All ETDs from UAB

Advisory Committee Chair

Barrett Bryant

Advisory Committee Members

Jeffrey Gray

Marjan Mernik

Rajeev Raje

Changcui Zhang

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

2007

Degree Name by School

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) College of Arts and Sciences

Abstract

Software complexity may be reduced and productivity may be increased by the synergy of Component-Based Software Engineering and Software Product Line En- gineering. The synergistic techniques decrease complexity by uplifting software ar- tifacts to a higher abstraction level, namely the component level, and de¯ning the interfaces, interactions, and contexts of such artifacts for composing software systems. Such synergistic techniques also facilitate productivity increase by promoting feature reusability, leveraging component replacement and o®ering selectivity among prod- uct variants. When applied to Distributed Real-time and Embedded (DRE) systems, however, these technologies must ful¯ll such systems' time-critical missions and nu- merous functional and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. New critical challenges to be solved are QoS sensitivity that in°uences functional validity and performance quality, tangled requirements that increase the complexity of requirements evaluation and abundant unsatisfactory design artifacts that introduce unnecessary development workload. With an aim to answer the QoS sensitivity problem and alleviate the requirements evaluation complexity and development workload in the analysis and design work°ows of a DRE software product line construction, this dissertation introduces a Quality of Service-driven software Product Line engineering framework (QoSPL). Such a frame- work consists of domain engineering, application engineering and quantitative analysis processes. The domain engineering process analyzes QoS requirements, represented as the execution °ows of application-speci¯c and functionality-determined tasks, and ii their common and variable features by means of a grammar-oriented speci¯cation language. The application engineering process models a set of execution °ows to describe the behavioral characteristics of a DRE system by means of formalism with concurrent and asynchronous behaviors in a timely manner. A DRE software product line can be realized by varying di®erent components and/or execution °ows. The quantitative analysis process utilizes evolutionary algorithms to simulate the in°uence factors of the deployment environment and to search the optimal simulation results. Less probable design artifacts in terms of their QoS requirements can be eliminated by means of programs written in a domain-speci¯c language. Adaptive approaches written in the domain-speci¯c language hasten the convergence rates and/or obtain better optimal results for the quantitative analysis process. This dissertation provides two case studies and a number of experimental results to show the bene¯ts of using QoSPL for a DRE software product line construction.

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