A domain‐specific modeling approach to realizing user‐centric communication

Abstract

SUMMARY Advances in communication devices and technologies are dramatically expanding our communication capabilities and enabling a wide range of multimedia communication applications. The current approach to develop communication‐intensive applications results in products that are fragmented, inflexible, and incapable of responding to changing end‐users' communication needs. These limitations have resulted in the need for a new development approach of building communication applications that are driven by end‐users and that support the dynamic nature of communication‐based collaboration. To address this need, the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) technology has been developed to support rapid specification and automatic realization of user‐centric communication applications based on a domain‐specific modeling approach. The CVM technology consists of a domain‐specific modeling language (DSML), the Communication Modeling Language (CML), that is used to create communication models, and a semantic rich platform, the CVM, that realized the created communication models. In this paper, we report on our experiences of applying a systematic approach to engineering CML and the synthesis of CML models in CVM. Based on a feature model describing the taxonomy of the user‐centric communication domain in a network independent manner, we develop the meta‐model of CML and its different concrete syntaxes. We also present a behavioral specification (dynamic semantics) of CML that enables the dynamic synthesis of user‐centric communication models into an executable form called communication control script. We validated the CML semantics using Kermeta, a meta‐programming environment for engineering DSMLs, and evaluated the practicality of our approach using a CVM prototype and a set of experiments. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Middleware to Support Services Delivery in a Domain-Specific Virtual Machine

“…In the subsequent subsections we introduce iDSMLs and DSVMs. As previously stated our research team has worked on two DSVMs, the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) in the user-centric communication domain [19,64], and Microgrid Virtual Machine (MGridVM) in the energy management for smart microgrid domain [2,3]. In this dissertation we will focus on the CVM, which is a distributed system unlike the MGridVM, which is currently a stand alone system.…”

“…The data schema shown in part (b) initiates the audio video connection, the data schema in part (c) initiates the patient record to be sent a a form. For more details on the metamodel (abstract syntax and static semantics) for CML, see Wu et al [64].…”

“…In Figure B.1, we see the set of control scripts for the Microgrid domain. For more details on the synthesis process we refer the reader to the work by Wu et al [64].…”

A Domain Specific Modeling Approach for Coordinating User-Centric Communication Services

“…The existing CVM technology captures the communication needs of this scenario in separate communication model instances [82], as shown in Figure 1.2. To achieve a more efficient collaborative communication process, these different communication instances need to be coordinated during the execution of the scenario.…”

“…The specifics of these functions are explained further in terms of synthesis algorithms and labeled transition systems in [82]. Although it is not the major contribution of this dissertation, for complete reasons, we show synthesis algorithms for synthesizing CML models in Appendix 6.1, analyzing CML control and data schema instances in Appendix 6.2, 6.3, and the details of the negotiation and media transfer state machines in Table A1,A2 in the Appendix.…”