The paper analyses ome of the practical problems that arise when the requirements of an information system evolve, and when the database and its application programs are to be modified accordingly. It presents four important strategies to cope with this evolution, namely forward maintenance, backward maintenance, reverse engineering .and anticipating design. A common, generic, framework that ca...

Comprehension is an essential part of software maintenance. Only software that is well understood can evolve in a controlled manner. In this paper, we present a formal process model to support the comprehension of software systems by using Ontology and Description Logic. This formal representation supports the use of reasoning services across different knowledge resources and therefore, enables...

Program slicing, introduced by Weiser, is known to help programmers in understanding foreign code and in debugging. We apply program slicing to the maintenance problem by extending the notion of a program slice (that originally required both a variable and line number) to a decomposition slice, one that captures all computation on a given variable; i.e., is independent of line numbers. Using th...

Software applications involving interactions of distributed systems are very common nowadays. Frequently, interactions are modelled during the analysis phase of a project and subsequently coded manually. Very often this results in a divergence of analysis model and the implemented code. Moreover, the border between interaction handling code and domain code may be blurred. In addition, hard-codi...

Many process models have been hitherto suggested. Very few of them, however, deal with the most utilised process today – the maintenance process. In this paper, we present and motivate the “Corrective Maintenance Maturity Model” (CM 3 ) a process model entirely dedicated to only software maintenance. .

Flexible manufacturing cells (FMCs) often operate with increasing failure rate due to extensive utilization and wear-outs of equipment. While maintenance plans can eliminate wear-out failures, random failures are still unavoidable. This paper discusses a procedure that combines simulation and analytical models to analyze the effects of corrective, preventive, and opportunistic maintenance polic...

Maintenance and support may account for as much as 60 to 75% of the total lifecycle cost of a manufacturing system. This paper presents a review on the predictive maintenance approaches, methods and tools in manufacturing systems and proposes an integrated predictive maintenance platform. This platform consists of three pillars, namely data acquisition and analysis, knowledge management, and a ...

An important issue in software maintenance and evolution is change propagation: given a primary change that is made in order to meet a new or changed requirement, what additional, secondary, changes are needed? We have previously developed techniques for effectively supporting change propagation within design models of intelligent agent systems. In this paper, we propose how this approach is ap...