Requirements engineering and design methods for distributed applications

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This project aims at developing and/or improving techniques for describing the dynamic behaviour of system components, especially at the requirements level, in order to facilitate the building of complex distributed systems out of smaller components, which may be re-used or developed for the particular application.  It deals with methods and tools for partially automating the development of a distributed system architecture and high-level design from given requirements, and for building distributed applications that are able to select appropriate partner applications for providing required services, and to adapt to the constraints given by the execution environments of the different system components. In this context, non-functional properties like response time, reliability, security and cost are important selection criteria. The objectives of the research include the development of methods and tools for deriving distributed system designs from a requirement  specification given in the form of UML Activity Diagrams or Use Case Maps, the consideration of distributed transactions, the integration of the "publish-subscribe" paradigm in order to allow for adaptable applications taking various non-functional requirements and trust relationships into account, and the improvement of methods for automatic submodule construction and their application to component re-use in the context of evolving system requirements. The methods and tools developed within this context will be evaluated by applying them to the development of system prototypes for various applications of realistic size and complexity. Possible areas of application are management of optical networks, electronic commerce, Grid computing and distributed multimedia applications, possibly using proposed Internet protocol standards.