Plug&Produce Paper Released by Plattform Industrie 4.0


The Plattform Industrie 4.0 has released a new paper on a standards-based Plug&Produce approach for industrial devices, which was mostly written by me. The paper is a contribution to the current working groups on Industrie 4.0 and focuses on a specific application scenario, where devices connect to each other with limited human interaction. Its purpose is to point to existing standards and reveal standardization gaps. Although a good fundament of standards exists, there is still the need to create more semantically standardized information models to realized this application scenario in a vendor-neutral way.

New Book: Modeling and Simulating Software Architectures: The Palladio Approach


After many years in the making, the Palladio book was finally published by MIT Press. I wrote two chapters in the book. The text details the key concepts of Palladio’s domain-specific modeling language for software architecture quality and presents the corresponding development stage. It describes how quality information can be used to calibrate architecture models from which detailed simulation models are automatically derived for quality predictions. It will also be an essential resource for software architects and software engineers and for practitioners who want to apply Palladio in industrial settings. You can also order from Amazon.

EMSE Paper Accepted

EMSE 2015
We got a paper accepted at the Springer Journal on Empirical Software Engineering: “Corporate organizations sometimes o ffer similar software products in certain domains due to former company mergers or due to the complexity of the organization. The functional overlap of such products is an opportunity for future systematic reuse to reduce software development and maintenance costs. We report on our experiences and lessons learned from conducting the domain analysis in four application cases with large-scale software products. We learned that the outcome of a domain analysis was often a smaller integration scenario instead of an SPL and that business case calculations were less relevant for the stakeholders and managers from the business units.”

Six years of Performance Modeling at ABB

Despite significant scientific research, systematic performance engineering techniques are still hardly used in industry, as many practitioners rely on ad-hoc performance firefighting. While there have been several industrial case studies on performance modeling in the last few years, more experience is needed to better understand the constraints in practice and to optimize existing tool-chains. I gave a talk summarizing six years of performance modeling at the Decartes/Kieker/Palladio Performance Symposium 2014 in Stuttgart. In three projects, different approaches to performance modeling were taken, and experiences on the capabilities and limitations of existing tools were gathered.

Industry Best Paper Award at SPLC 2014

Happy to report that our paper entitled “Customizing Domain Analysis for assessing the Reuse Potential of Industrial Software Systems” received the Best Paper Award of the Industry Track of SPLC 2014, the 18th International Software Product Line Conference in Florence, Italy. We have applied domain analysis on a number of device engineering tools and enterprise information systems from ABB and have reported several lessons learned.
SPLC 2014 Best Paper Award

IEEE TSE Paper Accepted

We got a paper accepted at IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering: “During the last decade, researchers have proposed a number of model transformations enabling performance predictions. This paper provides an in-depth comparison and quantitative evaluation of representative model transformations to, e.g., Queueing Petri Nets and Layered Queueing Networks. The semantic gaps between typical source model  abstractions and the different analysis techniques are revealed. The accuracy and efficiency of each transformation are evaluated by considering four case studies representing systems of different size and complexity. The presented results and insights gained from the evaluation help software architects and performance engineers to select the appropriate transformation for a given context.”TSE 2015

"Architekturen 2014" at ABB Ladenburg

The annual meeting of the special interest group on “software architecture” of the German Computer Science Society called “Architekturen 2014” was held at ABB Ladenburg. The meeting’s main theme was “Architectures for Industry 4.0“. The fourth industrial revolution is expected from a reorganization of industrial production processes to exploit the capabilities of cyber-physical systems. A dozen of invited talks from researchers and practitioners gave various perspectives on the topic and how it will affect software architectures.
Architekturen 2013