A New Application of Domain Speciﬁc Modeling

Towards Implementing an Early Warning Service

Syed Imran, Ioannis Dokas, John Feehan and Franclin Foping

University College Cork, Cork Constraint Computation Centre

Western Gateway Building, Cork, Ireland

Abstract. Domain Speciﬁc Modeling (DSM) has been used for a while in many

scenarios, case studies, and applications successfully. This paper intends to present

a new application of DSM for facilitating an Early Warning Service (EWS). The

knowledge about risks and its representation is an important factor for any EWS.

The challenge is to help the users be closer to the understanding of the associ-

ated risks and to facilitate them with a new software application so as to provide

the ability of risk analysis, we propose in this paper a novel application of using

Domain Speciﬁc Modeling (DSM) in deploying EWS. The paper presents a case

study in which there is a need to develop an EWS for the personnel of institu-

tions involved in the drinking water delivery governance model in the Republic

of Ireland.

1 Introduction

Access to safe drinking water is a basic human right, but this right is not being met

universally. At least one third of the population in developing countries and almost one

ﬁfth of the global population have no access to safe drinking water. Diseases related to

drinking water continue to be one of the major health problems globally as there are

about four billion cases of diarrhoea each year, out of which 2.5 million cases end in

death [1]. In particular waterborne disease outbreaks have attracted the attention of the

media and of the public, giving a raise on the discussions about the issues of drinking

water safety and risk management of water utilities.

The ultimate goal of our research, which is at its early phase, is to design and de-

velop a domain speciﬁc software application that will facilitate Early Warning Service

(EWS) development and is to be used by the personnel of institutions involved in the

drinking water delivery governance model of Ireland, such as the EPA, local authorities

(LA) and the Health Service Executive (HSE). It can be viewed as useful contribution

in supporting a proactive risk management strategy.

The goal of this paper is to propose a component and its high level architecture of

the EWS; that is a Domain Speciﬁc Modeling (DSM)application for modeling and rep-

resenting the knowledge about risks in WTP operations. Fig. 1, provides a model of the

interactions between the DSM application and the entities such as personnel of EPA and

WTP caretaker. One of the use cases, for example would be met when an EPA person-

nel is required to perform an audit on WTP using software application for EWS and in

order to do so it is necessary for him to receive input from the caretaker regarding with

Imran S., Dokas I., Feehan J. and Foping F. (2010).

A New Application of Domain Speciﬁc Modeling Towards Implementing an EarlyWarning Service.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Model-Driven Architecture and Modeling Theory-Driven Development, pages 99-104

DOI: 10.5220/0003049600990104

 SciTePress

Fig. 1. Functional requirements.

proﬁling the particular plant and updated working status on water treatment utility. The

possibility of automatically generating code from domain speciﬁc models can enhance

the development of the EWS.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides the brief description

of the relevant concepts of DSM . In Section 3 a proposed architecture of our novel ap-

plication of DSM will be presented. In Section 4, related work is high-lighted followed

by concluding remarks in Section 5.

2 Concepts

Each of the concepts mentioned below and their research areas has its own substantial

body of literature. In this article, we just scratch the surface of each.

2.1 Knowledge Modeling

Modeling in the context of information technology aims at capturing relevant knowl-

edge in a conceptual, often high-level, and abstract form. An ideal situation from a pure

knowledge perspective is to be able to reuse the knowledge available implicitly and ex-

plicitly, which can be accomplished by the effort of knowledge modeling. The activity

of knowledge modeling is to generate knowledge models, which are interpretable mod-

els that represent the concepts or entities of a real world, their behaviour, properties and

related constraints. Knowledge models are structured representations of knowledge and

they maintain knowledge in the form of symbols, entities, events with states, attributes

and values, in order to represent the pieces of knowledge and their relationship.

The elicitation and modeling of knowledge for engineering tasks, especially re-

lated to a speciﬁc domain, has always been a matter of concern. General purpose pro-

gramming languages represents knowledge in an object oriented style, supports think-

ing in terms of classes, objects and methods instead of depiction of acquired speciﬁc

knowledge in terms of their domains. Therefore, for knowledge acquisition activities

the knowledge modeling is used as a means of acquiring, validating and storing knowl-

edge for future use.

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In model-driven paradigm of DSM metamodels are used to deﬁne various modeling

languages that represent the key concepts and abstractions for a speciﬁc domain. The

domain models, built by the set of processes and programming tools in DSM environ-

ment are formal models which correspond to entities in the real world and conceptually

represents its behaviour, constraints.

2.2 Domain Modeling

Utilizing the DSM approach can be achieved by raising the abstraction level and by un-

derstanding the concepts of speciﬁc domain. The deﬁnition of the modeling language

will be based on domain concepts identiﬁed during domain analysis [2]. The identiﬁed

domain concepts of the risk analysis methodologies for drinking water utilities are re-

quired to be mapped to the domain semantics, which is a set of rules that specify the

well-formedness of domain models and are represented by means of graphical nota-

tions; these notations represent the graphical syntax to express the semantics.

For capturing the syntax of the modeling language, a metamodel must describe all

the entities and relationships that may exist in DSM [3]. Metamodels provide object-

oriented speciﬁcation of the abstract syntax which is the structure of the language

constructs used in Model Driven Engineering where models are primary artifacts. In

other words, metamodeling can be deﬁned as a modeling activity for specifying mod-

els, where models are abstract representations of the real world entities, processes thus

describing the information that concerns with a particular domain. The high level con-

ceptual architecture for deﬁning models for DSM is given in Fig. 2.

In order to complete the DSM deﬁnition specifying domain concepts and domain

models is not sufﬁcient enough but domain rules and constraints are also required to

deﬁne the legal relationships between domain concepts and their usage. Different kinds

of constraints will be applied to the proposed DSM such as operational constraints

expression for modes of operations relevant to failure preventive measures, compos-

ability constraints expression for compatibility between different alternatives, resource

constraints will be used to indicate the need for speciﬁc resources and performance con-

straint [3]. In this consideration of DSM, the constraints and behaviour of DSM will be

deﬁned in accordance to EWS by keeping the integrity of the domain concept.

2.3 Code Generation

In DSM the code is required to be generated from the domain models in order to drive

working software application, a database schema or even some documentation [4]. Fully

functional executable code can be generated from the domain models itself without any

manual intervention. During transformation no manual mapping is required from do-

main models to code; instead automatic code generation is facilitated by implementing

any technology that provides model to text transformations. In Eclipse, Model to Text

transformations (M2T)[5] project focuses on code generation and hosts frameworks

mostly based templates with an ability of generating text from models.

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Fig. 2. Conceptual architecture of DSM.

3 Proposed High Level Architecture

In this approach, we stress on providing a new standalone DSM application for a EWS

in WTP. Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) will be used to develop it. Fig. 3 illustrates

the higher level architecture and the core components of our system can be described

as follows:

Fig. 3. High level Architecture.

– Prospective users include authorized stakeholders, personnel and managers of WTP,

EPA and HSE;

– The presentation layer comprise of RCP platform in order to provide a standalone

application. Domain speciﬁc editor will serve as user interface for the prospect user

to interact with EWS;

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– An application layer will provide the core logic for different processes. Risk analy-

sis to calculate the likelihood of vulnerabilities. Monitoring mechanism will assist

the users such as plant manager to check, oversee the current status of water treat-

ment utilities. Proﬁling mechanism will allow the update of physical inventory and

to list what exist in speciﬁc plant;

– The persisting layer will handles all the logic to save and retrieve the data from

data base. In this layer object-relation mapping is performed to transparently maps

objects to relational data.

4 Related Work

A useful aspect of DSM is in providing the convenience of identifying the concepts

representing the real entities of WTP by utilizing custom graphics within the models.

Hence, offering the convenience to think closer in terms of problem domain and even-

tually providing an effective EWS. The speciﬁed domain models can be used to deﬁne

other models or to conﬁgure other systems perhaps in combination with other enabling

technologies by providing the domain speciﬁc application process interface for EWS.

We argue that it is feasible to develop a novel type of software application to provide

EWS.

DSM approach has been successfully applied in a vast array of different domains

to create applications for a broad collection of programming languages and platforms

including many industrial applications [6] such as in insurance sector, mobile phones,

and radios. Their comprehensive study comparison is out of the scope of this paper.

The most recent relevant work we have found is on developing a prototyping ap-

proach using DSM for describing the earthquake detection algorithms for an earthquake

EWS [7],[8],[9].

DSM approaches have been used also for risk and vulnerability modeling in do-

mains such as critical systems engineering [10], grid computing systems security [11].

These approaches are deﬁning the concepts of ”threat” ”risk” and ”vulnerability” in an

appropriate manner but do not integrate the concept of early warning signal, which is

of important in every EWS.

5 Conclusions and Ongoing Research

This paper proposes the use of a DSM in EWS for drinking water utilities. Our in-

novative approach consists of providing DSM to model the risk associated for water

treatment utilities and to describe the architecture of EWS application. However, there

are many technical research challenges that need to be resolved to deﬁne the early warn-

ing methodologies within the drinking water treatment utilities and their deployment in

our domain models along with their constraints. These include the modeling of con-

straints as well as the behaviour of the entities of water treatment utilities with respect

to the rules and techniques involved in risk management. Further different aspects of

DSM implementation need to be investigated such as code generation, improved per-

formance, and validity of the models with respect to the domain.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the research project SCEWA (Grant No 2007-DRP-2-S5),

funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency under the DERP grand scheme.

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