Overview

The group is conducting research in the field of software systems engineering. Within this broad area the research activities of the the group have been focused on:

• Service-oriented software systems engineering
  

  This strand of work focuses on the construction of systems from web-services. The strands of research which are being pursued in this area include the discovery and composition of web-services during system design or at run-time, and the development of mechanisms for monitoring the behaviour of service-based systems against service level agreements (SLAs).

• Security engineering
  

  The group has recently started work in the area of security with a focus on developing platforms to support the monitoring of the effectiveness of implementations of security solutions and the extent to which they address security requirements. This work has focused on the development of event capturing mechanisms for monitoring, negotiation protocols for the initiation and termination of monitoring activities in distributed systems without forms of centralised control and patterns for the specification of monitorable security properties.

• Inconsistency management in software development
  

  Development of techniques to support the detection, handling and diagnosis of inconsistencies in object-oriented software models, software requirements and software design specifications. These techniques are based on graph matching, and knowledge-based and probabilistic reasoning.

• Requirements engineering
  

  Development of techniques to support the automatic generation and maintenance of fine-grain traceability relations between different parts in the documentation of software systems. This work is based on the use of lightweight natural language processing techniques and rule-based reasoning. As part of this work, we have also investigated the application of probabilistic reasoning and machine learning techniques in the automatic generation of traceability relations. We have also looked at processes of requirement specification evolution supported by the use of abductive reasoning and inductive machine learning techniques.

• Embedded Systems
  

  Development of methods for the analysis, fine grain control, optimisation and implementation of mission-critical and safety-critical embedded systems.

Members

Academic staff:

Visiting staff:

Research assistants:

Research students:

A list of selected publications of the members of the groups is maintained. In addition to it the members of the group have their own lists which can be accessed from their web-pages.

Research Opportunities

The group welcomes applications from students who want to do research in the areas that are of interest to the academic members of the group. Those interested may initially contact the relevant member of the group or Prof. George Spanoudakis.
Further information about Research Studies within The School of Informatics can be found here