Tag: moana-cbs

Seven Brave Software Architects/Engineers from Thales Completes MOANA-CBS Course using Eclipse ComMASuite

Posted on by bennyakesson

ESI (TNO) has given another instance of the course “Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems” (MOANA-CBS), developed as part of the applied research project DYNAMICS, at Thales. A batch of 7 brave software engineers participated to learn more about how to identify and resolve a range of interface model quality problems, such as deadlocks, livelocks, and race conditions. This instance of the course was adapted to be based completely on the latest version of Eclipse ComMASuite, the open source version of ComMA, making the course accessible to a large general audience. Previously, the course has been given with an internal version of ComMA or by using Petri nets as the interface modelling language.

 In total, over 110 participants, mostly with backgrounds in system and software engineering, have followed different versions of this course. This time, two former Thales participants assisted in giving the course, both by presenting contents and supervising exercises, to help Thales transfer the knowledge developed in the DYNAMICS project into the organization. We look forward to further improve the material and keep sharing the knowledge we developed with Thales and other interested parties.

Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems (MOANA-CBS) Course Update

Posted on by bennyakesson

Last year, ESI (TNO) and Thales developed a two-day course on Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems (MOANA-CBS) as a part of the DYNAMICS project. The course addresses the trend to tackle software complexity by decomposing monolithic software into loosely coupled components. While this trend manages complexity through improved scalability, adaptability, and testability, it also increases concurrency and asynchronous communication. This may in turn lead to an explosion in possible behaviors. As a consequence, it is hard to oversee the behavior of such systems, resulting in situations where early design errors are detected much later in the system lifecycle with exponentially rising costs. The course targets software and system architects/engineers involved in design and implementation of components and interfaces, and teaches methods for modelling and analyzing them to guarantee that they are free from deadlocks, livelocks, races, and buffer overflows.

We piloted the course material both in academic and industrial environments. The former was as a part of my course Embedded Software and Systems, a part of the Software Engineering Master  at the University of Amsterdam. The latter was as a part of the Accelerate program run by Thales and Luminis to accelerate their medior software talent to a senior level. Thales recently published an interview with Patrick Schulenberg, one of the participants in the program, about his experience. Patrick explains that the program has been an excellent opportunity for him to grow within the company, and mentions the positive impact of our course: “ESI taught a class about interface modeling, sharing their experiences with using the Comma framework at Philips – this was a trigger for us to put practical modeling proficiency on our roadmap”.

Currently, we are developing an updated version of the MOANA-CBS course that will have closer ties to ComMA, an open-source domain-specific language initially developed by Philips and ESI that is currently used by several companies. This update will strengthen the practical applicability of the course for users of ComMA, and will introduce unfamiliar users to interface modelling and analysis through hands-on experience with the tool. The new version of the course is expected to be ready in Q3.

Embedded Software and Systems Course @ UvA Continues to Evolve

Posted on by bennyakesson

The fall semester of the very special academic year 2020/2021 is over. Most of the students following the Master of Software Engineering program at the University of Amsterdam have just completed my course Embedded Software and Systems (ESS). The ESS course had changed in a three important ways this year.

Firstly, a generic lecture about Petri Nets was changed to a series about two lectures, explaining how Petri Nets can be used to model and analyze software interfaces and components. Part of the material for this course was reused from the course Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems (MOANA-CBS), developed together with Thales targeting an industrial audience. These new lectures also prime students nicely for a lecture about the DYNAMICS project, a research collaboration between ESI and Thales. This allows me to show how these models and analyses can be used in practice to address problems related to software evolution by detecting incompatibilities and generating adapters when updating software interfaces. A generic lecture about the data-flow model of computation was removed to create room for this new material, but I am happy to teach fewer modelling formalisms and have more time to go in depth and show how they can be used to solve industrial problems. A nice result of this change to the course is that three master students have accepted thesis projects in the area of modelling and analysis of software components and interfaces in collaboration with ESI under the supervision of myself and my colleague Debjyoti Bera.

Secondly, the course project was redeveloped this year. Previously, students used Mathworks Stateflow to program Lego Mindstorm EV3 rovers to follow a line, avoid obstacles, and count objects. However, this project felt a bit too much like a toy and there were technical problems with both rovers and tools that were hard to overcome and limited the education experience. In particular, it was not easily possible to see or influence how code was generated for the Lego Mindstorm robots, which felt like a missed opportunity when teaching model-based engineering. 

Two bachelor students did their theses in spring to evaluate the suitability of using the TurtleBot3 Burger robot, both in reality and in simulation using Gazebo, in the course. In addition, Stateflow was exchanged for Yakindu Statechart Tools, which is easier to use and gives us the flexibility we need in code generation. The new application developed in the project is to use Yakindu to program the TurtleBot to autonomously drive through a maze and map it.

Lastly, the COVID-19 pandemic required the entire course to be taught online. As a result, used a blended learning approach and prerecorded the lectures so that the students could watch them when they wanted to. Online interactive sessions were added to the course where the students could ask questions about the lectures, and participate in quizzes and group discussions. Online teaching meant that the students did not have access to the four physical TurtleBots that we had purchased. Luckily, the newly developed course project could be done with simulations in Gazebo. Below is a demo from one of the groups that very successfully solved the assignment. 

The ESS course is continuously evolving and maturing and next year will be no different. Most importantly, we hope that the pandemic will be over by then and that we can put our three physical TurtleBots to good use.

Course on Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems

Posted on by bennyakesson

A course called “Modelling and Analysis of Component-based Systems” (MOANA-CBS) is being developed in collaboration with Thales as a part of the DYNAMICS project. The course addresses the challenge of overseeing the explosion of possible interactions between asynchronously communicating components in component-based systems. Some of these interactions may be undesirable and leave systems prone to deadlock, livelock, race conditions, and buffer overflows, reducing software quality. The course participants in the course learn how to mitigate this problem by modelling the behavior of components and interfaces using Petri Nets, a well-known formalism suitable for describing asynchronously communicating systems. Theory is linked to practice through demonstrations of relevant examples using the ComMA tool. Using properties and analysis methods for Petri Nets, they learn how to identify patterns in component and interface design that may cause the aforementioned problems, as well as design guidelines for how to avoid them. The course is taught using a combination of lectures, assignments, demonstrations, discussions, and reflection.

We piloted parts of the course at Van der Valk Hotel in Arnhem on October 7 and 8, attended by 12 software architects from Thales and Luminis. The course was positioned as a part of their Accelerate program, which aims to accelerate young architects from the two companies into a more senior role. We felt that the delivery of the course went well and evaluations from the participants suggests it was well-received. The evaluation of this pilot also highlighted some further points for improvement that will be considered going forward.