Towards Quality Driven Exploration of Model Transformation Spaces

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Mauro Luigi Drago

DATE: Wednesday, July 20th, 2011
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-006, Black building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 14.30

ABSTRACT:
Verifying that a software system has certain non-functional properties is a primary concern in many engineering fields. Although several model-driven approaches exist to predict quality attributes from system models, they still lack the proper level of automation envisioned by Model Driven Software Development (MDSD). When a potential issue concerning non-functional properties is discovered, the identification of a solution is still entirely up to the engineer and to his/her experience. This paper presents QVT-Rational, our multi-modeling solution to automate the detection-solution loop. We leverage and extend existing model transformation techniques with constructs to elicit the space of the alternative solutions and to bind quality properties to them. Our framework is highly customizable, it supports the definition of non-functional requirements and provides an efficient engine to automatically explore the solution space. We evaluate our approach by applying it to two well-known software engineering problems - Object-Relational Mapping and components allocation - and by showing how several solutions that satisfy given performance requirements can be automatically identified.

BIO:
Mauro Luigi Drago is a PhD student at the Department of Electronics and Information (DEI) of Politecnico di Milano since January 2009 and works in the DEEPSE group under the supervision of Prof. Carlo Ghezzi. He obtained his MSc. from Politecnico di Milano in April 2009 working on trust and reputation systems for service-oriented architectures. His current research interests are in the area of Model Driven Engineering (MDE), specifically on how design processes may be automated with particular attention to non-functional aspects and on tools to bring MDE to the great public.^

HOST: Prof. Walter Binder