Ian D. Peake’s research while affiliated with RMIT University and other places

We present work towards using ontological information to facilitate collaborative tasks during operation, maintenance and service of industrial automation facilities. We use semantic models as an additional layer for a collaboration framework to enable automatic reasoning, decision support and knowledge sharing among multiple parties. Documents such as texts, workflows, images, social media profiles or models of production plants can be semantically annotated to facilitate their ontological classification. Our semantic models comprise behavior and space information, as well as links between documents and from documents to external data collections, such as logs, tables and sensor data. Our semantic models can be used to check consistency, confidentiality and security properties and to support collaborative tasks.

We present work towards a toolchain that combines our existing tools Reactive Blocks and BeSpaceD with our remote collaboration and visualization facility VxLab. Software development in areas such as oil and gas, mining or automation is subject to remote configuration and maintenance of installations. Different reasons are driving this trend including difficult accessibility of remote sites and outsourcing to offsite experts or due to cheaper labor costs. Here, we concentrate on work towards remote configuration, installation and maintenance of the software controlling these installa.

We describe our ongoing work and view on simulation, validation and visualization of cyber-physical systems in industrial automation during development, operation and maintenance. System models may represent an existing physical part - for example an existing robot installation - and a software simulated part - for example a possible future extension. We call such systems cyber-virtual systems. In this paper, we present the existing VITELab infrastructure for visualization tasks in industrial automation. The new methodology for simulation and validation motivated in this paper integrates this infrastructure. We are targeting scenarios, where industrial sites which may be in remote locations are modeled and visualized from different sites anywhere in the world. Complementing the visualization work, here, we are also concentrating on software modeling challenges related to cyber-virtual systems and simulation, testing, validation and verification techniques for them. Software models of industrial sites require behavioural models of the components of the industrial sites such as models for tools, robots, workpieces and other machinery as well as communication and sensor facilities. Furthermore, collaboration between sites is an important goal of our work.

An appropriate system model gives developers a better overview, and the ability to fix more inconsistencies more effectively and earlier in system development, reducing overall effort and cost. However, modelling assumes abstraction of several aspects of the system and its environment, and this abstraction should be not overlooked, but properly taken into account during later development phases. This is especially especially important for the cases of remote integration, testing/verification, and manufacturing of cyber-physical systems. For this reason we introduce a development methodology for cyber-physical systems (CPS) with a focus on the abstraction levels of the system representation, based on the idea of refinement-based development of complex, interactive systems.

We present a semi-automated approach and framework for cost-aware recovery from service inconsistency arising due to unreliable service actions. A range of costs such as time are parameterised and modelled generically using cost algebras. With respect to a user-provided business specification, we distinguish end-state consistency, which must be achieved at service completion, from strong consistency, which may be momentarily violated. Our approach ensures optimal end-state consistency for services where action failure may lead to temporary violations of strong consistency or end-state consistency. Enterprises could not otherwise optimally and dynamically handle strong consistency violation, especially with respect to a variety of costs. Our approach provides quantitative analysis by defining a service model as an high-level message sequence chart (hMSC), annotating service actions with costs, then interpreting the model as a weighted (Mazurkiewicz) trace language, catering for costs in the presence of true concurrency. We devise a framework and method which checks such a model and ensures service end-state consistency optimally by concatenating the traces of recovery strategies (expressed by MSCs) from an enterprise service repository. We evaluate our approach using a popular online shop case study.

We present a method and initial results on reverse engineering the architecture of monolithic software systems. Our approach is based on analysis of system binaries resulting in a series of models, which are successively refined into a component structure. Our approach comprises the following steps: 1) instrumentation of existing binaries for dynamically generating execution traces at runtime and connected analysis, 2) static inspection of binaries, 3) interpretation using domain knowledge, and 4) identifying component boundaries using software clustering. We motivate a generic method which covers a large class of software systems, and evaluate our method on concrete software tools for industrial automation systems development, focusing on Intel x86 and Microsoft Windows-compatible applications.

Contract models underlying architecture-level verification methods must suit a range of different accuracy vs analytical complexity tradeoffs depending on domain. For example, trustworthiness in safety-critical systems is enabled by representational simplicity leading to comprehensible proofs while real-time systems require precise characterisation of execution time. A family of mutually-compatible parameterised contract models enabling such tradeoffs is needed, supporting reasoning about consistency and conformance (replaceability) which is bidirectional (from requirements to provisions and vice versa) and parametric (context-sensitive). This paper proposes a framework for such a family. The framework extends a previous formalisation of parameterised contracts. It provides more general notions of conformance, bidirectional reasoning and parameterisation, suitable for compositional architectural analyses of software products and product lines, for which software architects do not only need checking but scope for restricting or enriching service and interface contracts in predictable and compositional ways. The family of mechanisms presented here covers a range of levels of expressiveness, spanning the established four levels of component contracts, and is worked out in detail with examples for two common existing representations---tables and finite automata.

Failure in long running grid applications is arguably inevitable and costly. Therefore, fault tolerance (FT) support for grid applications is needed. This paper evaluates an extension of our prior work on Recovery Aware Components (RAC), a component based FT approach. Our extension utilizes the grid application architecture according to a small number of architectural classes. In this paper, we evaluate the MapReduce architecture only and analyze the reliability improvement MapReduce applications would gain by adopting the RAC approach. Our analysis shows that significant increases in reliability are possible at moderate extra cost. Obviously the cost of FT depends on the failure rate of the managed system, i.e., the system to be protected from faults, and the FT strategy chosen. Our work aims to give High Performance Computing (HPC) software architects the tools to control these factors for dierent grid application architectures.

Change propagation has mainly been estimated by maintenance history or source code analysis. However, sometimes history and code are inaccessible, or impractical to analyse, such as for heterogeneous sources. Previously we hypothesised that change propagation from modifying domain level components may be predicted purely from information available to domain users. We proposed domain-based change propagation analysis, enabling analysts and domain experts to predict conceptual coupling independent of implementation. This paper reports on application of domain-based analysis to a significant (enterprise) system. We performed both domain- based analysis and a well known history-based analysis and compared the results. Like history-based approaches, domain-based analysis reveals coupling between software components, can assist to prevent errors in software maintenance, and predict change propagation. We conclude that it may be worth applying to certain kinds of systems where established approaches would be considered impractical.