Ongoing Research Projects
APPAREIL : une APproche PAramétrique de REIngénierie Logicielle.
APPAREIL is a 4-year FIRST Europe Objective 3 research project funded by the Wallonian DGTRE and Europe with as industrial partner Rhea System S.A. (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) and academic partner the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Researcher: Diego Ordonez. Total budget: 251.000€. Duration: from January 20, 2005 until January 19, 2009.
Rhea System is a company specialised in engineering services and products, mainly focused on satellite mission analysis. Their core product is MOIS (“Manufacturing and Operations Information System”), an environment for creating, configuring and testing operational procedures for satellite and spacecraft missions. These procedures are typically expressed in the form of some Operations Language, so that they can be executed by a particular Mission Control System. Unfortunately, a multitude of such operations languages exists, which are not all supported (yet) by MOIS. Therefore, this project will investigate how MOIS can be extended with a more generic approach for developing such mission operation procedures, that is more independent of the actual operations language considered. More specifically, the project aims at developping a generic and modular technique for language-independent, semi-automatic translation of operations expressed in any operations language to the internal MOIS representation, and back.
Centre de Recherche en Restructuration Logicielle
(Research Center on Structural Software Improvement)This research collaboration between three Belgian universities: UCL (Pr. Kim Mens, spokesperson), ULB (Pr. Roel Wuyts) and UMH (Pr. Tom Mens) is funded by the Fonds de la Recherche Fondamentale Collective (FRFC-FNRS) in Belgium. No researchers are payed on this project; it aims mainly at increasing the collaboration between the involved universities. Total budget: 22.900€. Duration: from January 1, 2005 until December 31, 2008.
The project intends to study formalisms for automated software restructuring, based on advanced refactoring and composition techniques, transformation formalisms and intensional views.
SYCOMORE : SYnchronisation of source COde and MOdels in the context of software Renovation
SYCOMORE is a 2-year FIRST Post-Doc research project funded by the Wallonian DGTRE and the industrial partner IBA (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). Researcher: Johan Brichau. Total budget: 168.000€. Duration: from October 1, 2006 until September 30, 2008.
Every software system, and business-critical software systems in particular, inevitably must evolve to cope with new and changing (business) requirements, technological infrastructure, changing legislation and so. However, due to the complexity of the system's source code, such a software renovation task is an intricate and complex process. In this project, we investigate an extension of the existing formalism of “intensional views”, to support software renovation tasks in an industrial context. Intensional views allow developers to document a software system according to several conceptual views and to check their validity compared to the source code of the system. They thereby allow to detect inconsistencies of the source code with respect to a defined architecture and design. The extension that is developed in this project will enable intensional views to operate on industrial-scale software systems implemented in several programming languages, and to guide the developer for solving synchronization problems between the source code and the conceptual model throughout evolutions and renovations. In addition, a methodology for intensional views in software renovation contexts will be conceived. The developed extension and the methodology are validated in the context of a case study provided by the industrial partner, operating in the medical sector, who currently performs an important renovation of its proton therapy control system (treatment of cancers).
MoVES : Fundamental issues in software engineering: Modelling, Verification and Evolution of Software
MoVES is an IAP project (Interuniversity Attraction Pole) funded by the Belgian federal government and involves partners from each of the following Belgian universities: FUNDP, KUL, VUB, UA, UCL, ULB, ULg. The project runs from 2007 until 2011, with a budget for UCL of 400.000€.
Software-intensive systems are among the most complex artefacts ever built. In the development of such systems, the use of rigorous models and analysis methods is essential to make sure that the software satisfies its requirements and exhibits the desired properties (e.g., safety, security, reliability, consistency). At the same time, in order to adapt to the constantly changing requirements and technology, these systems must be able to evolve over time, without breaking their essential properties. This project combines the leading Belgian research teams in software engineering, with recognised scientific excellence in model-driven engineering (MDE), software evolution, formal modelling and verification (FMV) and aspect-oriented software development (AOSD). The project aims to advance the state of the art in each of these domains. The long term objective of our network is to strengthen existing collaborations and forge new links between those teams, and to leverage and disseminate our research expertise in this domain at a European level.
VariBru: Variability in Software-Intensive Product Development.
Brussels Government (IRSIB), ICT Impulse Progral, 3 years (starting in 2007). This project proposal is currently under evaluation. Total budget: 2.384.300€ of which 549.600€ for UCL.