Nianyu Li

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Reseacher at ZGC Lab

With the rapid growth of open-source ecosystems (e.g., Linux) and domain-specific software projects (e.g., aerospace), efficient management of reusable artifacts is becoming increasingly crucial for software reuse. The multi-level feature tree enables semantic management based on functionality and supports requirements-driven artifact selection. Ho...

Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is a safety-critical scenario where the goal is to secure collision-free trajectories from initial to desired locations. However, due to system complexity and uncertainty, integrating learning-based controllers with MAPF is challenging and cannot theoretically guarantee the safety of the learned controllers. In respo...

In the evolution of software systems, especially in domains like autonomous vehicles, dynamic user preferences are critical yet challenging to accommodate. Existing methods often misrepresent these preferences, either by overlooking their dynamism or overburdening users as humans often find it challenging to express their objectives mathematically....

In self-adaptive software systems, the role of context is paramount, especially for proactive self-adaptation. Current research, however, does not fully explore context’s impact, for example on priorities of the requirements. To address this gap, we introduce a novel contextual goal model to capture these factors and their influence on the system....

Reusing third-party software packages is a common practice in software development. As the scale and complexity of open-source software (OSS) projects continue to grow (e.g., Linux distributions), the number of reused third-party packages has significantly increased. Therefore, maintaining effective package management is critical for developing and...

Self-adaptive systems (SASs) are designed to handle changes and uncertainties through a feedback loop with four core functionalities: monitoring, analyzing, planning, and execution. Recently, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), especially the area of large language models, has shown impressive performance in data comprehension and logical r...

Security attacks present unique challenges to the design of self-adaptation mechanism for software-intensive systems due to the adversarial nature of the environment. Game-theoretical approaches have been explored in security to model malicious behaviors and design reliable defense for the system in a mathematically grounded manner. However, modeli...

Many self-adaptive systems benefit from human involvement and oversight, where a human operator can provide expertise not available to the system and detect problems that the system is unaware of. One way of achieving this synergy is by placing the human operator on the loop – i.e., providing supervisory oversight and intervening in the case of que...

The increasing prevalence of security attacks on software-intensive systems calls for new, effective methods for detecting and responding to these attacks. As one promising approach, game theory provides analytical tools for modeling the interaction between the system and the adversarial environment and designing reliable defense. In this paper, we...

Security attacks present unique challenges to self-adaptive system design due to the adversarial nature of the environment. Game theory approaches have been explored in security to model malicious behaviors and design reliable defense for the system in a mathematically grounded manner. However, modeling the system as a single player, as done in pri...

Cyber-physical space systems are engineered systems operating within physical space with design requirements that depend on space, e.g., regarding location or movement behavior. They are built from and depend upon the seamless integration of computation and physical components. Typical examples include systems where software-driven agents such as m...

Cyber-physical space systems are engineered systems operating within physical space with design requirements that depend on space, e.g., regarding location or movement behavior. They are built from and depend upon the seamless integration of computation and physical components. Typical examples include systems where software-driven agents such as m...

Many self-adaptive systems benefit from human involvement and oversight, where a human operator can provide expertise not available to the system and can detect problems that the system is unaware of. One way of achieving this is by placing the human operator on the loop, i.e., providing supervisory oversight and intervening in the case of question...

In cyber-physical systems, physical and software components are deeply intertwined, blurring the boundaries between the cyber and physical worlds. Perceiving environmental information is a prerequisite for a cyber-physical system to be reliable and adaptive to the environment. However, the intrinsically open and dynamic nature of the environment br...

Smart Cyber-Physical Systems (sCPS) are a novel kind of Cyber- Physical System engineered to take advantage of large-scale cooperation between devices, users and environment to achieve added value in the face of uncertainty and changing environments. Examples of sCPS include modern traffic systems, Industry 4.0 systems, systems for smart buildings,...

Cyber-physical space systems are becoming increasingly important. Such systems have to satisfy requirements that are heavily affected by the physical space they operate in and by the active entities inhabiting the space, whose dynamic behaviors generate continuous topological changes. Reasoning about requirements in the early design phases is extre...