Towards engineering models of aspectual pervasive software services

Abstract

With the proliferation of ubiquitous computing devices and mobile internet it is envisaged that future pervasive services will be increasingly large-scale and operate at an inter-organizational level. Therefore, designing and implementing pervasive services will be a more complex and challenging task. Building software architectural models of concurrent and distributed pervasive services and their compositions provide engineers a better understanding of how these complex services inter-operate and help uncover any errors during the early stages of the software lifecycle. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on behavioral modeling and analysis techniques for representing pervasive software services and verifying process behavior of these models against specified system properties. As part of ongoing research, we model the crosscutting context-dependent behavior of our services as aspect-oriented models using a custom Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile, and apply model transformation techniques to automatically translate the aspects into state machine based behavioral representations to facilitate rigorous software process analysis. The approach is explored using an existing case study in transport and logistics.