Contract-Based Model of Evolving Architecture for Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

The sustainable development of most economies and the quality of life of their citizens largely depend on the development and application of evolutionary digital ecosystems. The characteristic features of these systems are reflected in the so called Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Cities, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Systems of Human-Machine-Things, and Data Centers. Compared to the challenges in traditional ICT applications that engineers used to face, system and software development is to develop and integrate new components or subsystems, new applications and front end services that depends on the infrastructures of existing systems. This has to deal with the complexity of ever evolving architectures digital components, physical components, together with sensors and smart devices controlled and coordinated by software. The architectural components are designed with different technologies, run on different platforms and interact through different communication technologies. Software runs in these systems for data processing and analytics, computation, and intelligent control. However, the critical requirements of applications of these systems should not be compromised, and thus critical components need to be “provably correct”. In this talk we discuss, for development software in these emerging systems, the need of a foundation for the combination of traditional software engineering, AI (or knowledge-based engineering) and the emerging Big Data technologies. We show how an interface theory could play a core role in this foundation for seamless combination of different models, methods and tools for software development, AI and Big Data, as well as for system integration.

Biography

Zhiming Liu is known for his work on real-time and fault-tolerant program design, verification, and schedulability analysis by transformations that established a theory of real-time and fault-tolerant refinement; probabilistic duration calculus for system dependability specification and analysis, and his work on the rCOS formal method of model-driven design. The key bibliographic database lists over 130 of his peer reviewed publications in recognized outlets. These include papers published in the top journals on formal methods, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages, Formal Aspects of Computing, Science of Computer Programming and Theoretical Computer Science, as well as mainstream conferences. He received a 2nd prize in natural science of Science and Technology Award from Macao SAR in 2012 for his work on the rCOS method. He joined Southwest University in Chongqing (China) as a full-time professor in January 2016, and he is now leading to build the Centre for Research and Innovation in Software Engineering. Zhiming Liu received his PhD in 1991 from the University of Warwick (UK), and then worked there for three more years as a postdoc research fellow till 1994. After that, he worked during 1994-2005 at the University of Leicester as lecturer. Between 2002 and 2013, he worked for the United National University – International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST, Macau) as a research fellow and then senior research fellow. Then he worked from 2013 to 2015 at Birmingham City University as Professor of Software Engineering before he returned back China to take his current position. Zhiming Liu is a member of CCF, a Fellow of British Computer Society, and a senior member of ACM. He also a founder of the international conferences ICTAC, SEFM, FACS and SETTA.