Papers by Andrea D'Ambrogio
Computers
Process-oriented requirements engineering approaches are often required to deal with the effectiv... more Process-oriented requirements engineering approaches are often required to deal with the effective adaptation of existing processes in order to easily introduce new or updated requirements. Such approaches are based on the adoption of widely used notations, such as the one introduced by the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. However, BPMN models do not convey enough information on the involved entities and how they interact with process activities, thus leading to ambiguities, as well as to incomplete and inconsistent requirements definitions. This paper proposes an approach that allows stakeholders and software analysts to easily merge and integrate behavioral and data properties in a BPMN model, so as to fully exploit the potential of BPMN without incurring into the aforementioned limitation. The proposed approach introduces a lightweight BPMN extension that specifically addresses the annotation of data properties in terms of constraints, i.e., pre- and post-cond...
Informatics
The ever-increasing adoption of innovative technologies, such as big data and cloud computing, pr... more The ever-increasing adoption of innovative technologies, such as big data and cloud computing, provides significant opportunities for organizations operating in the IT domain, but also introduces considerable challenges. Such innovations call for development processes that better align with stakeholders needs and expectations. In this respect, this paper introduces a development framework based on the OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA) that aims to support the development lifecycle of data-intensive web applications. The proposed framework, named E-MDAV (Extended MDA-VIEW), defines a methodology that exploits a chain of model transformations to effectively cope with both forward- and reverse-engineering aspects. In addition, E-MDAV includes the specification of a reference architecture for driving the implementation of a tool that supports the various professional roles involved in the development and maintenance of data-intensive web applications. In order to evaluate the effect...
Safety-Critical Simulation Engineering
Modeling and Simulation Based Systems Engineering is emerging as an integrative approach from the... more Modeling and Simulation Based Systems Engineering is emerging as an integrative approach from the long lasting close interaction between modeling and simulation, and systems engineering. It is emphasizing the extensive employment of modeling and simulation through the life cycle of systems engineering. When the system of interest is safety-critical, possible missing qualities of simulation become a safety issue. That eventually makes simulation a subject of a qualification question. Tool qualification requirements have already been established for various safety-critical domains. However, the methods and guidelines for applying these requirements in the simulation engineering life cycle are still missing. This paper proposes a simulation qualification approach for safety-critical systems engineering
Model-driven Approaches for Simulation Engineering (Mod4Sim 2017), 2017
MSaaS (M&S as a Service) is gaining momentum as an effective approach to bring the benefits of se... more MSaaS (M&S as a Service) is gaining momentum as an effective approach to bring the benefits of service-oriented architectures and cloud computing into the M&S field, so as to enhance interoperability, composability, reusability and reduce the cost of M&S efforts. Such significant advantages can be further enhanced by introducing automated model transformations that support the various phases of a M&S effort, from simulation model building down to model implementation, deployment and execution. In previous contributions we have already addressed the use of automated model transformations that can be effectively adopted to provide simulation services for MSaaS platforms. This paper instead focuses on the automated development of modeling services for MSaaS, i.e., those services that allow platform users to easily build models in their own modeling language by use of a web-based user interface. Specifically, this work proposes an approach to automatically generate web-based visual editors from a metamodel that defines a given modeling language. Once generated, such editors can be made available on demand through a complete MSaaS platform, which also includes simulation services. The paper first describes the architecture of a MSaaS platform that includes modeling services, then illustrates the method for the automated development of web-based modeling services and, finally, gives a complete example application of the proposed method.
M&S and Complexity in Intelligent, Adaptive and Autonomous Systems Symposium (MSCIAAS 2018), 2017
During the Spring Simulation Multi-Conference 2017, a group of invited experts discussed challeng... more During the Spring Simulation Multi-Conference 2017, a group of invited experts discussed challenges in M&S of cyber physical systems. This 2018 panel is a follow-on activity, asking how the combination of various simulation paradigms, methodsso-called hybrid simulationcan be utilized regarding complexity, intelligence, and adaptability of cyber physical systems. This paper is a collection of position papers of the participating experts, supporting their viewpoints represented in the discussion.
Summer of Simulation
Simulation Foundations, Methods and Applications, 2019
We are having seasons: summers and winters of many scientific disciplines. Many fields are experi... more We are having seasons: summers and winters of many scientific disciplines. Many fields are experiencing hype cycles. Each one of us would remember “AI winter” from the history of Artificial Intelligence. Inflated expectations are followed by disappointment and eventually funding cuts. Renewing the interest takes then years if not decades. The Society for Modeling and Simulation International has achieved outstanding success in the last 50 years to keep Summer Computer Simulation Conference (SCSC) an important event through many seasons of simulation, some of which were more remarkable than others. This chapter summarizes the Panel discussion/contributions of the SCSC 2018 about the seasons in computer simulation and the ways to achieve and further prolong summers of computer simulation
Applying IEEE Recommended Practice for Distributed Simulation Engineering and Execution Process for Modeling and Simulation Based Airborne Systems Engineering
ARP 4754A (Guidelines for Development of Civil Aircraft and Systems) promotes modeling and simula... more ARP 4754A (Guidelines for Development of Civil Aircraft and Systems) promotes modeling and simulation for aircraft systems integration, requirements validation and implementation verification. DO-331, the model-based development and verification supplement to DO-178C (Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification) further endorses simulation for verification of Specification Models, Design Models and executable code. While both state that the quality of simulation should be assured, there is no particular guidance for its qualification. This paper investigates the application of IEEE Recommended Practice for Distributed Simulation Engineering and Execution Process (DSEEP) for the qualification of simulation as a tool for airborne systems engineerinng
2019 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), 2019
A business process (BP) can be defined a set of tasks that are coordinately performed by an organ... more A business process (BP) can be defined a set of tasks that are coordinately performed by an organization to achieve a business goal. M&S (Modeling & Simulation) techniques are widely and effectively adopted for BP analysis. A BP M&S approach is typically carried out by first building a simulation model (from a conceptual model of the BP under analysis), and then producing the software implementation of the simulation model, so to eventually execute the simulation code and get the results of interest. The standard language currently used to define BP models is the OMGs BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation). This paper presents a BPMN-based M&S approach that introduces a BPMN extension to specify BP simulation models as annotated BPMN models, and a domain-specific BP simulation language to specify and execute simulation model implementations, which can be seamlessly derived from annotated BPMN models by use of automated model transformations.
M&S as a Service (MSaaS) is an increasingly adopted paradigm that brings the benefits of service-... more M&S as a Service (MSaaS) is an increasingly adopted paradigm that brings the benefits of service-oriented architectures and cloud computing into the M&S field. The design and implementation of MSaaS platforms typically address the provision of coarse-grained M&S services, which offer the user easy access and orchestration of M&S components consisting of entire environments, applications and/or tools. This paper introduces an approach to the provision of fine-grained M&S services, which are defined by use of a microservice-based architecture, according to which applications are developed as a suite of small-sized services. The proposed approach extends an already available MSaaS platform, named SOASim. The paper shows how the integration and mutual use of fine-grained and coarse-grained services (e.g., modeling services, transformation services, presentation services etc.) significantly enhance the benefits of SOASim. An example application to the microservice-based setup of a discre...
Proceedings of the 2017 Winter Simulation Conference, 2017
From experimentation to theory; standards and advanced methodologies, modeling and simulation is ... more From experimentation to theory; standards and advanced methodologies, modeling and simulation is continually pushing the envelope of the available technologies, as many sectors have growing needs to process, visualize, make readable, understand, and deploy complex models that use immense amounts of data. These players need to transform data into hypothesis building and critical decision-making, and to change their models in response to new hypotheses, usually involving multiple highly specialized experts working together in geographically distant areas. After 50 years, we are now beyond Modeling and Simulation using Grid and Cloud computing, Web-based and distributed simulation and other recent technologies. We need to deal with computing power and storage in heterogeneous environments, resources virtualization; services consumed on demand (with minimal limitation for resource location), power issues, massive datasets. We face new challenges as we have ubiquitous processors that can...
INTRODUCTION Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods have been deployed in Concurrent Engi... more INTRODUCTION Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods have been deployed in Concurrent Engineering Facilities (CEF) primarily as enablers for the effective (i.e. unambiguous) communication in the collaborative activities in CEF studies. Moreover, MBSE has also paved the way for the reuse of engineering artefacts across projects, with potential benefits not only on the reduction of the activity effort but also on the more accurate estimation tools for project and product performance metrics. However, MBSE methods have primarily focussed on the representation of intra-system related artefacts (from requirements to functional and physical schemas), and partially neglected the formalisation of the intersystems aspects. The inter-systems aspects, namely interfaces, can be even more critical in CEF studies as they are key specifications for cross-functional and cross-enterprise systems integrations [1]. Currently, interfaces are commonly maintained in document-based forms, therefore...
In modern Software Engineering, Continuous Delivery (CD) is a development approach in which a sof... more In modern Software Engineering, Continuous Delivery (CD) is a development approach in which a software is iteratively developed in short cycles ensuring, for each cycle, that the new features are available to end users as soon as they are implemented and tested. CD aims at defining, building and releasing software with greater speed and frequency through the deployment pipeline resulting in three major benefits, visibility, feedback and continuous deployment respectively, enabling the software functional items to efficiently flow from development to production. In this domain, the need for evaluating the performance of the deployment pipeline emerges, since the conventional metrics available in the software engineering discipline are not suited to handle all the involved aspects. In this paper, the metrics suited for supporting CD are introduced and an integration with Modeling and Simulation (M&S) techniques is discussed, based on the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) stan...
Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) is defined by the International Council on Systems Enginee... more Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) is defined by the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) as "the formalized application of modeling to support system requirements, design, analysis, verification, and validation activities beginning in the conceptual design phase and continuing throughout development and later life cycle" [1]. The advantages obtained by the MBSE approach, in terms of enhanced communications, reduced development risks, improved quality, increased productivity and enhanced knowledge transfer, can be further scaled up by innovative model-driven approaches that treat models as the primary artifacts of development, by introducing a radical shift from a strictly contemplative use of models to a more productive and powerful model use. Model-driven engineering enhances the typical MBSE advantages by use of metamodeling techniques and model transformations, which allow system designers to obtain a significant increase of the level of automation...
Business Process Management (BPM) is an holistic approach for describing, analyzing, managing, im... more Business Process Management (BPM) is an holistic approach for describing, analyzing, managing, improving and executing large enterprise business processes, which can be seen as a number of related tasks that have to be executed in order to reach well-defined objectives. This paper introduces an approach to the specification and management of the resources that are associated to each BP task and that are required to support the execution of processes and related complex systems. This work provides a notation to define, at design time, the real entities which will perform the activities at different levels of abstraction, also specifying their non-functional properties. This approach makes use of composition patterns in order to model complex resources into tree structures allowing to represent part-whole hierarchies in a flexible and scalable manner. To accomplish these modeling objectives, the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) has been extended. BPMN is the de-facto standard...
Extending the CMMI Engineering Process Areas for Simulation Systems Engineering
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2018
Today’s companies in high-tech industries develop products of high complexity which consist of co... more Today’s companies in high-tech industries develop products of high complexity which consist of complicated subsystems with many heterogeneous components integrated together. As the system complexity increases, it becomes increasingly more challenging to manage the tedious development process. The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) was proposed as a general framework for process management and improvement which judges the maturity of a process. Simulations have long been regarded as complex and integrated systems. Simulation system engineering manages the total simulation system’s life-cycle process. The adaptation of the CMMI for simulation life-cycle processes is envisioned as a domain specific solution for simulation process management and improvement. This article investigates the opportunities of extending the CMMI engineering process area with emphasis in simulation system engineering, having its roots from IEEE Recommended Practice for Distributed Simulation Engineering and Execution Process (DSEEP).
Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2017
A BPMN extension to support discrete-event simulation for healthcare applications: an explicit re... more A BPMN extension to support discrete-event simulation for healthcare applications: an explicit representation of queues, attributes and data-driven decision points.
2016 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), 2016
Service-oriented systems are often at the core of mission-or business-critical systems, and thus ... more Service-oriented systems are often at the core of mission-or business-critical systems, and thus advanced quantitative analysis techniques are needed to assess, from the early development stages, whether or not the system accomplishes the stakeholder requirements and constraints. In this respect, in order to take advantage of the distributed nature of the considered systems, the use of distributed simulation (DS) appears the most natural and effective simulation approach. Nevertheless, the integration of traditional system development processes with DS approaches can be cost-and time-demanding. This paper presents SOAsim, a highly automated framework that allows system designers to generate the executable DS code from the model-based specification of the system under study, by use of automated model transformations. Moreover, in order to reduce the costs of setting-up dedicated DS platforms, SOAsim also automates the DS deployment and execution over a cloud-based infrastructure, according to a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) paradigm.
Setting systems and simulation life cycle processes side by side
2016 IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering (ISSE), 2016
The long lasting close interaction between modeling and simulation (M&S) and systems engineer... more The long lasting close interaction between modeling and simulation (M&S) and systems engineering disciplines is leading to a more integrative approach, namely M&S based systems engineering. It emphasizes the extensive employment of modeling and simulation all through the life cycle of systems engineering efforts. The success of M&S based systems engineering depends on the quality of simulations utilized. Further, simulations are also man-made systems, thus they necessitate a system engineering approach. Utilization of systems engineering for engineering of simulation systems is called simulation systems engineering. While ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2015 proposes process descriptions for life cycle of systems, IEEE 1730-2010 recommends a life cycle process framework for simulations. This paper addresses the comparison, integration and augmentation of these two standards, thereby attempting to contribute towards an integrative life cycle process.
2016 IEEE 25th International Conference on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE), 2016
The 7th edition of the CoMetS track aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners ... more The 7th edition of the CoMetS track aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners from both the modeling and simulation (M&S) community and the collaborative environments community, in order to focus on innovative research contributions that address both the use of collaborative technologies in the field of M&S and the use of M&S methodologies and tools to address the design of collaborative systems. This paper reports on the motivations of the track and the organization of its seventh edition.
A Model-Driven Approach to Enable the Distributed Simulation of Complex Systems
Complex Systems Design & Management, 2015
The increasing complexity of modern systems makes their design, development and operation extreme... more The increasing complexity of modern systems makes their design, development and operation extremely challenging and therefore new Systems Engineering and Modeling and Simulation (M&S) techniques, methods and tools are emerging, also to benefit from distributed simulation environments. In this context, one of the most mature tools is the IEEE 1516-2010—Standard for M&S High Level Architecture (HLA). However, building and maintaining distributed simulations components, based on the IEEE 1516-2010 standard, is still a challenging and costly task. To ease the development of full-fledged HLA-based simulations, the paper proposes the MONADS method that, according to the model-driven systems engineering paradigm, allows one to generate the HLA-based simulation code from SysML models by the use of a chain of model-to-model and model-to-text transformations. The effectiveness of the method is shown through a case study that concerns an Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) approaching and docking to the International Space Station (ISS).
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Papers by Andrea D'Ambrogio