Robots are complex to develop due to the diversity of hardware, software components and the absence of common standards. To deal with these problems, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is used to systematize the software development. This work aims to provide a comprehensive overview of existing model-based approaches in robotics. We present a classification of the 63 papers selected comparing past expectations

Software agents and Multi-agent Systems (MAS) composed by these agents are used in the development of the complex intelligent systems. In order to facilitate MAS software development, various domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) exist. Unfortunately, the usability evaluation of these languages are mostly not considered or only a few assessments which cover one single MAS DSML are made. A comparative

End-user (non-professional) programmers often opportunistically create programs, they evaluate various alternatives and reuse existing code by merging components from it or modifying it to suit the context or problems of their programs. Finding and evaluating which program variants to reuse code from is challenging because the searching mechanisms within online repositories are not optimal. To understand

In many industrial settings, the common and varying features of related software-intensive systems, as their reusable units, are likely to be implemented by a combined set of traditional techniques. Features do not align perfectly well with the used language constructs, e.g., classes, thus hindering the management of implemented variability. Herein, we provide a detailed framework to capture, model

The popularity of Question–Answer websites such as StackOverflow, Ask and Yahoo! Answers is gradually increasing. Considering this increased popularity, the quality of the questions and answers is necessary to be taken into account. The reason for this necessity is that there could be many answers to any question, and some of these answers have a low level in terms of quality. The credibility and expertise

Software requirements elicitation workshops often make use of a widely used and, on the surface, highly informal, notational medium: the sticky note. Often, in such workshops, facilitators and participants collaborate to construct “diagrams” made up of sticky notes. Methodologies have been developed that prescribe the way that diagram construction can uncover and document software requirements. Because

A visual block programming language allows users to make their own programs by dragging and dropping graphic blocks rather than by writing the program. This enables users who are not proficient in programming to create programs easily. Although existing studies have applied this idea to programming Internet of things (IoT) applications, existing visual language tools have certain limitations in terms

We are interested in specifications which provide a consistent high-level view of systems. They should abstract irrelevant details and provide a precise and complete description of the behaviour of the system. This view of software specification can naturally be expressed by means of Gurevich’s Abstract State Machines (ASMs). There are many known benefits of such an approach to system specifications

Input data of a data mining algorithm must conform to a very specific tabular format. Data scientists arrange data into that format by creating long and complex scripts, where different low-level operations are performed, and which can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. To alleviate this situation, we present Lavoisier, a declarative language for data selection and formatting in a data mining

Software project defect prediction (SDP) can predict the bug probability of software by their features and allocate their testing efforts. The existing software defect prediction methods can be divided into two categories: methods based on traditional handcrafted features and methods based on automatically made abstract features, especially those made by deep learning. The current research indicates

Engineers face significant challenges in developing cyber-physical systems (CPS) due to their heterogeneous nature, i.e. the need for knowledge and skills from a wide range of academic and industrial disciplines, the integration of the artifacts of these disciplines and fields, and the difficulty of maintaining such heterogeneous artifacts should be taken into account. The development of CPS mostly

Robots are becoming interactive and robust enough to be adopted outside laboratories and in industrial scenarios as well as interacting with humans in social activities. However, the design of engaging robot-based applications requires the availability of usable, flexible and accessible development frameworks, which can be adopted and mastered by researchers and practitioners in social sciences and

Model transformations (MT) are a significant element of model-based and model-driven engineering approaches. Hence their quality is important for their effectiveness for use in such developments. The concept of technical debt (TD) estimates the impact of quality flaws on the maintenance costs of software artefacts. In this paper we define a quality model for model transformation languages, and define

The mandala thangka, as a religious art in Tibetan Buddhism, is an invaluable cultural and artistic heritage. However, drawing a mandala pattern of thangka style is both time- and effort-consuming and requires mastery due to intricate details. Retaining and digitizing this heritage is an unresolved research challenge to date. In this paper, we propose a parametric approach to model and generate mandala

Software systems produce long sequences of call graphs, in particular, if the graphs are generated during runtime and not revision by revision. Visualizing, analyzing, and interacting with such long dynamic graphs with respect to different properties is a challenging task. In this article we describe an interactive visualization technique for dynamic call graphs that supports the observation of the

Erlang is a programming language which brings together the features of functional programming and actor-based concurrency. Although it is a dynamically-typed language, there exists a tool (Dialyzer) that analyses Erlang programs in order to detect type discrepancies at compile-time. This tool is based on the notion of success types, which are overapproximations to the actual semantics of expressions

The Internet is constantly evolving and changing over time. Outages, attacks, upgrades, censorships, and policy changes modify the routing very frequently everywhere in the world. To give the possibility to the Internet Service Providers and to the network operators of monitoring such an evolving scenario, many organizations collect information on the routing changes and give free access to them. We

We present BiDaML 2.0, an integrated suite of visual languages and supporting tool to help multidisciplinary teams with the design of big data analytics solutions. BiDaML tool support provides a platform for efficiently producing BiDaML diagrams and facilitating their design, creation, report and code generation. We evaluated BiDaML using two types of evaluations, a theoretical analysis using the “physics

Software modeling is considered as the high-level design technique for describing abstract statements about software systems. While some practitioners create models for the early analysis of their design decisions and generating code from their models, some practitioners create models for the eased communication among stakeholders. There also exist practitioners who ignore modeling and directly proceed

Visual data stories have been shown to significantly aid the comprehension and short-term memorability of statistical facts and value messages. Hence, they are a promising medium for communicating complex information to a target audience, fulfilling the communicative goal of information visualisation. However, creating visual data stories often requires a plethora of tools to execute the visual data

Bipartite graphs are typically visualized using linked lists or matrices, but these visualizations neither scale well nor do they convey temporal development. We present a new interactive exploration interface for large, time-dependent bipartite graphs. We use two clustering techniques to build a hierarchical aggregation supporting different exploration strategies. Aggregated nodes and edges are visualized

We give an operational semantics for the evaluation of spreadsheets, including sheet-defined and built-in numeric functions in the Funcalc spreadsheet platform. The semantics allows for different implementations and we discuss sheet-defined functions implemented using both interpretation and run-time code generation. The semantics specifies the expected result of a computation, also considering non-deterministic

Visualization of customer behavior is urgently needed for an increasing number of customer orders on takeout service. Although many works have been done on visualizing customer opinion or customer click events of one store, visualizing customer switching behavior among stores is still challenging. The challenge is to show customer order records over time and structure the inter-connection among different

The POSIX shell language defies conventional wisdom of compiler construction on several levels: The shell language was not designed for static parsing, but with an intertwining of syntactic analysis and execution by expansion in mind. Token recognition cannot be specified by regular expressions and lexical analysis depends on the parsing context and the evaluation context. Besides, the unorthodox design

Although today’s software systems are distributed by necessity, their design verification and validation is still an open issue due to their ever-increasing complexity. This paper proposes a stepwise development method allowing a designer to build correct-by-construction distributed systems. System correctness is handled w.r.t.a realizability property. We assume a top-down approach where systems are

Generalised parsing has become increasingly important in the context of software language design and several compiler generators and language workbenches have adopted generalised parsing algorithms such as GLR and GLL. The original GLL parsing algorithms are described in low-level pseudo-code as the output of a parser generator. This paper explains GLL parsing differently, defining the FUN-GLL algorithm

The widespread use of diagrammatic languages has motivated the need for grammar-based tools to support designers in the definition and implementation of graphical environments. The effective use of such systems requires efficient parsing techniques. In previous years, many approaches have been devised and one of them is based on the extension of the LR parsing methodology from traditional string languages

Models of human information seeking reveal that search, in particular ad-hoc retrieval, is non-linear and iterative. Despite these findings, today’s search user interfaces do not support non-linear navigation, like for example backtracking in time. We propose QueryCrumbs, a compact and easy-to-understand visualization for navigating the search query history supporting iterative query refinement. We

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) offer mechanisms to perform incremental analysis efficiently

Real-time systems must meet strict timeliness requirements. These systems also often need to protect their critical program information (CPI) from adversarial interference and intellectual property theft. Trusted execution environments (TEE) execute CPI tasks on a special-purpose processor, thus providing hardware protection. However, adapting a system written to execute in environments without TEE

Research into how virtual reality (VR) can be a beneficial technology for new and emerging large, complex data visualisations for data scientists is ongoing. In this paper, we evaluate three-dimensional VR navigation technique for data visualisations and test their effectiveness with a large graph visualisation. We evaluate two prominent navigation techniques employed in VR (Teleportation and One-Handed

Security patterns are a well-established means to encapsulate and communicate proven security solutions and introduce security into the development process. Our objective is to explore the research efforts on security patterns and discuss the current state of the art, which will serve as a guideline for interested researchers, practitioners, and teachers. We have conducted a systematic mapping study

Model Driven Architecture (MDA) has earned a prominent place in Software Engineering. However, while the application of MDA in software industry has grown, its impact in industry is not being as fast and broad as predicted. Moreover, the emerging use of agile methods have had an effect on the interest of industry and academics on developing software using metamodels. As a result, it is difficult to

Data-flow analysis is the static analysis of programs to estimate their approximate run-time behavior or approximate intermediate run-time values. It is an integral part of modern language specifications and compilers. In the specification of static semantics of programming languages, the concept of data-flow allows the description of well-formedness such as definite assignment of a local variable

In the recent years, there has been a massive increase in the amount of data published on the web about human and animal health events. Epidemiologists use this spatio-temporal information on a daily basis to detect and monitor disease outbreaks over time. While official sources such as the World Organization for Animal Health release formal outbreak notifications, unofficial sources such as online

During the last decade, we are witnessing the advent of a proliferation of techniques and associated tools for automatic program repair (APR). The current techniques and tools provide rich sources of knowledge that should be taken into consideration for future research. An overview of the current APR techniques and tools can serve the research community as a knowledge accumulator. However, APR techniques

Geovisualization of attribute uncertainty helps users to recognize underlying processes of spatial data. However, it still lacks an availability of uncertainty visualization tools in a standard GIS environment. This paper proposes a framework for attribute uncertainty visualization by extending bivariate mapping techniques. Specifically, this framework utilizes two cartographic techniques, choropleth

Branching tubular structures are prevalent in many different organic and synthetic settings. From trees and vegetation in nature, to vascular structures throughout human and animal biology, these structures are always candidates for new methods of graphical and visual expression. We present a modeling tool for the creation and interactive modification of these structures. Parameters such as thickness

As we are in the age of big data, graph data become bigger. A big graph normally has an overwhelming number of edges. Existing metrics of edge centrality are not quite suitable for dealing with such a large graph. A novel metric for measuring the importance of edges in a graph is introduced in this paper. Compared with the other six popular matrices with respect to a number of real-world graphs, the

Thanks to the increasing power of supercomputers, CEA develops ever more complex numerical simulators in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC) to cover a wide range of physical phenomena. As a consequence, simulation codes tend to become unmanageable and difficult to maintain and adapt to new hardware architectures. In this paper, we report on our experience in the use of Model-Driven Engineering

We propose an image-space contrast enhancement method for color-encoded visualization. The contrast of an image is enhanced through a perceptually guided approach that interfaces with the user with a single and intuitive parameter of the virtual viewing distance. To this end, we analyze a multiscale contrast model of the input image and test the visibility of bandpass images of all scales at a virtual

Colors have a significant impact on marketing so designers often use color strategically to shape brand personality and purchase intent. The automatic color design of advertising images is challenging because it must satisfy esthetic goals while also complying with the color design for different content, brand or targeted audience. This paper proposes a data-driven method to color advertising images

The land use mapping refers to mapping and assessing changes and patterns of land use. The use of agricultural land maps becomes increasingly important. The governments, private sectors, research agencies, and community groups rely on land use mapping data for natural resource assessment, monitoring, and planning. Finding an effective mapping approach is thereby crucial for natural resource condition

Patterns, micro-patterns, and nano-patterns have many applications: program comprehension, code transformations, documentation aids, improving code robustness, etc. This work revisits the notion of nano-patterns—originally an obiter dictum of the work on micro-patterns. Nano-patterns here are taken as more general than their previous definition in the literature: predicates on short code snippets that

Artificial intelligence and satellites have brought spatial-image interpretation to the forefront. Over the past two decades, the literature has provided three distinct methods for identifying and classifying the boundary of raster objects: the digital Jordan curve, the hyper-raster, and a marginal approach. While each approach has its own merits and drawbacks, there should be methods by which to convert

The flow of information in a computing system is a crucial indicator for the security of the system. In a system of multiple message-passing processes, the flow of information could depend on the states of different processes. We devise a type-based verification technique for flow policies with such multi-process (global) dependencies, to provide confidentiality guarantees. In this technique, the confidentiality

Using JavaScript as a description language can increase the productivity of application programs on embedded systems. Since JavaScript is a dynamic language, it is important for a JavaScript virtual machine (VM) to efficiently identify the types of first-class values and perform type-based dispatches. For embedded systems, the type-based dispatching code is desired to be compact as well as fast. Although

While signals can express time-varying values well, they heavily rely on the semantics of dataflow programming and functional programming. Several research have developed mechanisms for using signals with imperative object-oriented design and shown the benefits of its usage. However, they tend to introduce a class for signals, which thus results in the necessity of lifting up/down between variables

The development of enterprise software typically relies on object-oriented (OO) programming languages. However, OO languages are not particularly suited for the implementation of software which involves solving complicated search problems with dynamically appearing constraints, e. g. as found in logistics. Aiming to improve this situation, we propose the Münster Logic-imperative Language (Muli). As

Visual Programming Languages have been widely adopted in design and comprehension of sophisticated systems. Context-sensitive graph grammar formalisms are suitable tools for specifying these languages, since they are intuitive and possess sufficient expressive power and usability. Nevertheless, some of the formalisms whose contexts are implicitly or incompletely represented in productions, called implicit

Massive traffic surveillance data extracted from vehicle detectors such as cameras provide essential information for revealing urban traffic pattern. However, most existing tools only allow users to analyze the data in specific time periods and regions with particular requirements. In this paper, we work closely with traffic domain experts and investigate a novel way of reframing visual traffic analysis

Information visualisation researchers have posited that author-driven narratives will allow information to be conveyed efficiently and argue for the adoption of storytelling techniques in information visualisation. However, limited work has been done to date to concretely examine the effects of author-driven narratives in users’ comprehension and memorability of visualisations, and their associated

Web-active end-user programmers squander much of their time foraging for bugs and related information in mashup programming environments as well as on the web. To analyze this foraging behavior while debugging, we utilize an Information Foraging Theory perspective. Information Foraging Theory models the human (predator) behavior to forage for specific information (prey) in the webpages or programming

Visualisation underpins the understanding of scientific data both through exploration and explanation of analysed data. Provenance strengthens the understanding of data by showing the process of how a result has been achieved. With the significant increase in data volumes and algorithm complexity, clinical researchers are struggling with information tracking, analysis reproducibility and the verification

Security vetting of Android apps is often performed under tight time constraints (e.g., a few minutes). As such, vetting activities must be performed “at speed”, when an app is submitted for distribution or a device is analyzed for malware. Existing static and dynamic program analysis approaches are not feasible for use in security analysis tools because they require a much longer time to operate than

Business Intelligence applications often handle data sets that contain uncertain values. In this contribution, we focus on product costing, which deals with the average costs of product components – that vary significantly based on many factors such as inflation, exchange rates, and commodity prices. After experts estimate the uncertainty information for single items, decision makers need to quickly

Extracting hand movements using single RGB video camera for sign language recognition is a necessary attribute in developing an automated sign language recognition system. Local spatio temporal methods has shown encouraging outcomes for hand extraction using color cues. However, the color intensities does not behave as an independent entity during video capture in real environments. This has become

Image aesthetics have been a popular topic in the recent years. The users can obtain aesthetic score of any image by using the computational approaches based on photography rules. However, most approaches consider the task as an off-line process because those methods usually require high computational complexity. On the other hand, mobile devices (tablet and smart phone) have become an indispensable

Software vulnerabilities represent one of the main weaknesses of an Information Technology (IT) system w.r.t. cyber attacks and nowadays consolidated official data, like the Common Vulnerability Exposure (CVE) dictionary, provide precise and reliable details about them. This information, together with the identification of priority systems to defend allows for inspecting the network structure and the

Component-based-software-development (CBSD) is one of the most recent trends in the software development industry and its success majorly depends on the quality of the software components. Good quality software components are those components, which are internally strongly cohesive and are independent of others. Use of such components helps in faster development of a software and reduces the maintenance