Completed Projects
The group has been involved in distributed systems research for a number of years. This page lists those projects that have been completed over that period
All project specific enquiries should be directed to the contact person listed here.
Check the current projects list for information about the ongoing work of the group.
AMUSE: Autonomic Management of Ubiquitous Computing for e-Health
EPSRC Funded
AMUSE focuses on the architecture and development of autonomous management capabilities for ubiquitous computing environments, in general, and e-health environments, in particular.
Project website: AMUSE
Local Contact: Emil Lupu
BiosensorNet: Autonomic Biosensor Networks for Pervasive Healthcare
EPSRC WINES Funded
BioSensorNet will develop a new generation of intelligent biosensing networks for heathcare, that can integrate local analogue signal processing with ultra-low power sensor interface and wireless data path; recognise the environment and physical context within which the signal is sensed; and form an autonomic system capable of self-configuring a network of sensors to provide reliable long-term adaptive sensing by fusing error-prone signals from individual sensors.
Project website: BiosensorNet
Local Contact: Morris Sloman
^Top
Cityware: Urban Design and Pervasive Systems
EPSRC WINES Funded
The project aims to develop an understanding of people’s relationships with urban space and with public pervasive technologies as well as to develop a set of well-founded, empirically tested and practically applicable principles, tools and techniques for the design and implementation of city-scale, long-term pervasive systems.
Project page: Cityware
Local Contact: Naranker Dulay
PAQMAN: Policy Analysis for QoS Management
EPSRC Funded
The PAQMAN Project is an EPSRC funded research project that will investigate the area of Policy Analysis and Refinement for QoS Management.
Project Pages: PAQMAN
Local Contact: Emil Lupu
SMMC: Self Managed Mobile Cells
SEAS DTC Funded
The project is developing techniques for discovering unmanned authonomous vehicles (UAVs) , validating credetials and assigning them to roles. Tasks and policies relevant to that role are then downloaded to the UAV and the set of UAVs collaborate to form a self managed cell.
Local Contact: Morris Sloman
STATUS: Software Architecture that Supports Usability
The aim of the STATUS project is to study and determine the connections between software architecture and the usability of the resultant software system and to explain the characteristics of software architectures that improve software usability.
Local Contact: Jeff Magee
UK-UbiNet: The UK Ubiquitous Computing Network
EPSRC Funded
This is an EPSRC funded network of research in the U.K. in the area of Ubiquitous Computing.
Project website: UK-UbiNet
Local Contact: Morris Sloman
PolyNet: Policy Based Management of Adaptive Networks
EPSRC Funded
The overall objective is to evaluate the Ponder Policy Specification language as a means of specifying and implementing both security and management policies for adaptive networks.
Local Project Pages: [PolyNet]
Local Contact: Morris Sloman
DIADEM FIREWALL
IST 6th Framework
The project aims for the general goal of development and deployment of innovative network components that enable service providers to offer to their customers secure broadband services in an effective and cost-efficient way.
Project Website: DIADEM FIREWALL
Local Contact: Morris Sloman
TrustCoM
IST 6th Framework
Trust and Contract Management framework enabling secure collaborative business processing for dynamically evolving virtual environments.
Project Website: here
Local Contact: Emil Lupu
Polyander: Language Based Policy Specification, Analysis and Deployment for Large-scale Systems
- The project aims to further the development of policy based network and systems management and achieve significant advances in user definition of policies by combining the language based approach formulated at Imperial College with the CISCO Information Model based on the Common Information Model, a DMTF Standard.
Local Contact: Morris Sloman
PATIA : Adaptive Management System for Distributed Webservices
EPSRC Funded
- The Patia project aims to carry out studies into data placement and request scheduling to prototype an adaptive web server management system.
Project website: here
Local Contact: Julie McCann
AutoMed: Automatic Generation of Mediator Tools for Heterogeneous Database Integration
EPSRC Funded
The AutoMed project investigates the practical application of graph based database schema transformation, its use in automating global query processing and the application of heuristic and evolutionary computing techniques to schema improvement and global query optimisation for heterogeneous databases.
Project Website: here
Local Contact: Peter McBrien
ALPINE: Application Level Programmable Inter-Network Environment
BT Funded
- Imperial's area within this project is in policies for security and management of programmable (active) and adaptive networks for telecommunications.
Project Website: here
Local Contact: Morris Sloman
VOICI: Handling Inconsistency and Change in Evolving Requirements Specifications
EPSRC Funded
Project website: here
Local Contact: Alessandra Russo
Prinicipal Investigator: Bashar Nuseibeh
Managing Inconsistency in Software Engineering
EPSRC Funded
- The development of software systems inevitably involves the management of inconsistencies which may arise in the different stages of development. A large proportion of software engineering research has been devoted to consistency maintenance, or has been geared towards eradicating inconsistencies as soon as they are detected. Industrial reality however suggests that practitioners (and their customers) live with inconsistency on a regular basis and develop ways of dealing with it as a matter of course.
- The project aims to investigate the issues of managing inconsistencies that arise during software development activities, in order to provide development tools that are more in tune with actual development practices. In particular, the focus of the project is on examining and developing approaches that tolerate, even make use of, inconsistency in software descriptions (e.g., specifications and programs), and that facilitate reasoning, analysis and action in the presence of inconsistency.
Project Website: here
Local Contact: Alessandra Russo
Prinicipal Investigator: Bashar Nuseibeh
SecPol: Specification and Analysis of Security Policy for Distributed Systems
EPSRC Funded
- The overall objective of this project is to provide a framework for managing security in large, multi-organisational distributed systems. This will include techniques and tools for specification of security policy by refining high level goals into implementable policies; analysis of policies for inconsistencies and conflicts; and example mappings onto modern security implementation mechanisms. It will build upon the Role based management framework developed during the EPSRC funded Roleman project and related work at Imperial College. This framework includes a notation and editor for defining obligation and authorisation policies plus some policy conflict analysis tools.
Project Website: here
Local Contact: Morris Sloman
Prinicipal Investigator: Bashar Nuseibeh
LinkMe: Distributed Link Services for Mobile Environments
EPSRC Funded
- The overall objective of this project is to provide a distributed link service for mobile users of distributed hypermedia (Web) information systems. This will include servers, mobile agents, specification and elaboration techniques for architecture description and runtime support. The work is novel in that integrates work on open hypermedia, mobile agents, constraint specification and software architectures and has broader applicability in areas such a programmable telecomunications. Ordnance Survey's geographic information system will be used for a demonstrator and critical evaluation.
Project Website: here
Local Contact: Morris Sloman
Prinicipal Investigators: N. Dulay, M. Sloman, J. Magee, J. Kramer (Imperial College London); D. De Roure, W. Hall (University of Southampton)
Pro-Active Role Based Management for Telecommunication Services
Sponsored by Fujitsu Network Systems Laboratories, Kawasaki, Japan
Project Website: here
Prinicipal Investigators: Emil Lupu, Morris Sloman, Jeff Kramer, Jeff Magee
Beads- Behaviour Analysis for Distributed Systems
- The research objective is to develop effective techniques with tool support for analysing the behaviour of concurrent and distributed systems. The analysis aims to expose behavioural anomalies in the design and implementation of these systems. To handle scalability, the proposed techniques emphasise compositionality and support incremental analysis. To facilitate practical use, the approach aims to incorporate both a fast approximate technique (low-order polynomial dataflow algorithm) for preliminary analysis and an exhaustive technique (state space enumerative technique) for detailed analysis.
- This project is a development of TRACTA - Tractable Behaviour Analysis for Distributed Systems.
PONDS: Policy Notation for Distributed Systems
EPSRC Funded
- This project is investigating the application of policy specification languages to service level agreements.
Project Website: here
Local Contact: Morris Sloman
SLURP - Sound Languages Underpin Reliable Programming
The SLURP group is investigating the semantics of the Java language. It has been demonstrated that many breaches of the Java security originate with the possibility of breaking the type system through a combination of fooling the byte-code verifier and the linker/loader. Previous work by Sophia Drossopoulou and Susan Eisenbach gives a concise specification of a substantial portion of the Java programming language and shows that the type system works properly. That work is being extended to take in environmental issues such as the effects of dynamic linking, the byte-code verifier and finally, to be able to characterise a large portion of the language and the environment for which it is demonstrably safe to run externally produced Java code.
Local Contact: Sophia Drossopoulou
C3DS: Control and Coordination of Complex Distributed Services
ESPRIT Long Term Research Project 24962
- The objective of the C3DS project is to exploit distributed object technology to create a framework for complex service provisioning. By complex service provisioning we primarily mean the ability to compose a given service out of existing ones as well as the ability to exercise dynamic control over the execution of the service. Mechanisms are needed to dynamically add, extend, remove or move component services in a dependable and predictable manner (service level requirements). At the same time, end users, most of whom are not programmers, must be able to specify, create, configure and manage services easily (end user requirements).
- The C3DS approach to building a framework for complex service provisioning is be based on unifying three technologies: software architecture based development environments, software agents and transactional workflow management systems.
Project Website: here
Local Contact: Christos Karamanolis
FEAST/2 - Feedback, Evolution and Software Technology
EPSRC Funded
- Based on an observation first made in 1971, the FEAST/1 project was set up to explore the hypothesis that "real world software evolution processes constitute multi level, multi loop, multi agent feedback systems and must, in general, be treated as such to achieve significant process improvement for other than the most primitive processes."
- The project objective is the development of theory, and the idenfication and definition of methods and tools to support software evolution processes, its management and improvement.
- FEAST/1 (1996-1998)developed black box models of system and process evolution metrics obtained from the industrial collaborators ICL,Logica,Matra-BAe and MOD-DERA and throgh the good offices of one of the Senior Visiting Fellows, from Lucent Techonologies. System dynamics models were also developed by a top-down procedure to identify critical feedback loops and assess their impact. The FEAST/1 project has shown the presence of feedback, demonstrated its impact and, in particular, indicated that a significant part of the system dynamics displayed by the various observable trends has its origin in outer loop feedback mechanisms, involving user, organisational and management domains. The results support six of the eigth laws of software evolution developed over the last 25 years.
- FEAST/2 (1999-2001) is continuing and expanding the investigation with BT Labs as an additional industrial collaborator.
Project Website: here
Local Contact: Ms Siew F Lim (e-m)
Principal Investigator: Prof. MM Lehman
PROMOTER II - Process Modelling Techniques
- The aim is to promote collaborative research on software process modelling, to coordinate European activities and so advance the field. Particular emphasis is based on team work, model acquisition, customisation, instantiation, and evolution, long term transactions and configuration management.
VOILA - Inconsistency Handling in Multi-Perspective Specifications
This work combines two novel and promising lines of research in software engineering: the ViewPoints approach to distributed development of systems and inconsistency handling in logic. The objectives of the project are twofold: to facilitate distributed development of multi-authored, multi-perspective software specifications, described in multiple viewpoints; and to provide sound techniques for handling inconsistencies that occur naturally in such specifications, not by eradicating them immediately, but by using any useful information they contain as a trigger for taking further appropriate actions.
MISD - Managing Inconsistency in Software Development
The aim is to develop a common framework for managing inconsistencies that arise in software development, and to populate this framework with inconsistency handling tools and techniques. These focus on detection, analysis and reasoning in the presence of inconsistency. The collaboration is with Prof. Carlo Ghezzi and his group at Politecnico di Milano, and Prof. A. C. W. Finkelstein.
FEAST/1 Feedback, Evolution and Software Technology
EPSRC Funded
- Based on an observation first made in 1971, the FEAST/1 project was set up to explore a hypothesis that "real world software evolution processes constitute multi level, multi loop, multi agent feedback systems and must, in general, be treated as such to achieve significant process improvement for other than the most primitive processes."
- In a two year investigation terminating in Sept. 1998 the project explored this hypothesis by developing and analysing black box models of system and process evolution metrics obtained from the industrial collaborators. System dynamics models were also developed by a top-down procedure to identify critical feedback loops and assess their impact. The FEAST/1 project has shown the presence of feedback, demonstrated its impact and, in particular, indicated that a significant part of the system dynamics displayed by the various observable trends has its origin in outer loop feedback mechanisms, involving user, organisational and management domains.
ARES
- The main objective of this project is to enable software developers to explicitly describe, assess, and manage architectures of embedded software families. To reach this goal we select, extend or develop a framework of methods, processes and prototype tools for incorporating architectural reasoning along the life-cycle of embedded software family. Results of this project will help to design reliable systems with embedded software, that satisfy important quality requirements, evolve gracefully and may be built in-time and on-budget.
Management of Multiservice Networks
The MMN project was a BT University Research Initiative. This project comprises a 5 year plan (oct 94-sep 99), for 6 partners to carry out extensive basic research into the Management of Multiservice Networks, in partcular focusing on SuperJANET. Imperial's work package is Configuration Management: graphical tools to support the initial construction and subsequent dynamic change of the software components of the network services, the management system itself and distributed applications.
Project Website: here
RoleMan: Role Based Management for Multiservice Networks
EPSRC Funded
Local Contact: Emil Lupu
Integrated Design and Construction Activities for Distributed Systems (The System Architect's Assistant)
- The aim is to provide an architectural methodology and graphical support tool, the System Architect's Assistant, for the design and engineering of distributed systems. The work will support both initial informal design decomposition and subsequent rigorously checked composition when a set of specified, designed and implemented components are integrated to construct the desired distributed system. The Assistant tool is intended to act as an integrating framework supporting selected design and analysis techniques and implementation platforms.
Domain Specific Software Development using ViewPoints
- The aim is to promote collaborative research in Software Development by using domain specific information and representing the different roles and views of the participants. The collaboration is with Prof. Goedicke of University of Essen and Prof. A. C. W. Finkelstein.
ISI - Information Systems Interoperability
- The aim is to promote international collaborative research on interoperability and integration of heterogeneous information systems. This combines work in the areas of CSCW, distributed systems, databases and information systems. The partners involved are the Universities of Hagen (Prof. Krämer), and Aachen (Prof. Jarke) in Germany, and Queensland (Prof. Popazoglou) in Australia. More information can be found on Hagen's ISI page, including the final project publication.
ANS - Autonomic Networked Systems
DTI Funded
- Ubiquitous networks for home healthcare monitoring. A ubiquitous network must have a high degree of automatic adaptability and reconfigurability since it is inconceivable that we should require users to perform explicit systems management and maintenance. The ANS is self-configuring, self-optimising, and self-repairing. The user can seamlessly plug and unplug units into and out of the network.
Project Website: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~asher/ubi/ansproj/