expensive computationally, i.e., leads to non-tractable graph comparison algorithms. To handle this problem,...

Autonomous Guided Vehicles are mobile robots that can use various technologies and techniques for their navigation such as line following, indoor localisation, image recognition, GPS, laser-and gyro-based. These mobile robots are widely used in the manufacturing industry to achieve goals around their operation area. In this research, we benefit fro...

An ideal test is supposed to show not only the presence of bugs but also their absence. Based on the Fundamental Test Theory of Goodenough and Gerhart (IEEE Trans Softw Eng SE-1(2):156–173, 1975), this paper proposes an approach to model-based ideal testing of hardware description language (HDL) programs based on their behavioral model. Test sequen...

Models are used in both Software Engineering (SE) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). SE models may specify the architecture at different levels of abstraction and for addressing different concerns at various stages of the software development life-cycle, from early conceptualization and design, to verification, implementation, testing and evolution....

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) achieving environmental sensing are fundamental communication layer technologies in the Internet of Things. Battery-powered sensor nodes may face many problems, such as battery drain and software problems. Therefore, the utilization of self-stabilization, which is one of the fault-tolerance techniques, brings the net...

Developing smart software services requires both Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence (AI) skills. AI practitioners, such as data scientists often focus on the AI side, for example, creating and training Machine Learning (ML) models given a specific use case and data. They are typically not concerned with the entire software development...

In this paper, we present ML-Quadrat, an open-source research prototype that is based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and the state of the art in the literature of Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) for smart Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT). Its envisioned users are mostly software developers who might no...

Model-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) testing keeps its importance in software GUI testing. Manual testing is time consuming and highly error prone. There are several test models in general use that the software testing community has been working on for many years. This article examines the different models used in model-based GUI testing. To...

Wireless sensor networks can be used as cost-effective monitoring and automation platforms in smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0. Maximizing the covered area and increasing the network lifetime are two challenging tasks in wireless sensor networks. A feasible solution for maximizing the coverage area and network lifetime is detecting and relocati...

The Internet of Things and its technologies have evolved quickly in recent years. It became an umbrella term for various technologies, embedded devices, smart objects, and web services. Although it has gained maturity, there is still no clear or common definition of references for creating WSN-based IoT systems. In the awareness that creating an om...

The Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are complex, multi- disciplinary, physically-aware future’s paradigms which are integrating embedded computing technologies (cyber part) into the physical world (physical part). The interaction requirement with the physical world makes the CPS unpredictable because of the real-world’s dynamic behaviours. So a CPS ne...

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is connected if a communication path exists among each pair of sensor nodes (motes). Maintaining reliable connectivity in WSNs is a complicated task, since any failure in the nodes can cause the data transmission paths to break. In a k-connected WSN, the connectivity survives after failure in any k-1 nodes; hence, pr...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are heterogeneous and require cross-domain expertise to model. The complexity of these systems leads to questions about prevalent modeling approaches, their ability to integrate heterogeneous models, and their relevance to the application domains and stakeholders. The methodology for Multi-Paradigm Modeling (MPM) of CPS...

Over the past decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has provided enormous new possibilities and opportunities, but also new demands and requirements for software systems. In particular, Machine Learning (ML) has proven useful in almost every vertical application domain. Although other sub-disciplines of AI, such as intelligent agents and Multi-Agent...

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications working on TinyOS operating system is widely used in various areas. However, the requirement of managing the power constraints makes TinyOS different from ordinary systems and hence building WSNs with TinyOS can be a challenging and time-consuming task. As successfully applied in many other domains, model-...

The development of Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) draws more interest from both researchers and industrial practitioners considering the opportunities they offer in almost all areas of industry. However, the engineering and management of CPS are challenging tasks due to their inherent heterogeneity and complexity characteristics. Regarding the develo...

This technical report presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study that focuses on identifying and classifying the recent research practices pertaining to CPS development through MDE approaches. The study evaluates 140 research papers published during 2010-2018. Accordingly, a comprehensive analysis of various MDE approaches used in the deve...

One of the main aims in the layered software architecture is to divide the code into different layers so that each layer contains related modules and serves its upper layers. Although layered software architecture is matured now; many legacy information systems do not benefit from the advantages of this architecture and their code for the process/b...

Software development required for constructing multi-agent systems (MAS) usually becomes challenging and time-consuming due to the properties of autonomy, distributedness, and openness of these systems in addition to the complicated nature of internal agent behaviors and agent interactions. To facilitate MAS development, the researchers propose var...

Traditionally, software testing is aimed at showing the presence of faults. This paper proposes a novel approach to testing graphical user interfaces (GUI) for showing both the presence and absence of faults in the sense of ideal testing. The approach uses a positive testing concept to show that the GUI under consideration (GUC) does what the user...

This chapter discusses the design and development of a Cyber-physical System (CPS) use case. The system is developed using the Internet of Things (IoT) components and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) elements. The proposed system is composed of different hardware parts, software elements, computing components and communication technologies resulting i...

Intelligent agents are software components that can work autonomously and proactively to solve the problems collaboratively. To this end, they can behave in a cooperative manner and collaborate with other agents constituting systems called Multi-agent Systems (MAS). These systems have different perspectives such as the internal structure, plan, int...

There are various computation components, operating systems , and firmware used in the development of the Internet of Things (IoT). This variety increases the structural complexity and development cost and effort of the IoT systems. Besides, analyzing and troubleshooting these systems are time-consuming, costly, and cumbersome. To address these pro...

The variety of smart devices and their communication models increase the development complexity of embedded software for IoT. Thus, the development of these systems becomes more error-prone, complex, and costly. To tackle this problem, in this study, a model-driven approach is proposed for the development of RIOT-OS based IoT systems. To this end,...

In this paper, we introduce a tool-supported reverse engineering methodology, called RE4TinyOS to create or update application models from TinyOS programs for the construction of Wireless Sensor Networks. Integrating with an existing model-driven engineering (MDE) environment, use of RE4TinyOS enables the model-code synchronization where any modifi...

Model-based System Engineering (MBSE) is a methodology that uses models throughout the engineering to replace the paper-based approach of communication among stakeholders. Multi-Paradigm Modelling (MPM) is at the core of this engineering approach as for each phase in the engineering process the most appropriate models at the most appropriate levels...

Engineers face significant challenges in developing cyber-physical systems (CPS) due to their heterogeneous nature, i.e. the need for knowledge and skills from a wide range of academic and industrial disciplines, the integration of the artifacts of these disciplines and fields, and the difficulty of maintaining such heterogeneous artifacts should b...

Models are well-defined abstractions that provide cost-effective representations of the real-world for a precise purpose. When dealing with complex problems, there usually exist multiple abstractions, typically describing partially overlapping details of the system under study, and resulting in a hierarchy of abstractions. Adaptive abstraction leve...

Context: A significant effort has been devoted to the design and implementation of various domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) for the software agents domain. Problem: Language usability is often tackled in an ad-hoc way, with the collection of anecdotal evidence supporting the process. However, usability plays an important role in the produ...

Context: A significant effort has been devoted to the design and implementation of various domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) for the software agents domain.Problem: Language usability is often tackled in an ad-hoc way, with the collection of anecdotal evidence supporting the process. However, usability plays an important role in the produc...

The huge variety of smart devices and their communication models increases the development complexity of embedded software for the Internet of Things. As a consequence, development of these systems becomes more complex, error-prone, and costly. To tackle this problem, in this study, a model-driven approach is proposed for the development of Contiki...

The continuous integration of software-intensive systems together with the ever-increasing computing power offer a breeding ground for intelligent agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) more than ever before. Over the past two decades, a wide variety of languages, models, techniques and methodologies have been proposed to engineer agents and MAS. Des...

Context: The "Physics of Notations" (PoN) supports a systematic improvement of the cognitive effectiveness of visual modelling languages. Problem: PoN focuses on the concrete syntax of a language, building on a predefined abstract syntax. We should also consider the abstract syntax of a language when developing efforts to improve it by choosing the...

There are various operating systems and programming languages for programming the low power wireless devices in the Internet of things (IoT). This heterogeneity makes the process of programming these devices time-consuming and complex. In our running study, we aim to deploy Model-driven Engineering (MDE) techniques in order to increase the level of...

Gömülü sistemlerde Nesnelerin Internet’inin (IoT) kullanımı için en yeni özel işletim sistemlerinden biri Google firmasının Android Things’idir. Bu bildiride Android Things işletim sistemine dayalı gömülü sistem yazılımlarının geliştirilmesi için bir yaklaşım sunulmuş; gerçekleştirilen bir alarm sistemi uygulaması üzerinden de söz konusu işletim si...

In this work, a metamodel is introduced for CArtAgO infrastructure which can be used in the modeling of software agents on this infrastructure. The metamodel allows the programming of artifact-based environments for multi-agent systems. It can be used for different agent platforms as it is independent of the specifications of these platforms. Also,...

By increasing the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their diversity, the development of these systems and their maintenance become increasingly complex and difficult. As a result, great losses occur in terms of time and cost. In this study, it is aimed to reduce the time and cost losses by using model-driven engineering approaches such...

Bu çalışmanın amacı yazılım testi alanında yaygın olarak kullanılan Bütünsel Test (Holistic Test) ve Mutasyon Testi (Mutation Testing) yöntemlerinin kullanılarak model tabanlı melez bir yöntemin Android uygulamalarının Grafiksel Kullanıcı Arayüz (GKA) testi için öne sürülmesidir. Ayrıca bu melez yöntem test alanında bilinirliği yüksek İdeal Test’in...

In this paper, a modeling tool, called DSML4BDI, for the model-driven development of Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents, is introduced. As being an implementation of a domain-specific modeling language, DSML4BDI tool enables graphical modeling of all BDI components and relations with including the automatic construction of logical expressions and...

Development of software agents according to Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model usually becomes challenging due to autonomy, distributedness and openness of multi-agent systems (MAS). Hence, in this paper, a domain-specific modeling language (DSML), called DSML4BDI, is introduced to support development of BDI agents. The syntax of the language prov...