Viewable Measures for Component-Based Software Engineering. Software costs over US$300 billion per year worldwide with around 70% of large projects failing to complete in time. Reliable estimation of development effort is a great challenge in Software Engineering. This project aims to develop a reliable multi-dimensional software size measure and an effort estimation model for a new method of development called component based software engineering. We will validate our results theoretically and ....Viewable Measures for Component-Based Software Engineering. Software costs over US$300 billion per year worldwide with around 70% of large projects failing to complete in time. Reliable estimation of development effort is a great challenge in Software Engineering. This project aims to develop a reliable multi-dimensional software size measure and an effort estimation model for a new method of development called component based software engineering. We will validate our results theoretically and test it against empirical data from software industry. We will provide novel visualization techniques to comprehend measurements of large systems. The outcomes will help software projects better estimate deadlines and budgets thus reducing costs significantly.Read moreRead less
Achieving Tailored Industrial Software Process Improvement with Experience Repositories and Electronic Process Guides. There is a well-recognised need for organisations to improve their software development processes in order to achieve higher software quality and greater efficiencies in development. The use of electronic process guides and experience repositories have been two technologies independently proposed to achieve these aims. This research will develop a framework, methods and tools ....Achieving Tailored Industrial Software Process Improvement with Experience Repositories and Electronic Process Guides. There is a well-recognised need for organisations to improve their software development processes in order to achieve higher software quality and greater efficiencies in development. The use of electronic process guides and experience repositories have been two technologies independently proposed to achieve these aims. This research will develop a framework, methods and tools to allow integration of experience repositories and electronic process guides to facilitate process tailoring, process improvement, and project management. The result will be significant improvements in software development productivity and quality.Read moreRead less
Eat and Dream: effective automatic testing and debugging for real-life embedded wireless communications software. Embedded software is a key enabling technology for the majority of Australian manufacturing industries, including strategically important sectors such as the automotive industry. Embedded wireless communication technologies are playing an increasingly significant role in Australia with a wide range of critical applications ranging from natural disaster early warning to personal healt ....Eat and Dream: effective automatic testing and debugging for real-life embedded wireless communications software. Embedded software is a key enabling technology for the majority of Australian manufacturing industries, including strategically important sectors such as the automotive industry. Embedded wireless communication technologies are playing an increasingly significant role in Australia with a wide range of critical applications ranging from natural disaster early warning to personal health monitoring. Embedded wireless communications software, however, is difficult to test and debug owing to the complexity of the operational environment and complications arising from the interplay between software and hardware. This project will develop an effective and automatic technology to alleviate these difficulties and achieve higher quality software.Read moreRead less
A Generic Software Architecture for Web-Based Applications on Micro-Mobile Systems. The next generation of computers that will capture the imagination of the society are likely to be micro-mobile devices such as personal digital assistants, mobile phones, smartcards and chips embedded in home and office items. Developing applications for information processing using a wireless network of such devices is an emerging challenge. This project will develop and evaluate a generic architecture for web- ....A Generic Software Architecture for Web-Based Applications on Micro-Mobile Systems. The next generation of computers that will capture the imagination of the society are likely to be micro-mobile devices such as personal digital assistants, mobile phones, smartcards and chips embedded in home and office items. Developing applications for information processing using a wireless network of such devices is an emerging challenge. This project will develop and evaluate a generic architecture for web-based applications on micro-mobile devices. This will make it easy to design applications that can seamlessly interact with different kinds of devices. The project will be carried out in partnership with Total Internet Centre, a Newcastle based regional enterprise.Read moreRead less
Provably Correct on-chip Communication-based Design. This project falls in the priority area of Frontier Technologies for Building and Transforming Australian Industries. Embedded systems have complex communication architectures and functionalities due to their mission- and time-critical applications. This project will develop verifiable algorithms and techniques for design reuse to address them, help solve outstanding problems in the VLSI/SoC community and to lift the country's visibility and ....Provably Correct on-chip Communication-based Design. This project falls in the priority area of Frontier Technologies for Building and Transforming Australian Industries. Embedded systems have complex communication architectures and functionalities due to their mission- and time-critical applications. This project will develop verifiable algorithms and techniques for design reuse to address them, help solve outstanding problems in the VLSI/SoC community and to lift the country's visibility and credibility in the area. The economic benefits are better techniques for design reuse for embedded systems that may be integrated into existing Computer Aided Design environments, with potential to commercialise the algorithms to Electronic Design Automation and vendors.Read moreRead less
A framework for modelling feature variability and dependencies in software product lines. In most Australian software development organisations software products are developed individually rather than product line based. This project will promote the awareness of product line based software development and provide a frontier technology, the effective feature modelling approaches, to help Australian software industry transform from the single product based development to the product line based de ....A framework for modelling feature variability and dependencies in software product lines. In most Australian software development organisations software products are developed individually rather than product line based. This project will promote the awareness of product line based software development and provide a frontier technology, the effective feature modelling approaches, to help Australian software industry transform from the single product based development to the product line based development to achieve significant improvement on the productivity and the quality of the software development. This improvement will dramatically reduce the cost of software products and alleviate the pressure of skill shortage that currently threatens Australian economy.Read moreRead less
Fault-tolerant CORBA-based distributed systems. The focus of this research is Fault-Tolerant CORBA-based Distributed Systems. An implementation of the CORBA Fault Tolerance specification will be produced and evaluated against performance, interoperability and compliance criteria. A model for the management of degradation behaviour in distributed systems will be developed and an implementation produced. Novel algorithms, models and approaches to fault tolerance and degradation management will be ....Fault-tolerant CORBA-based distributed systems. The focus of this research is Fault-Tolerant CORBA-based Distributed Systems. An implementation of the CORBA Fault Tolerance specification will be produced and evaluated against performance, interoperability and compliance criteria. A model for the management of degradation behaviour in distributed systems will be developed and an implementation produced. Novel algorithms, models and approaches to fault tolerance and degradation management will be developed. Convincing demonstration applications will be produced to illustrate the widespread relevance of fault-tolerant and degradable systems to real-world domains such as telecommunications, commercial systems and defence.Read moreRead less
Redesigning Typesetting for the Digital Age: Multilingual Layout on Multiple Media. We propose to create and develop a new model for character-level automatic typesetting, much more flexible than existing approaches. This model will support quality typesetting of all of the modern - and many ancient - languages and scripts, on media such as paper, computer screen, paper maps and online maps, for regular and safety-critical applications.
The fundamental innovations in this proposal are the us ....Redesigning Typesetting for the Digital Age: Multilingual Layout on Multiple Media. We propose to create and develop a new model for character-level automatic typesetting, much more flexible than existing approaches. This model will support quality typesetting of all of the modern - and many ancient - languages and scripts, on media such as paper, computer screen, paper maps and online maps, for regular and safety-critical applications.
The fundamental innovations in this proposal are the use of a tree-structured parameter space (generalization of Unix environment variables) and a multiple-pass approach to typesetting (as used in compilers). These innovative techniques will be integrated into computer software used worldwide.Read moreRead less
Design-Driven Requirements for Internet-Enabled System Development. The nature of Web system development is significantly different from conventional, software and IT development. Amongst other factors, there is substantial uncertainty in both clients' understanding of their needs and developers' understanding of the systems domain. We will develop an uncertainty model relevant to the development model relevant to the development of internet-enabled systems, and then use this model to adapt th ....Design-Driven Requirements for Internet-Enabled System Development. The nature of Web system development is significantly different from conventional, software and IT development. Amongst other factors, there is substantial uncertainty in both clients' understanding of their needs and developers' understanding of the systems domain. We will develop an uncertainty model relevant to the development model relevant to the development of internet-enabled systems, and then use this model to adapt the design process to support elicitation of requirements, as well as developing support for this adapted process. This will facilitate the development of systems that more accurately reflect clients' needs, and result in an understanding of what would be involved in reducing development costs.Read moreRead less
Ontology-based agent-oriented development methodologies. Establishing an industry strength unified agent-oriented methodology which focuses on interoperability and reusability will create stronger commitment to the new technology and stability in the commercial sector in Australia. Our methodology will create significant potential for Australian software companies, due to the added productivity and long term customer satisfaction through reusability, interoperability and pay-off of the developed ....Ontology-based agent-oriented development methodologies. Establishing an industry strength unified agent-oriented methodology which focuses on interoperability and reusability will create stronger commitment to the new technology and stability in the commercial sector in Australia. Our methodology will create significant potential for Australian software companies, due to the added productivity and long term customer satisfaction through reusability, interoperability and pay-off of the developed systems. This not only brings profits to Australian companies through the exploitation of this frontier technology, but also enhances the standard of living through increased satisfaction of the Australian public in their increasing use of software as they interact with today's computer-controlled world.Read moreRead less