• Modeling and Managing Uncertainty

    Collaborators: Many
  • “The Uncertainty Interaction Problem in Self-Adaptive Systems” (Javier Camara, Javier Troya, Antonio Vallecillo, Nelly Bencomo, Radu Calinescu, Betty H.C. Cheng, David Garlan and Bradley Schmerl), Springer International Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM), vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 1277–1294, 2022.
  • "Addressing the uncertainty interaction problem in software-intensive systems: challenges and desiderata," Javier Cámara, Radu Calinescu, Betty H. C. Cheng, David Garlan, Bradley R. Schmerl, Javier Troya, Antonio Vallecillo: . MoDELS 2022: 24-30
  • “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Model-Driven Engineering for Data-Centric Systems,” (Benoit Combemale, J¨org Kienzle, Gunter Mussbacher, Hyacinth Ali, Daniel Amyot, Mojtaba Bagherzadeh, Edouard Batot, Nelly Bencomo, Benjamin Benni, Jean-Michel Bruel, Jordi Cabot, Betty H.C. Cheng , Philippe Collet, Gregor Engels , Robert Heinrich, Jean-Marc Jezequel, Anne Koziolek, Sebastien Mosser, Ralf Reussner, Houari Sahraoui, Rijul Saini, June Sallou, Serge Stinckwich, Eugene Syriani and Manuel Wimmer), IEEE Software, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 71–84, 2021.
  • “Toward Model-Driven Sustainability Evaluation,” (J¨org Kienzle, Gunter Mussbacher, Lucy Bastian, Nelly Bencomo, Jean-Michel Bruel, Benoit Combemale, Christoph Becker, Stefanie Betz, Ruzanna Chitchyan, Betty H. C. Cheng, Sonja Klingert, Richard F. Paige, Birgit Penzenstadler, Norbert Seyff, Eugene Syriani, and Colin C. Venters), Communications of the ACM (CACM), March 2020, Vol. 63 No. 3, pp. 80–91.
  • Addressing assurance of AI-based autonomous systems

    X-PLORE:Combining Model-Driven Engineering, Bio-Inspiration, and Formal Analysis to Mitigate Uncertainty in High-Assurance Software Systems.
    Collaborators: Michael Langford, Kenneth H. Chan, Sol Zilberman, Erik Fredericks, Byron DeVries, Philip McKinley, Robert Clark, Jonathan Fleck, AFRL, BBN, UMich, UVa

  • Click for Description
  • A robust computing-based system must be able to monitor its environment, adapt to changing conditions, withstand component failures and attacks , and continuously deliver acceptable and trusted behavior. However, the designer of such a system is faced with a challenging set of tasks: anticipating and characterizing conditions in which the system will operate; enabling the system to accommodate changing requirements, both functional and non-functional; and ensuring that existing and newly added functionality (possibly from third-party providers) will produce expected overall system behavior. These tasks are particularly difficult for systems that must operate safely and securely in the face of uncertainty.
    The primary objective of the X-PLORE project is to harness the power of evolutionary computing (EC) and symbolic analysis (SA) in software engineering in order to advance the field to be able to support the modeling, analysis, and mitigation of two broad categories of uncertainty in software systems. External uncertainty includes aspects of the operating environment (including adverse conditions in the physical environment and unexpected human interaction) that can lead to suboptimal, and possibly catastrophic, results as the system tries to adapt to mischaracterized conditions. Internal uncertainty includes (unwanted) feature interaction among system components as well as unexpected component behavior due to software updates and reconfiguration.
    This project will involve collaboration with other funded projects from Carnegie Mellon University, BBN, and FIU, just to name a few, working with rovers and drones.
    • Trustworthy AI

      Collaborators: Michael Langford, Kenneth Chan, Sol Zilberman, Jonathan Fleck, Robert Clar, Philip McKinley
      • “MoDALAS: addressing assurance for learning-enabled autonomous systems in the face of uncertainty,” (Michael Austin Langford, Kenneth H. Chan, Jonathon Emil Fleck, and Philip K. McKinley, Betty H.C. Cheng), Springer International Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM), 22(5): 1543-1563 (2023).
      • “A Modular and Composable Approach to Develop Trusted Artificial Intelligence,” (Michael Austin Langford and Betty H. C. Cheng), Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS 2022), pp. 121–130, September 2022, (Nominated for Best Paper).
      • “MoDALAS: Model-Driven Assurance for Learning-Enabled Autonomous Systems,” (Michael Austin Langford, Kenneth H. Chan, Jonathon Emil Fleck, and Philip K. McKinley, Betty H.C. Cheng), in Proceedings of IEEE / ACM 23rd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), full paper, October 2021.
      • “Know What You Know”: Predicting Behavior for Learning-Enabled Systems When Facing Uncertainty.” (Michael Austin Langford, Betty H. C. Cheng), IEEE Software Engineering for Adaptive self-Managing Systems (SEAMS@ICSE 2021): pp. 78-89 (Best Paper Award).
      • “Enki: A Diversity-Driven Approach to Test and Train Robust Learning-Enabled Systems” (Michael A. Langford and Betty H.C. Cheng), ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, vol. 15, no. 2 pp. 5:1–5:32, 2021.
      • “AC-ROS: Assurance Case Driven Adaptation for the Robot Operating System,” (Betty H.C. Cheng, Robert Clark, Jonathon Fleck, Michael Langford and Philip McKinley), in Proceedings of IEEE / ACM 23rd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), pp. 102–113, October 2020, Montreal, Canada.
      • “Enhancing Learning-Enabled Software Systems to Address Environmental Uncertainty” Michael Austin Langford and Betty H. C. Cheng, 16th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC), pp. 115-124, June 2019, Umea, Sweden.
      • “Applying evolution and novelty search to enhance the resilience of autonomous systems, ” Michael Austin Langford, Glen A. Simon, Philip K. McKinley, Betty H. C. Cheng, Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-managing Systems SEAMS@ICSE 2019: 63-69.
      • “An Evolutionary Approach to Discovering Execution Mode Boundaries for Adaptive Controllers,” Anthony J. Clark, Byron DeVries, Jared M. Moore, Betty H.C. Cheng, and Philip K. McKinley, in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Evolv- able Systems, held in conjunction with the 2016 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence (SSCI), pp. 1-8, Athens, Greece, December 2016, peer-reviewed full paper.
  • Automotive Cybersecurity

    Collaborators: Kenneth Chan, Nick Polanco, Tom Holt, Jay Kennedy, Pranshu Bajpai, Richard Enbody, Matt Pasco, Brad Doherty
    • “Expound: A Black-box Approach for Generating Diversity-Driven Adversarial Examples,” (Kenneth Chan and Betty H. C. Cheng), Proc. 15th IEEE Symposium on SearchBased Software Engineering, Singapore, December 2023, San Francisco, California, USA
    • “EvoAttack: An Evolutionary Search-based Adversarial Attack for Object Detection Models,” (Kenneth H. Chan and Betty H. C. Cheng), Proc. 14th IEEE Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering, Singapore, pp. 83–97, November 2022, Singapore.
    • "Situational crime prevention for automotive cybersecurity." Nick Polanco, Betty H. C. Cheng, Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2022, Companion) 2022, 562-568.
    • “Towards a Blockchain Framework for Autonomous Vehicle System Integrity,” (Kenneth H. Chan, Matthew Pasco, and Betty H.C. Cheng), Journal of Transportation Cybersecurity and Privacy Special Issue on System Safety and Cybersecurity, vol. 4, May 2021.
    • “Ransomware Targeting Automobiles.” (Pranshu Bajpai, Richard Enbody, and Betty H.C. Cheng) In Proceedings of the Second ACM Workshop on Automotive and Aerial Vehicle Security (AutoSec’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 23–29, 2020.
    • “Assuring Vehicle Update Integrity using Asymmetric Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Public Key Cryptography (PKC),” (Daniel Kent, Betty H.C. Cheng, and Joshua Siegel), 2020 escar USA Special Issue of the SAE International Journal of Transportation Cybersecurity and Privacy, Vol. 2, August, 2020.
    • “Security Patterns for Automotive Systems,” (Betty H.C. Cheng, Bradley Doherty, Nick Polanco, and Matthew Pasco), in Proc. of Workshop for Modeling for Automotive Soft- ware Engineering (MASE), co-located with Proceedings of IEEE / ACM 22nd Inter- national Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), September 2019, Munich, Germany.
    • “Automotive Cybersecurity and Situational Crime Prevention: Assessing a New Platform for Cybercrime and Malicious Hacking” (Jay P. Kennedy, Thomas J. Holt, and Betty H.C. Cheng) Journal of Crime and Justice, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 632–645, 2019.
  • Detecting N-way Feature Interactions

    Collaborators: Byron DeVries
    • “Towards the detection of partial feature interactions” Byron DeVries, Betty H. C. Cheng, Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-managing Systems SEAMS@ICSE 2019: pp. 146-152
    • “Automatic Detection of Feature Interactions Using Symbolic Analysis and Evolutionary Computation,” Byron DeVries and Betty H.C. Cheng, in Proceedings of The 18th IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security (QRS), July 2018, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 257–268.
    • “Run-time Monitoring of Self-Adaptive Systems to Detect N-way Feature Interactions and their Causes,” Byron DeVries and Betty H.C. Cheng, Proceedings of the 10th Inter- national Symposium on software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-managing Systems (SEAMS), 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 94–100 (short paper).
    • “A Toolchain for the Detection of Structural and Behavioral Latent System Properties” (Adam Jensen, Betty H.C. Cheng, Heather J. Goldsby, and Edward Nelson), Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2011), pp. 683–698, Wellington, New Zealand, October, 2011. (Nominated for Best Paper).
    • “Automatically Exploring How Uncertainty Impacts Behavior of Dynamically Adaptive Systems” (Andres J. Ramirez, Adam C. Jensen, Betty H.C. Cheng and David Knoester,), in Proceedings of 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011), pp. 568–571, November, 2011, Lawrence, Kansas.
  • Detecting Incomplete Requirements

    Collaborators: Byron DeVries, Erik M. Fredericks
    • “Analysis and Monitoring of Cyber-Physical Systems via Environmental Domain Knowledge & Modeling.” (Byron DeVries, Erik M. Fredericks, Betty H. C. Cheng), IEEE Software Engineering for Adaptive self-Managing Systems (SEAMS@ICSE 2021): pp.11-17.
    • “Using Models at Run Time to Detect Incomplete Requirements,” Byron DeVries and Betty H. C. Cheng, Workshop on Models at Run time (MART), co-located with ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2017), Austin, Texas, 2017, pp. 201-209.
    • “Automatic Detection of Incomplete Requirements Using Symbolic Analysis and Evolu- tionary Computation.” Byron DeVries, Betty H. C. Cheng, Proceedings of International Symposium on Search-based Software Engineering (SSBSE’17), 2017, Paderborn, Ger- many, pp. 49-64.
    • “Automatic Detection of Incomplete Requirements via Symbolic Analysis,” Byron DeVries, Betty H. C. Cheng, Proceedings of ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2016), St. Malo, France, pp. 385–395.
  • Assurance Cases

    • MAPE-SAC: Framework to manage the adaptation of security assurance case (SAC)

      Collaborators: Philip McKinley and Rose Gamble
      • “MAPE-SAC: A Framework to Dynamically Manage Security Assurance Cases” Sharmin Jahan, Matthew Pasco, Rose Gamble, Philip McKinley and Betty H.C. Cheng. 1st International Workshop on Self-Protecting Systems (SPS'19), pp. 146-151, June 2019, Umea, Sweden.
      • ``MAPE-K/MAPE-SAC: Interaction Framework for Adaptive Security Assurance Cases,'' Sharmin Jahan, Ian Riley, Charles Walter, Rose F. Gamble, Matthew Pasco, Betty H.C. Cheng, and Philip K. McKinley, submitted to special issue Special Issue on Self-Protecting Systems in Journal of Future Generation Computer Systems.
    • Confidence of certification of assurance cases

      Collaborators: Wuwei Shen
      • “Measuring Confidence of Assurance Cases in Safety-Critical Domains” (Chung-Ling Lin, Wuwei Shen, and Betty H.C. Cheng) (to appear in) Proceedings of 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Cybersecurity and Software Assurance Minitrack, January 7-10, 2020.
      • “Measure Confidence of Assurance Cases in Safety-Critical Domains,” Chung-Ling Lin, Wuwei Shen, Steven Drager, Betty H.C. Cheng, Proceedings of IEEE 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), (NIER track), May 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 13–16.
  • Adaptive Testing for Autonomous Systems

    Collaborators: Erik Fredericks
    • “Towards run-time adaptation of test cases for self-adaptive systems in the face of uncertainty,” (Erik M. Fredericks, Byron DeVries, and B. H. C. Cheng), in the Pro- ceedings of the 9th International Symposium on software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-managing Systems (SEAMS), 2014, pp. 17–26.
    • “Validating Code-Level Behavior of Dynamic Adaptive Systems in the Face of Uncer- tainty,” (Erik M. Fredericks, Andres J. Ramirez, and Betty H. C. Cheng), in the Pro- ceedings of International Symposium on Search-based Software Engineering (SSBSE’13), 2013, pp. 81–95, Springer.
    • “Towards run-time testing of dynamic adaptive systems,” (Erik M. Fredericks, Andres J. Ramirez, and Betty H. C. Cheng), in Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS), 2013, pp. 169-174.
  • Run-time monitoring of Autonomous Systems

    • “Run-time Monitoring of Self-Adaptive Systems to Detect N-way Feature Interactions and their Causes,” Byron DeVries and Betty H.C. Cheng, Proceedings of the 10th Inter- national Symposium on software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-managing Systems (SEAMS), 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 94–100 (short paper).
    • “Using Models at Run Time to Detect Incomplete Requirements,” Byron DeVries and Betty H. C. Cheng, Workshop on Models at Run time (MART), co-located with ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2017), Austin, Texas, 2017, pp. 201-209.
    • Automatic Derivation of Utility Functions for Monitoring Software Requirements” (An- dres J. Ramirez and Betty H.C. Cheng), Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2011), pp. 501–516, Wellington, New Zealand, October, 2011.
    • “Adaptive Monitoring of Software Requirements,” (Andres J. Ramirez, Betty H.C. Cheng, and Philip K. McKinley), In the Proceedings of First International Workshop on Requirements Engineering (RRT10), Sydney, Australia. September, 2010.
    • “Evolving Models at Run Time to Address Functional and Non-Functional Adaptation Requirements,” (Andres J. Ramirez and Betty H.C. Cheng), In the Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Models at Run Time (MaRT09), Denver, Colorado, USA, October, 2009.
  • Managing Uncertainty for Autonomous and Cyber-physical Systems

    We have several projects that address how to manage uncertainty for autonomous systems.
    • RELAX Specification Language for capturing uncertainty

      Collaborators: Jon Whittle, Jean-Michel Bruel, Nelly Bencomo, Pete Sawyer, A. Ramirez, B. DeVries
      • “AutoRELAX: Automatically RELAXing a Goal Model to Address Uncertainty” (Erik Fredericks, Byron DeVries, and Betty H.C. Cheng), Journal of Empirical Software Engineering, vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 1466–1501, 2014.
      • “RELAX: A Language to Address Uncertainty in Self-Adaptive Systems Requirements,” Jon Whittle, Pete Sawyer, Nelly Bencomo, Betty H.C. Cheng, and Jean-Michel Bruel,” Requirements Engineering Journal, Springer, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 177-196, 2010.
      • “RELAXing Claims: Coping with Uncertainty While Evaluating Assumptions at Run Time,” (Andres J. Ramirez, Betty H.C. Cheng, Nelly Bencomo, and Pete Sawyer), in Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Model Driven Engineering and Language Systems (MODELS12), pp. 53–69, Innsbruck, Austria, October 2012.
      • “A Language for Self-Adaptive System Requirements” (Jon Whittle, Pete Sawyer, Nelly Bencomo, and Betty H.C. Cheng), Proceedings for SOCCER’08: International Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing Consequences for Engineering Requirements (co-located with RE08), Barcelona, Spain, September 2008.
      • “Automatically RELAXing Goal Models to Cope with Uncertainty” (Andres J. Ramirez, Erik M. Fredericks, Adam C. Jensen, and Betty H.C. Cheng), Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Search-based Software Engineering (SSBSE’12), pp. 198– 212, Riva del Garda, Italy, September 2012.
    • Goal-based modeling of autonomous systems

      Collaborators: Jon Whittle, Nelly Bencomo, Pete Sawyer, B. DeVries
      • “Goal-Based Modeling and Analysis of Non-Functional Requirements,” Byron DeVries, Betty H. C. Cheng, in Proceedings of IEEE / ACM 22nd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), Practice and Innovation Track, September 2019, Munich, Germany.
      • “RELAXing Claims: Coping with Uncertainty While Evaluating Assumptions at Run Time,” (Andres J. Ramirez, Betty H.C. Cheng, Nelly Bencomo, and Pete Sawyer), in Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Model Driven Engineering and Language Systems (MODELS12), pp. 53–69, Innsbruck, Austria, October 2012.
      • “A Goal-Based Modeling Approach to Develop Requirements of an Adaptive System with Environmental Uncertainty” (Betty H.C. Cheng, Pete Sawyer, Nelly Bencomo, Jon Whittle), the Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MoDELS 2009), pp. 468–483, Denver, Colorado, 2009. (Full paper, 16% acceptance rate. 10 year Most Influential Paper Award)
      • “Goal-based Modeling of Dynamically Adaptive System Requirements,” (Heather J. Goldsby, Pete Sawyer, Nelly Bencomo, Betty H.C. Cheng, and Danny Hughes), Engi- neering of Computer-Based Systems (ECBS08), Ulster, Northern Ireland, April 2008 (full paper).
      • “Visualizing the Analysis of Dynamically Adaptive Systems Using i* and DSLs*,” (Pete Sawyer, Nelly Bencomo, Danny Hughes, Paul Grace, Heather J. Goldsby, and Betty H.C. Cheng), Proceedings of Second International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Visualization (REV07), New Delhi, India, October 2007.
  • Modeling for Sustainability

    Collaborators: J. Kienzle et al.

      “Towards Model-Driven Sustainability Evaluation,” (J ̈org Kienzle, Gunter Mussbacher, Lucy Bastian, Nelly Bencomo, Jean-Michel Bruel, Benoit Combemale, Christoph Becker, Stefanie Betz, Ruzanna Chitchyan, Betty H. C. Cheng, Sonja Klingert, Richard F. Paige, Birgit Penzenstadler, Norbert Sey↵, Eugene Syriani, and Colin C. Venters), Communications of the ACM (CACM) (in press).

    • “Modeling for sustainability,” Benoit Combemale, Betty H. C. Cheng, Ana Moreira, Jean-Michel Bruel, and Je↵ Gray. 2016. . In Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Modeling in Software Engineering (MiSE ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 62-66.
  • Supporting collaborative model-driven engineering for Visually-Impaired Developers

    • Collaborators: Brad Doherty and Tia Fowlkes

      We have developed a process and prototype to support 3D printing of UML diagrams and textual annotations created from commercial off- the-shelf tools, without having to redraw them in a 3D modeling tool, including text annotations that have been automatically translated to and printed in 3-D Braille. Our next step identifying technologies that support the haptic display of the 3D models on tablet-based devices, augmented with audio support for the textual information in order to address scalability issues encountered with the 3D printing of the graphical models and Braille for the textual annotations.

    • “UML Modeling for Visually-Impaired Persons,” (Brad Doherty and Betty H.C. Cheng), Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Human Factors in Modeling co- located with ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2015), Ottawa, Canada, pp. 4-10.