Uwe Assmann

Technische Universität Dresden | TUD · Faculty of Computer Science

Over the past few decades, meeting customer demands has evolved due to extended delivery times, expensive manufacturing skills, and a need for flexibility. Competitive technologies have created gaps among manufacturers, impacting their ability to meet customer expectations. An issue is the visibility of production capabilities and loads within the...

Machine learning (ML) has emerged as a powerful tool in multiple sclerosis (MS) research, enabling more accurate diagnosis, prognosis prediction, and treatment optimization. However, the complexity of developing and deploying ML models poses challenges for domain experts without extensive programming knowledge. We propose a novel domain-specific la...

Verifying industrial robotic systems is a complex task because those systems are distributed and solely defined by their implementation instead of models of the system to be verified. Some technologies mitigate parts of this problem, e.g., robotic middleware such as the Robotic Operating System (ROS) or concrete solutions such as automata-based spe...

Operating energy grids with a high share of renewable energy sources (RES) requires system reconfiguration as a response to environmental condition changes. To understand them better, simulations are needed and Modelica is an excellent choice for that. Energy grids with event-based reconfigurations are an instance of variable structure systems (VSS...

Currently, the Internet of Things (IoT) is connected to the virtual world through the Web of Things (WoT), allowing efficient utilization of real-world objects with Internet technologies. The WoT facilitates abstract interaction between applications and connected IoT devices, allowing owners to switch between devices while using multiple ones. To a...

In collocated collaboration, group members frequently compare, discuss, and decide on ideas or partial solutions to reach an overall goal. To facilitate comparison, documentation as well as votes of the outcomes of such discussions, we apply mobile phones using mobile device-based interaction techniques. Such interaction techniques provide eyes-fre...

Robotic systems compute data from multiple sensors to perform several actions (e.g., path planning, object detection). FPGA-based architectures for such systems may consist of several accelerators to process compute-intensive algorithms. Designing and implementing such complex systems tends to be an arduous task. This work proposes a modeling appro...

Dynamic object roles and corresponding contexts can model complex applications with higher-level abstraction. These abstracted applications can be used in wider areas such as financial institutions, health care, and supply chain network. Role management which consists of the creation of role objects, and binding role object between core objects sti...

Gas accidents frequently turn industrial or civil structures into extremely dangerous environments. Disasters like the Ahrtal flood in summer 2021 destroy infrastructures such as the gas grid and the power grid, so that people loose control and suddenly find themselves confronted with explosions, suffocation, and death. This paper presents a case s...

Multi-objective parameter tuning is a highly-practical black-box optimization problem, in which the target system is expensive to evaluate. To identify well-performing solutions within the limited budget, a substitution of the target system with a surrogate model, its cheap-to-evaluate approximation, introduces immense benefits. Some surrogates may...

Our everyday lives are increasingly pervaded by digital assistants and smart devices forming the Internet of Things (IoT). While user interfaces to directly monitor and control individual IoT devices are becoming more sophisticated and end-user friendly, applications to connect standalone IoT devices and create more complex IoT processes for automa...

The bigraph theory, devised by Robin Milner, is a recent mathematical framework for concurrent processes. Its generality is able to subsume many existing process calculi, for example, CCS, CSP, and Petri nets. Further, it provides a uniform proof of bisimilarity, which is a congruence. We present the first canonical string encoding for pure and lea...

The ability to collaboratively edit data in distributed environments is essential in our information-based industry. Typically users or systems concurrently access and modify data from different locations for different purposes. Each purpose might require its own representation and subset of the shared data (i.e., a model), for the editor to be pro...

Multi-agent systems have evolved with their application framework, analysis approaches and design complexities over the past few decades. In order for programming software agents, you need to handle analysis, design and implementation together; furthermore, privacy and trust should be integrated externally into the agent-oriented applications. Curr...

Multi-agent systems have evolved with their application framework, analysis approaches and design complexities over the past few decades. In order for programming software agents, you need to handle analysis, design and implementation together; furthermore, privacy and trust should be integrated externally into the agent-oriented applications. Curr...

In this chapter, we present essential building blocks for developing applications in the domain of the Tactile Internet. Our building blocks belong to the fields of (i) safe, secure, and scalable computing infrastructures; (ii) world capturing and modeling; and (iii) context adaptive software and self-explanation. They cover topics, such as resourc...

The development of industrial robots has greatly advanced over the last 20 years, with the focus on human–robot collaboration, mobility and, especially, the effectiveness of automation. Indeed, recent robotic technologies are capable of an advanced level of manipulation tasks, learning skills, and protecting their user so that they can be used as r...

Zusammenfassung Im zukünftigen taktilen Internet wachsen die physische und virtuelle Welt auch über mehrere Standorte hinweg immer weiter zusammen. Robotic Co-working – das gemeinsame Kollaborieren von Robotern und Menschen – gewinnt dabei zunehmend im Kontext des Internet der Dinge (IoT) und cyber-physischer Systeme (CPS) an Bedeutung. Mit dieser...

Solving Stochastic Resource-Constrained Multi-Project Scheduling Problems (SRCMPSP) is an upcoming topic. Numerous variants, smaller batch sizes and shorter product life cycles lead to more uncertainty. In Production Planning and Control (PPC), stochastic scheduling approaches are coming into focus. The schedule thus is determined during production...

In collocated collaboration, applied methods and technologies to support the collaboration process mainly comprise either analog paper and pen methods, large display applications or the usage of several laptops. Whereas paper and pen are easy to use, they impair the digital documentation and further editing. Large displays are expensive, stationary...

Beside designing the graphical interface of mobile applications, mobile phones and their built-in sensors enable various possibilities to engage with digital content in a physical, device-based manner that move beyond the screen content. So-called mobile device-based interactions are characterized by device movements and positions as well as user a...

In mixed-focus collaboration, group members create content both individually as a kind of groundwork for discussion and further processing as well as directly together in group work sessions. In case of individual creation, separate documents and contents need to be merged to receive an overall solution. In our work, we focus on mixed-focus collabo...

Various built-in sensors enable interacting with mobile devices beyond the screen. So-called mobile device-based interaction techniques are characterized by movements and positions in real space, e.g. twisting the device to switch between front and rear camera or pouring photos from one device into another for sharing. Although interactions should...

Beside designing the graphical interface of mobile applications, mobile phones and their built-in sensors enable various possibilities to engage with digital content in a physical, device-based manner that move beyond the screen content. So-called mobile device-based interactions are characterized by device movements and positions as well as user a...

Just like current software systems, conceptual models are characterised by increasing complexity and rate of change. Yet, these models only become useful if they can be continuously evaluated, validated and serialized. To achieve sufficiently low response times for large models, incremental analysis is required. Reference Attribute Grammars (RAGs)...

The bigraph theory is a relatively young, yet formally rigorous, mathematical framework encompassing Robin Milner's previous work on process calculi, on the one hand, and provides a generic meta-model for complex systems such as multi-agent systems, on the other. A bigraph $F = \langle F^P, F^L\rangle$ is a superposition of two independent graph st...

Multi-view environments for software development allow different views of a software system to be defined to cover the requirements of different stakeholders. One way of ensuring consistency of overlapping information often contained in such views is to project them “on demand” from a Single Underlying Model (SUM). However, there are several ways t...

Smart things (such as sensors, and embedded devices) are going to become an essential source of data within the Internet of Things (IoT)—equipped with sensors and actuators; those devices can gather different information not only from their internal states but also about the environment and entities they interact with. A huge variety and amount of...

New types of smart devices are emerging every day providing end-users with new ways of interacting with the IoT. Setup and configuration of these devices are, however, rather complex and require technical expertise. Especially in smart homes users often lack these skills and need assistance with setting up devices, which makes them hesitant to adop...

Efficiency of self-optimizing systems is heavily dependent on their optimization strategies, e.g., choosing exact or approximate solver. A choice of such a strategy, in turn, is influenced by numerous factors, such as re-optimization time, size of the problem, optimality constraints, etc. Exact solvers are domain-independent and can guarantee optim...

Current Model-driven Software Development (MDSD) approaches struggle when modeling context-dependent and dynamic systems, as their underlying metamodels cannot capture context-dependent concepts and relations. By contrast, role-based modeling has been studied for more than 35 years as a promising paradigm to model context-dependent and dynamic syst...

Business models are important for both start-ups and established companies because they form the basis for a company's success by outlining their key factors. Business models can be created and documented in several ways. We focus on Business Model Canvases (BMC) and present MobiLean, a mobile application for the collaborative creation of BMCs. Mob...

Business models are important of both start-ups and established companies because they form the basis for a company's success by providing key factors of a company. There are several ways to create and document ideating business models. We describe MobiLean, a mobile application for the collaborative creation of Business Model Canvases (BMC) using...

Workflow technologies provide sophisticated concepts and tools for a simplified high-level programming of enterprise applications across individual systems and organizational borders. They are also useful to compose flexible and reusable workflows in cyber-physical systems (CPS) involving hardware devices, software applications, smart objects and h...

With the establishment of Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things, the virtual world of software and services and the physical world of objects and humans move closer together. Despite being a useful means for automation, BPM technologies and workflow systems are yet not fully capable of executing processes in CPS. The effects on an...

The Internet of Things (IoT) introduces various new challenges for business process technologies and workflow management systems (WfMS’s) to be used for managing IoT processes. Especially the interactions with the physical world lead to the emergence of new error sources and unanticipated situations that require a self-adaptive WfMS able to react d...

This work presents a new reference architecture for multi-layer autonomic systems called context-controlled autonomic controllers (ConAC). Usually, the principle of multiple system layers contradicts the principle of a global adaptation strategy, because system layers are considered to be black boxes. The presented architecture relies on an explici...

Workflows can be a useful means to formalize and enact processes among the sensors, actuators, smart objects and humans in Cyber-physical Systems (CPS). However, the dynamic nature of CPS and their resource constraint entities require the workflows and Workflow Management Systems (WfMSes) to be resilient and self-adaptive to deal with unanticipated...

Just like current software systems, models are characterised by increasing complexity and rate of change. Yet, these models only become useful if they can be continuously evaluated and validated. To achieve sufficiently low response times for large models, incremental analysis is required. Reference Attribute Grammars (RAGs) offer mechanisms to per...

Software Product Lines (SPLs) have a long tradition and aim at reducing development costs by increasing reuse. They have been successfully applied to develop families of languages, ultimately establishing the field of Language Product Lines (LPLs). Currently, LPLs facilitate a family of textual languages by defining an SPL of compilers/interpreters...

Robots come out of the cage. Soon, it will be possible to interact with free-standing robots along an assembly line or in a manufacturing workshop (robotic co-working). New sensitive robot arms have appeared on the market [1] that slow down or stop when humans enter their context, which creates rich opportunities for collaboration between human and...

The application of workflow technologies in the context of Internet of Things (IoT) presents a young and vibrant research field. Introducing a dedicated workflow layer on top of typical software architectures to model and execute repetitive tasks among IoT devices, systems and services facilitates the flexibility, reuse, configuration and programmi...

Petri nets are used to formally model the behavior of systems. However, when these systems dynamically change, e.g., due to context dependence, modeling gets complex and cumbersome since Petri nets are low-level and can not express dynamic changing parts. Expressing dynamically changing parts of the system directly within Petri nets increases the c...

Plenty of novel emerging technologies are being proposed and evaluated today, mostly at the device and circuit levels. It is unclear what the impact of different new technologies at the system level will be. What is clear, however, is that new technologies will make their way into systems and will increase the already high complexity of heterogeneo...

With the emergence of Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) more and more smart devices become parts of our daily lives--letting us sense and control our physical surroundings via software. However, with the number of smart devices raises the complexity of understanding and managing all devices and processes within one's vicinity. In this demo we present th...

Distributed self-adaptive systems are on the verge of becoming an essential part of personal life. They consist of connected subsystems which work together to serve a higher goal. The highly distributed and self-organizing nature of the resulting system poses the need for runtime management. Here, a particular problem of interest is to determine a...

Distributed process execution is a scalable solution for implementing workflows that deal with many devices in the Internet of Things (IoT). In hierarchical network structures the execution of activities and subprocesses can be moved closer to the computing edge onto specialized devices while still preserving data security. However mobility, resour...

When writing parallel software for high performance computing, a common practice is to start from a sequential variant of a program that is consecutively enriched with parallelization directives. This process - progressive parallelization - has the advantage that, at every point in time, a correct version of the program exists. However, progressive...

Since the year 1977, role modeling has been continuously investigated as promising paradigm to model complex, dynamic systems. However, this research had almost no influence on the design of todays increasingly complex and context-sensitive software systems. The reason for that is twofold. First, most modeling languages focused either on the behavi...

The ongoing development of Internet of Things technologies leads to the interweaving of the virtual world of software with the physical world. However, applying workflow technologies for automating processes in these Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) poses new challenges as the real world effects of a process have to be verified to provide a consistent...

Mobile devices changed the way how software is developed fundamentally, because the changing context in which those devices are used, influences the requirements of apps running on those devices. Hence, mobile apps must provide means for self-adaptation. With upcoming technologies like wearables, people will carry a whole range of heterogeneous dev...

Role-based modeling has been investigated for over 35 years as a promising paradigm to model complex, dynamic systems. Although current software systems are characterized by increasing complexity and context-dependence, all this research had almost no influence on current software development practice, still being discussed in recent literature. On...

Currently, small domestic service robots are on the verge of becoming a mass product for assisting end customers with everyday tasks. Despite open programming interfaces provided by robot manufacturers, many different robot systems exist that have to be programmed individually due to technical differences. The Robot Operating System (ROS) helps allev...

Present-day software systems have to fulfill an increasing number of requirements rendering them more and more complex. Many systems need to anticipate changing contexts (self-adaptive systems) or need to adapt to changing business rules or requirements (self-optimizing systems). The challenge of 21th century software development will be to cope wi...

For the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problem, many implementations exist, which meet different requirements w.r.t. non-functional properties (e.g., performance). If those requirements change during runtime, the application should change the SLAM implementation. Implementing the selection of the optimal SLAM-algorithms for robots by...

Complex systems are hard to define. Nevertheless they are more and more frequently encountered. Examples include a worldwide airline traffic management system, a global telecommunication or energy infrastructure or even the whole legacy portfolio accumulated for more than thirty years in a large insurance company. There are currently few engineerin...

Software product lines (SPLs) and software ecosystems (SECOs) encompass a family of closely related software systems in terms of common and variable assets that are configured to concrete products (variability in space). Over the course of time, variable assets of SPLs and especially SECOs are subject to change in order to meet new requirements as p...