Thorsten Weyer

Mittelhessen University of Applied Sciences | THM · Institute for Programming Languages and their Application

This paper presents an overview on how existing development methodologies and practices support the creation of trustworthy software. Trustworthy software is key for a successful and trusted usage of software, specifically in the Cloud. To better understand what trustworthy software applications actually mean, the concepts of trustworthiness and tr...

Thanks to great advances such as in connectivity (including IoT, Big Data), pattern recognition and decision making (AI) and integration technologies (CPS), with computing as a backbone, there is a convergence of technology domains and the real world towards the Next Computing Paradigm (NCP). The integration concerns typical in the realm of CPS, in...

The development of future large-scale safety-critical systems, also known as cyber-physical systems (CPS), involves many technology and influencer communities. Novel approaches and tools will be required to tackle the multi-dimensional challenges between these communities to benefit CPS, especially their adaptability to new technologies. ere are ma...

Real-time systems are typically reactive embedded software-intensive systems that are part of a larger technical system such as a vehicle or an airplane. Real-time systems perform time-critical tasks, which depend on timely processing of context data obtained from sensors, and making decisions as well as performing actions based on the assessed con...

In this talk, we present our contribution "Orthogonal Uncertainty Modeling in the Engineering of Cyber-Physical Systems" published in IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering in July 2020 [Ba20]. We have proposed a modeling language for "Orthogonal Uncertainty Models" (OUMs). OUMs constitute a dedicated, central artifact to document,...

Model inspections are important to ensure high-quality software and to satisfy legal obligations in model-based engineering processes. As model-based specifications are typically documented on type-level, errors concerning the interactions between multiple system instances can go unnoticed. For collaborative cyber-physical systems (CPS), a plethora...

The use of conceptual models to foster requirements engineering has been proposed and evaluated as beneficial for several decades. For instance, goal-oriented requirements engineering or the specification of scenarios are commonly done using conceptual models. Bringing such model-based requirements engineering approaches into industrial practice ty...

Developing safety-critical, software-intensive embedded systems are characterized by the need to identify hazards and to defne hazard-mitigating requirements at the earliest possible stage of development, i.e., during requirements engineering. These hazard-mitigating requirements must be adequate in the sense that they must specify the functionalit...

There are many communities involved in the creation of cyber-physical systems, which are used in domains including transport, health, manufacturing and, in the longer term, will be in the home, where miniaturization will play a role. In this article we explain that engineering for future CPS needs a centre of gravity that has the purpose of drawing...

Embedded systems are being increasingly used in changing environments where they no longer fulfill their associated stakeholder goals on their own, but rather in interaction with other embedded systems. This transition to networked, collaborative embedded systems is creating new application opportunities that impose numerous challenges for develope...

As collaborative embedded systems operate autonomously in highly dynamic contexts, they must be able to handle uncertainties that can occur during operation. On the one hand, they must be able to handle uncertainties due to the imprecision of sensors and the behavior of data-driven components for perceiving and interpreting the context to enable de...

Dieser Vortrag berichtet von dem Beitrag Do Instance-level Review Diagrams Support Validation Processes of Cyber-Physical System Specifications: Results from a Controlled Experiment [DBW20], der auf der IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP) 2020 vorgestellt und in dem Konferenzband veröffentlicht wurde. Im Rahme...

Digitalization changes the products the software profession develops. Digitalization also changes the way we develop products. Many companies of the software industry move away from rigid engineering processes towards agility, design thinking, and continuous delivery. In this article, we investigate embedded and cyber-physical systems using core te...

In the field of safety-critical systems, manual reviews are important to ensure high-quality software and to satisfy legal obligations. When applying model-based engineering approaches, no longer are only textual requirements specifications or software code under review, but also model-based specification artifacts like behav-ioral requirements mod...

Networks of collaborative cyber-physical systems can achieve goals individual systems are incapable of achieving on their own. However, which goals such a network can achieve depends, in part, on the networks current configuration, i.e. its composition of partaking individual systems. As networks of collaborative cyber-physical systems are of a dyn...

Context Emergent behavior cannot be attributed to one individual system alone but arises in the interplay of various systems, components etc. Ensuring the correctness of emergent behavior is a well-known challenge that has been addressed by research in various subfields of software engineering. Objective This paper aims at providing a unified view...

Software-intensive cyber-physical systems (CPS) perform essential tasks such as controlling automated production processes in industrial production plants. The required levels of autonomy, openness, and self-adaptation, as well as the dynamic nature of the context of such CPS, result in challenging tasks for their engineering. During operation, une...

Dieser Vortrag berichtet von dem Beitrag Improving manual reviews in function-centered engineering of embedded systems using a dedicated review model [DWP19], der in der Fachzeitschrift Software and Systems Modeling veröffentlicht wurde. Im Rahmen des Beitrags wurde ein dezidiertes Review-Modell vorgeschlagen, um die Validierung der interaktionsbas...

In model-based engineering of embedded systems, manual validation activities such as reviews and inspections are needed to ensure that the system under development satisfies the stakeholder intentions. During the engineering process, changes in the stakeholder intentions typically trigger revisions of already developed and documented engineering ar...

Collaborative cyber-physical systems face a plethora of different albeit often similar set-ups they might find themselves in during runtime. While it is necessary to consider each possible configuration to ensure safe operation of a collaborative cyber-physical system, the sheer number of unwanted behaviors makes manual safety assurance tasks daunt...

Artefacts play a vital role in software and systems development processes. Other terms like documents, deliverables, or work products are widely used in software development communities instead of the term artefact. In the following, we use the term ‘artefact’ including all these other terms. Despite its relevance, the exact denotation of the term...

Background] In model-based engineering models need to be regularly validated by manual assessment. Therefore, review processes have established. This commonly means that a visual inspection of the respective models is conducted. [Aims] In this paper, we report a study that aims at investigating whether automatically generated review models can aid...

Dieser Vortrag berichtet von dem Beitrag On Different Search Methods for Systematic Literature Reviews and Maps: Experiences from a Literature Search on Validation and Verification of Emergent Behavior [Br18], der auf der 22nd International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering 2018 vorgestellt und in dem Konferenzband ver...

Dieser Vortag berichtet von dem Beitrag Approaches, success factors, and barriers for technology transfer in software engineering-Results of a systematic literature review [Br18], der 2018 in der Fachzeitschrift Journal of Software: Evolution and Process veröffentlicht wurde.

In the future, cyber-physical systems (CPS) will increasingly need to have the capability to collaborate with other CPS during runtime to fulfill an overall purpose. This is, for instance, the case for autonomous driving where individual vehicles form a platoon in order to reduce energy consumption and improve the overall traffic flow. When enginee...

Background: Collaborative cyber-physical systems form highly dynamic networks, consisting of collaborating individual systems at run-time. These networks provide functionality that goes beyond the functionality of the individual systems that are part of the network. The availability of such collaborative functionalities depends not only on the indi...

Message sequence charts (MSC) and MSC-like languages play a pivotal role in requirements engineering. Particularly, when it comes to model-based requirements engineering, MSCs are used, e.g., to document scenarios, but also, specifically in the automotive domain, for specifying interaction sequences and the interaction-based behavior of such reacti...

Cyber-physical systems are increasingly developed for highly-automated purposes, such as industrial production plants. Not only the level of autonomy of these cyber-physical production systems, but also their potential lifespan, and the expectation that the system adapts throughout its life introduces challenges for the development process. To deve...

Introduction Technology transfer aims at supporting the transfer of results from software engineering research from academia to industrial application. Objective This paper reports on the current state of technology transfer in software engineering. Method We conducted a systematic literature review, in which we investigated 3070 papers. We ident...

[Background] Systematic literature reviews and maps have become well-established research methods in software engineering research. Of the three commonly suggested and used search methods: manual search, database search, or snowball search; systematic literature reviews and maps typically employ one or a combination of two or three of those as thei...

When developing safety-critical embedded systems, it is necessary to ensure that the system under development poses no harm to human users or external systems during operation. To achieve this, potential hazards are identified and potential mitigations for those hazards are documented in requirements. During requirements validation, the stakeholder...

Artefacts play a vital role in today's software and systems development processes. The notion of artefacts is widely used in software development communities. Despite the relevance and frequent use of the term `artefact', the exact denotation of this term is still not clear, due to a variety of different understandings of the term and to a careless...

Cyber-physical systems form collaborative networks dynamically at runtime. In the collaboration of multiple systems, behavior emerges in the interplay of the collaborating instances. This emergent behavior raises challenges for the validation of cyber-physical systems' software, since interoperability of the single systems as well as functional cor...

This talk is based on a paper published in the Requirements Engineering Journal in May 2017 [TWP17]. During the development of safety-critical systems, the development process must ensure that requirements, which are defined to mitigate a hazard, are adequate. Adequacy of such hazard-mitigating requirements (HMRs) means that the requirements may no...

To ensure fulfilling stakeholder wishes, it is crucial to validate the documented requirements. This is often complicated by the fact that the wishes and intentions of different stakeholders are somewhat contradictory, which manifests itself in inconsistent requirements. To aid requirements engineers in identifying and resolving inconsistent requir...

[Context] In software engineering research, emphasis is given to sound evaluations of new approaches. While industry surveys or industrial case studies are preferred to evaluate industrial applicability, controlled experiments with student participants are commonly used to determine measurements such as effectiveness and efficiency of a proposed ap...

To ensure fulfilling stakeholder wishes, it is crucial to validate the documented requirements. This is often complicated by the fact that the wishes and intentions of different stakeholders are somewhat contradictory, which manifests itself in inconsistent requirements. To aid requirements engineers in identifying and resolving inconsistent requir...

Process roles are used to structure complex engineering processes in single sys-tems development for many years. Typically, each role has specific responsi-bilities from which certain information demands originate. In the engineering of variable software, role-specific information demands affect variability in-formation. To control the access to th...

In software engineering, transferring innovative concepts, techniques and methods into the practice of existing organizations is an expensive and complex task. This chapter gives an overview on the transfer of the SPES XT modeling framework to different organization.

The SPES modeling framework allows seamless, model-based development of complex embedded software. It defines structures, content, and concepts used in artifacts. One major challenge when engineering embedded systems is to consider the synchronization between different engineering disciplines at the process and artifact level in a coherent manner....

As embedded systems evolve into more and more complex structures to meet the continuously increasing complexity of requirements, they face a variety of challenges. In particular, the involvement of multiple engineering disciplines targeting cross-cutting aspects of the system under development makes the situation even more challenging. Hence, there...

When developing embedded systems, the context is of vita! importance as embedded systems interact with the context through sensing and actuation. There is a multitude of context information, which is relevant for embedded systems engineering: on the one hand, external systems and human users interacting with the system under development constrain t...

Embedded systems are often highly integrated into a network of systems. To increase synergies, reduce code redundancies, and to support reuse, the different systems in this network provide conceptual functions for use by other systems. This chapter deals with the challenges resulting from this type of networked approach and provides essential solut...

In addition to design-time considerations, user trust and the trustworthiness of software-intensive socio-technical systems (STS) need to be maintained during runtime. Especially trust can only be monitored based on the actual usage of the system in operation. Service providers should be able to make informed decisions about runtime adaptation base...

When designing an automation plant the control software for the entire plant is typically designed after the physical architecture of the automation plant and the technical plant process have been defined. The later the control software of the automation plant is validated, the higher the effort for correcting it will be. Therefore, an early valida...

A significant challenge within university education, especially with regard to the teaching of highly theoretical topics like requirements engineering, is to maintain students' interest and motivation whilst addressing the core concepts that will enable students to work in industry upon graduation. It has long been established that experience-based...

[Context and motivation] Experiments are an important means to evaluate research results in the field of requirements engineering. Researchers often conduct such experiments with student participants. [Question/problem] The use of student participants evokes a multitude of potential threats to validity, which must be properly addressed by the chose...

In industrial practice, development processes , even when framed by laws and standards, such as those applicable to the automotive industry, for example , are unique not only to each application domain but furthermore to each manufacturer. While the engineering process often focuses on the development of the different engineering artifacts, no stru...

In automation plants, technical processes must be conducted in a way that products, substances, or services are produced reliably, with sufficient quality and with minimal strain on resources. A key driver in conducting these processes is the automation plant’s control software, which controls the technical plant components and thereby affects the...

Nowadays enterprise and automated systems play an important role in different business, physical, and social contexts. The fourth issue of the journal Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly suggests five challenging studies in this area addressing stakeholder personalities, enterprise actions, business process OR-joint semantics, valida...

Trustworthiness of software and services is a key concern for their use and adoption by organizations and end-users. Trustworthiness evaluation is an important task to support making informed decisions for both providers and consumers, i.e., for selecting components from a software marketplace. An analysis of the state of the art in software evalua...

In the engineering of smart cyber-physical systems (CPS), emphasis is given to dynamic networks of CPS collaborating to fulfill an overall purpose. In many cases, multiple instances of the same system type must collaborate at runtime to achieve the overall purpose. As the development process of CPS typically focuses on system specifications on the...

In automation plants, the software that controls the behavior of a plant must adhere to strict process requirements arising from the technical processes and from the physical plant design. In current practice, the validation of the control software starts late in the engineering process – in many cases not before the plant is almost completely cons...

In empirical software engineering research, graduate students are often seen as legitimate substitutes for industry professionals. It has been also argued in the literature that the generalizability of empirical results from experiments with undergraduate students as participants holds to a much lower extent. In this paper, we report on a controlle...

In empirical software engineering research, graduate students are often seen as legitimate substitutes for industry professionals. It has been also argued in the literature that the generalizability of empirical results from experiments with undergraduate students as participants holds to a much lower extent. In this paper, we report on a controlle...

Traditionally, embedded systems were characterized as reactive systems, whose functionality was determined by the execution of particular control circuits. Today’s embedded systems are equipped with powerful communication abilities to form collaborative networks of embedded systems dynamically during runtime in order to fulfill an overall purpose....

[Context and motivation] In practice, validating functional safety requirements is mainly done by means of reviews, which require large amounts of contextual information about hazards, such as safety goals or the operational conditions un-der which the hazard occurs. [Question/problem] This information is often scat-tered across a plethora of artif...

[Context and Motivation] In function-centered engineering of embedded systems, changes of stakeholder intentions are often directly incorporated in the functional design without updating the behavioral requirements accordingly. [Question/Problem] As a consequence, it is likely that the behavioral requirements of the system become outdated over the...

Today's embedded systems are highly integrated in their context. Their functional behavior does not only result from individual functions but also arises in the interplay between these functions. Automotive and avionics systems consist of control circuits to determine values in the context and to influence context properties. Thereby, indirect inte...