UC Institute for Software Research
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Department of Computing, Distributed Software Engineering Section, Imperial College, London
Distributed Software Engineering: an Architectural Approach (slides-3.2Meg, pdf-8.7Meg)
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May 18, 2007
Friday
Refreshments and Networking: 1:30
- 2:00
Presentation: 2:00 - 3:30
Faculty Host: Thomas Alspaugh, ISR
RSVP: Email RSVP required to Nancy Myers at nmyers@ics.uci.edu
by Monday May 14.
Location: Bren Hall (also known as Computer Science 3 building #314 on the campus map) room 6011
Cost: No cost to attend.
Directions and parking information are available.
Abstract: Software architectural (structural) concepts and principles are
highly beneficial in specifying, designing, analyzing, constructing
and evolving distributed software. Structure, as a separable
perspective, relies on sound techniques for composition - whether of
software components or specifications of behavior. These
complementary concerns of structure and composition are the themes
addressed in this talk.
With hindsight, work at Imperial College on engineering distributed
software can be roughly divided into three overlapping phases.
First, explicit structure characterized our work on configuration
programming. The prototype distributed system CONIC included the
ability to specify, construct and dynamically evolve a distributed
software system, using a configuration language to compose software
components. Work on the general purpose ADL Darwin and its
industrial instantiation, Koala, followed. The second phase focused
on modeling in a structural framework. The aim was to analyze
systems as structural compositions of their components' behavior.
This led to our work with labelled transition systems (LTS), the
process algebra, FSP (Finite State Processes) and construction of
the model checker, LTSA. Model animation and model synthesis from
scenarios has enriched this vein of research. Our current work is
concerned with self-adaptive software architectures for autonomous
systems. These are systems which both automatically configure
themselves and subsequently reconfigure themselves to accommodate
dynamically changing context and requirements without human
intervention. Structure in these systems is captured both explicitly
by description and implicitly by structural constraints.
A sound architectural approach dictates formalisms and techniques
that are compositional, components that are context independent and
systems that can be constructed and evolved incrementally. The talk
overviews our experience with, and gives indications of our future
work in, using architectural structure to engineer distributed
software. We emphasize the role of software tools and prototype
systems in Software Engineering research.
About the Speaker: Professor Jeff Magee is a graduate in Electrical Engineering and
holds M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computing Science. He is currently
Head of the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. His
research is primarily concerned with the software engineering of
distributed systems, including design methods, analysis techniques,
operating systems, languages and program support environments for
these systems. His work on Software Architecture led to the
commercial use by Phillips of an Architecture Description language
based on Darwin in their current generation of consumer television
products. He is the author of over 100 refereed publications and has
co-authored a book on concurrent programming entitled "Concurrency -
State models and Java programs". He was co-editor of the IEE
Proceedings on Software Engineering and is currently a TOSEM
Associate Editor. He was program co-chair of the 24th International
Conference on Software Engineering held in Florida and chaired the
ICSE Steering Committee from 2002-2004. He was a member-at-large of
the ACM SIGSOFT committee from 2002-2005. He was awarded the BCS
1999 Brendan Murphy prize for the best paper in Distributed systems
and the IEE Informatics Premium prize for 1998/99 for a paper
jointly authored with Professor Kramer on Software Architecture. He
is the co-recipient of the 2005 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research
Award for his work in Distributed Software Engineering. He has also
worked with many industries, including BP, BT, NATS, Fujitsu,
Barclays Capital, QinetiQ, Kodak and Philips, in both research
collaborations and in a consultancy role.