Ping Guo and Gregor Engels and Reiko Heckel: Architectural Style - Based Modeling and Simulation of Complex Software Systems. In Proceedings of the 12th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2005), Taipei (Taiwan). IEEE Computer Society (Washington, DC, USA), pp. 367--374 (2005)
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@inproceedings{Guo2005, author = {Ping Guo and Gregor Engels and Reiko Heckel}, title = {Architectural Style - Based Modeling and Simulation of Complex Software Systems}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2005), Taipei (Taiwan)}, year = {2005}, pages = {367--374}, address = {Washington, DC, USA}, month = {December}, publisher = {IEEE Computer Society} }

The design and development of complex software systems is a difficult task, and it is not easy to ensure the quality of a developed software. The paper presents an architectural style-based approach to specifying and analyzing complex software systems. The approach is developed based on UML-like meta models and graph transformation techniques to support sound methodological principals, formal analysis and refinement. The approach is illustrated through the specification and simulation of architectural styles of mobile computing middleware, where three abstract levels of architectural styles are defined in order to decrease the complexity brought by mobility.

Ping Guo and Reiko Heckel: Simulation and Testing of Mobile Computing Systems using Fujaba. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Fujaba Days (2004), Darmstadt (Germany). (Darmstadt, Germany) (2004)
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@inproceedings{Guo2004a, author = {Ping Guo and Reiko Heckel}, title = {Simulation and Testing of Mobile Computing Systems using Fujaba}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd International Fujaba Days (2004), Darmstadt (Germany)}, year = {2004}, address = {Darmstadt, Germany}, month = {September} }

The paper presents an approach for analysis, modeling and validation of mobile information systems with the tool support of Fujaba. The approach is developed based on UML-like meta models and graph transformation techniques to support sound methodological principals, normal analysis and refinement. With conceptual and concrete level of modeling and simulation, the approach could support application development and the development of new mobile platforms. The approach also provides automatic analysis, validation and behavior consistency check with the support of Fujaba.

Ping Guo and Reiko Heckel: Modeling and Simulation of Context-Aware Mobile Systems. In Proceedings of the 19th IEEE international conference on Automated software engineering (ASE 2004). IEEE Computer Society (Washington, DC, USA), pp. 430--433 (2004)
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@inproceedings{Guo2004, author = {Ping Guo and Reiko Heckel}, title = {Modeling and Simulation of Context-Aware Mobile Systems}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th IEEE international conference on Automated software engineering (ASE 2004)}, year = {2004}, pages = {430--433}, address = {Washington, DC, USA}, publisher = {IEEE Computer Society} }

This paper presents an approach for analysis, design and simulation of mobile systems. The approach is developed based on UML-like meta models and graph transformation techniques to support sound methodological principals, formal analysis and refinement. With conceptual and concrete level of modeling and simulation, the approach could support application development and the development of new mobile platforms.

Reiko Heckel and Ping Guo: Conceptual Modeling of Styles For Mobile Systems: A layered approach based on graph transformation. In Proceedings of the conference on Mobile Information Systems (MOBIS 2004), Oslo (Norway). Springer (Berlin/Heidelberg), IFIP - International Federation for Information Processing, vol. 158, pp. 65--79 (2004)
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@inproceedings{Heckel2004, author = {Reiko Heckel and Ping Guo}, title = {Conceptual Modeling of Styles For Mobile Systems: A layered approach based on graph transformation}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the conference on Mobile Information Systems (MOBIS 2004), Oslo (Norway)}, year = {2004}, volume = {158}, series = {IFIP - International Federation for Information Processing}, pages = {65--79}, address = {Berlin/Heidelberg}, publisher = {Springer} }

When designing a mobile application, we have to be aware of the properties and facilities of the target platform. At a conceptual level, this platform can be specified by a style, defining the structures and operations available to applications. In this paper, we use a UML-like meta model for the structural aspect and graph transformation rules over its instances to specify the dynamics of a style of mobile systems. The model is layered to separate clearly the software from the hardware and the geographic view of the system.

Ping Guo: Architectural Style-based Modeling and Simulation of Middleware for Mobile Systems. Type: Phd Thesis (2007)
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@phdthesis{Guo2007, author = {Ping Guo}, title = {Architectural Style-based Modeling and Simulation of Middleware for Mobile Systems}, year = {2007} }

Today, mobility is one of the most important market and technology trend within information and communication technology. As the demand for rapid deployment of dependable mobile applications increases, middleware for mobile systems is emerging as one of the most active areas of system research in mobility. The middleware is a set of distributed software services that exists between distributed operating systems and mobile applications. The key to the middleware is to provide support across the mobile application domains, help application developers overcome the complexity and problems brought by mobility, and enhance dependability and usability of developed mobile applications. The criticality and pervasiveness of middleware for mobile systems is continually growing. However, the design and development of the middleware are difficult tasks, and it is not easy to ensure the quality of a developed middleware. This is mainly caused by the increasing complexity of the middleware. In addition, the great diversity of this area makes it very difficult for the designers to reuse the already established design knowledge or successful experience when building new systems. All these make the design process quite inefficient and unpredictable, and therefore risking the project. “One man’s magic is another man’s engineering”. Engineering design is much more routine than innovative. Founding on this fundamental notion in software engineering, we develop an architectural style-based approach to deal with the problems in the thesis. We build architectural styles for a class of related middleware. The style represents a common form of design, which originates from the results that practitioners have achieved in one area. The style is formulated to repeat successes and avoid failures from previous projects. When building a new middleware, the designers and developers do not need to explore all possible alternatives for its supported architecture. Instead, they can use the architectural style that is effective for the middleware. They can define the design as instances of the style, or they can use the style as a reference model for further improvement and development. By structuring the design space for a family of related middleware, the style can drastically simplify the process of building a middleware, reduce costs of implementation through reusable infrastructure, and improve system integrity through style-specific analysis and checks. We develop the approach based on UML-like meta modeling and graph transformation techniques to support sound methodological principles, powerful modeling, formal analysis and refinement. The approach consists of several main parts: the modeling language that supports specification of the style and mobility, the refinement formalization that ensures that an abstract style is correctly refined to a concrete one, as well as the consistency check framework that validates behavioral consistency between two styles on different abstract layers. With the Fujaba simulation tool support, we also develop a style-based engineering process that helps us to efficiently develop correct and consistent styles. Besides, it allows a seamless integration of our approach into the well-known object oriented design. By providing a concrete example of how to construct the style for a class of related middleware, and how to use the style to help the design and development of a new middleware, we show that the architectural style-based approach is useful and practical.