Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Recent technological innovations in information acquisition, processing and transmission have encouraged the development of complex applications integrating hardware components. Such applications interact with environments characterized by perturbations (noises, faults, etc.) that can cause performance degradation during runtime. Despite the importance of these embedded complex applications, their development methodologies still fail to guarantee and optimize the required quality of service (QoS) even when adaptive and architecture reconfiguration techniques are considered at the design phase. The main reason is that the total package of components is not taken into account during design and development. This applies especially to hardware components: real hardware components are too costly to be used for testing purposes, and the rapid technological evolution of hardware components makes them difficult to simulate with existing software modeling methodologies. The purpose of our research is to study and develop a methodology for specification and modeling of software and hardware components that compose complex applications. We will investigate the impact of evolutionary processing to optimize the QoS of these components and make them adaptive to changes in their environment. Our study will contain inevitably experimental dimensions since we simulate behavior changes in the environments of components to define strategies that will maintain the QoS of these components. To define our methodology we combine and extend well-established methodologies in object software engineering such as HRT-HOOD, with evolutionary and simulation techniques.  We develop a generic testbed to test evolutionary techniques on various components. Then, we validate our experiments on real hardware components. To provide more powerful adaptive software capabilities, we test component results on entire complex applications defined from our development framework.