Tuesday 21 July 2015

Invited talk:

Annabelle Klarl, Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany:
The Ultra-Large-Scale System and the Engineer – Helena's Way

With the increasing advancement of computer technology and the ubiquitous inclusion of computation into everyday life, today’s systems get large – really large: may it be on the technical side in the number of hardware pieces, computational elements, and lines of code or on the human side in the number of stakeholders, goals, and users. At the same time, these ultra-large scale systems have to cope with openness and uncertainty in the sense of dynamic composition of the system and interaction with the environment. Those two properties make the systems hard to understand, design and create due to the rich diversity of features.

View-based modeling and decomposition allow software engineers to focus on one aspect at a time. This talk summarizes benefits and drawbacks of both techniques: We discuss role-based modeling as a general tool for complexity reduction of ultra-large-scale systems. As a pointer to current research, we illustrate role-based modeling with Helena, a modeling approach which employs ensembles as groups of components collaborating under certain roles as first-class citizens.