Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications

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    Business-oriented development of telecommunication services
    SINNOTT, RICHARD ; Kolberg, Mario (Association for Computing Machinery, 1998)
    The development of software for distributed systems, e.g. telecommunication services, is a complex activity. Numerous issues have to be resolved when developing such systems, examples of which are language/system heterogeneity and remoteness of components. Interface definition languages (IDLs) are used as the basis for addressing some of these issues. IDLs allow for the specification of the syntactic aspects of the interfaces of the components in the system to be made. Whilst lending itself to issues of heterogeneity and location transparency, dealing with IDL as the basis for system development is not without its problems. Two of the main problems with IDL are its lack of behaviour and its lack of abstraction. Thus designers should not be constrained to work within the syntactic notations used to implement their systems, nor should they be unaided in how they might better design their systems. In this paper we show how these issues are being addressed in the TOSCA project in its development of a service creation and validation environment.
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    Frameworks: the future of formal software development?
    SINNOTT, RICHARD (Elsevier Science, 1998)
    It could be argued that the primary issue to be dealt with in software engineering today is re-use of software. Current software development rarely, if ever, starts from nothing. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the development of specifications. To overcome this problem, various works have attempted to show how specifications can be built using architectural principles. We discuss one such approach in particular, the Architectural Semantics of Open Distributed Processing. We show the limitations of this work with regard to the architecting of specifications and propose a new approach, based on frameworks. To highlight the approach we use the work currently being done in the TOSCA project in its development of a service creation and validation environment for telecommunication services.
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    Engineering telecommunication services with SDL
    SINNOTT, RICHARD ; Kolberg, Mario (Kluwer Academic, 1999)
    If formal techniques are to be more widely accepted then they should evolve as current software engineering approaches evolve. Current techniques in the development of distributed systems use interface definition languages (IDLs) as a basis for the underlying communication and also as an abstraction tool. Object-oriented technologies and the idea of engineering software through frameworks are also widely accepted approaches in developing software. In this paper we show how the formal specification language SDL and associated tool support have been applied in the TOSCA project to engineer telecommunication services using these current techniques.
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    The pros and cons of using SDL for creation of distributed services
    Olsen, Anders ; Demany, Didier ; Cardoso, Elsa ; Lodge, Fiona ; Kolberg, Mario ; Bjorkander, Morgan ; SINNOTT, RICHARD (Springer, 1999)
    In a competitive market for the creation of complex distributed services, time to market, development cost, maintenance and flexibility are key issues. Optimizing the development process is very much a matter of optimizing the technologies used during service creation. This paper reports on the experience gained in the Service Creation projects SCREEN and TOSCA on use of the language SDL for efficient service creation.
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    Experiences of modelling and using object-oriented telecommunication service frameworks in SDL
    Kolberg, Mario ; Sinnott, Richard O. ; Magill, Evan H. (Elsevier, 1999)
    This paper describes experiences in using SDL and its associated tools to create telecommunication services by producing and specialising object-oriented frameworks. The chosen approach recognises the need for the rapid creation of validated telecommunication services. It introduces two stages to service creation; firstly a software expert produces a service framework, and secondly a telecommunications ‘business consultant’ who specialises the framework by means of graphical tolls to rapidly produce services. Here we focus on the underlying technology required. In particular we highlight the advantages of SDL and tools as well as issues and problems incurred.
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    Real-time systems development with SDL and next generation validation tools
    Sinnott, Richard O. (IEEE, 2001)
    The language SDL has long been applied in the development of various kinds of systems. Real-time systems are one application area where SDL has been applied extensively. Whilst SDL allows for certain modelling aspects of real-time systems to be represented, the language and its associated tool support have certain drawbacks for modelling and reasoning about such systems. In this paper we highlight the limitations of SDL and its associated tool support in this domain and present language extensions and next generation real-time system tool support to help overcome them. The applicability of the extensions and tools is demonstrated through a case study based upon a multimedia binding object used to support a configuration of time dependent information producers and consumers realising the so called lip-synchronisation algorithm.
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    The formal, tool supported development of real time systems
    Sinnott, Richard O. (IEEE Computer Society, 2004)
    The language SDL has long been applied in the development of various kinds of systems. Real-time systems are one application area where SDL has been applied extensively. Whilst SDL allows for certain modelling aspects of real-time systems to be represented, the language and its associated tool support have certain drawbacks for modelling and reasoning about such systems. In this paper we highlight the limitations of SDL and its associated tool support in this domain and present language extensions and next generation real-time system tool support to help overcome them. The applicability of the extensions and tools is demonstrated through a case study based upon a multimedia binding object used to support a configuration of time dependent information producers and consumers realising the so called lip-synchronisation algorithm.