Talkvander130318

Talk

This is a talk by a guest of the Software Languages Team.

Speaker

Prof. Vander Alves (University of Brasilia)

Title

Quality-aware Dynamic Software Product Lines: the Body Area Network Case

Host

Software Languages Team

Room

B017

Campus Koblenz

Date

18 March 2013

Time

11am (ct)

Abstract

Demographic and social changes have increased the number of elderly people living alone. Many of these need continuous medical assistance, yet it is not sustainable to have dedicated medical professional for each of them. Accordingly, automated support has been proposed, in particular, Body Area Network, in which a person goes about his or her daily activities at home or outdoors, but wears sensors monitoring vital signs and providing emergency detection and prevention. Such systems have to strike a balance between conflicting requirements, such as availability and reliability, e.g., if a person is well, not all sensors need to be active and working at the highest sampling rate; on the other hand, if he or she falls or has a stroke, the opposite must happen with the sensors. We explore how Dynamic Software Product Line (DSPL) achieve this goal. Accordingly, a DSPL reconfigures itself based on some context change e.g., the persons' medical situation, to meet a new and more suitable quality goal for that new situation, as specified by a reliability contract provided by the domain expert (a medical doctor). This contract is modeled as a state machine, whose transitions are medical events (e.g., fall,
stroke) and states are target reliability goals, prompting a reconfiguration to meet it. The quality of any given configuration is measured by a single function over the features of the DSPL and related quality information. This function is derived from a parametric discrete time Markov chain model representing the reliability of the DSPL. Further, this function relies on a normalized form of the feature model based on optional features. We analyze achieved expressiveness as well as time and space complexity issues.

Bio

Dr. Vander Alves is Adjunct Professor at the Computer Science Department of University of Brasilia, in Brasilia, Brazil. Previously he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Product Line Architectures department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Germany, where he participated in projects in the Ambient Assisted Living domain. Prior to that, he was a post doctoral researcher at Lancaster University, England, having worked in the EU AMPLE project in the field of Aspect-Orientation, Model-Driven development, and Software Product Lines. He also worked at the IBM Silicon Valley laboratory in San Jose, California, in the implementation of the Information Integration product line, which led to a registered patent at the US Patent Office. He holds a doctoral degree in Computer Science (Software Engineering) from the Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil. His major areas of research are Software Product Lines and Aspect-Oriented Software Development,and Ambient Intelligence