Section: Application Domains

Application Domains

The ADAM project-team targets the software engineering of adaptive service-oriented applications and middleware. The application domain covered by ADAM is broad and spans from distribution applications to middleware. In all these cases, adaptability is the property which is sought: applications and middleware must be adaptable to new execution contexts, they must react to changes in the environment and they must be able to discover and integrate new services.

The ADAM project-team produces software and middleware building blocks. This explains why the application domain is broad, yet targeting applications where adaptability is the key requirement. This includes electronic commerce, embedded systems, health care information systems, and terrestrial transport information systems. These domains are in direct relation with our currently funded activities. They act as testbeds for the solutions that we propose in terms of middleware services, middleware platforms, runtime kernels, component libraries, languages design or domain modeling.

Electronic Commerce

Applications in the domain of electronic commerce are by essence distributed. They involve many different participants with heterogeneous information systems which cannot be changed. The challenge is then to provide an adaptation layer to be able to compose and let these systems interoperate. In the context of the ANR TLog SCOrWare, the ICT SOA4All and the CAPPUCINO projects, our activities in this domain will aim at supporting service-oriented architectures. We want to have adaptive architectures that can be composed and orchestrated seamlessly. In this domain, the business relationship with customers is vital and many different usage scenarios must be supported. Customers are roaming, and the services must be kept operational across different devices. This puts some constraints on the server tier where technical services must be adapted to manage, for instance, long lasting transactions. The application server infrastructure must then provide a support for adapting technical services.

Embedded Systems

Embedded systems form a domain where adaptation is a key requirement. The design and the implementation of modern embedded software uses advanced software engineering techniques such model-driven development or software component frameworks. In this domain, we are involved in several projects, such as the ANR TLog Flex-eWare, and the trade cluster MIND. Several challenges must be addressed here. For example, when a model-driven developed application is adapted, designers have to ensure that the models and the operational level are kept synchronized. The co-evolution of these two levels is one of the challenges that we are addressing. A second challenge is related to software components that need to be customized in order to fit the requirements imposed by constrained environments. It is, for example, a matter of providing component frameworks that can accommodate various granularities of services.

Health Care Information Systems

Health care information systems form a third application domain in which the ADAM project-team is involved, for instance through demonstrators which will be implemented in the context of the ANR TLog FAROS project. The challenge here is to provide a distributed infrastructure where information will be available to medical staff wherever they are. This imposes to be able to provide this information on many different devices (from high resolution screens to embedded devices on the scene of an accident), while ensuring the privacy of the medical data of a patient (several level of data access must be granted depending on the categories of medical staff). Given the vital role of such an information system, we want to provide guarantees that the services will be highly available and trustworthy. We envision to provide a service-oriented architecture which will be extended to support software contracts and multi-scale environments.

Information Systems for Terrestrial Transport

Information systems for terrestrial transport are also a domain that we are relying on, to apply our research activities in accordance with the ANR ARA REVE project and the INRETS collaboration). Applications are here characterized by frequent disconnections, poor quality network links, and high mobility. We want to provide an infrastructure where the technical services, and among others the communication services, can be adapted to support new requirements. One of the paths that we propose to investigate is to include such a scenario in the general context of the adaptiveness of component frameworks.