Browsing by Author "Chigani, Amine"

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    A Campus Situational Awareness and Emergency Response Management System Architecture
    Chigani, Amine (Virginia Tech, 2011-04-06)
    The history of university, college, and high school campuses is eventful with man-made tragedies ensuing a tremendous loss of life. Virginia Tech's April 16 shooting ignited the discussion about balancing openness and safety in open campus environments. Existing campus safety solutions are characterized by addressing bits and pieces of the problem. The perfect example is the recent influx in demand for Electronic Notification Systems (ENS) by many educational institutions following the tragedies at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. Installing such systems is important, as it is an essential part of an overall solution. However, without a comprehensive, innovative understanding of the requirements for an institution-wide solution that enables effective security control and efficient emergency response, the proposed solutions will always fall short. This dissertation describes an architecture for SINERGY (campuS sItuational awareNess and Emergency Response manaGement sYstem) – a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based network-centric system of systems that provides a comprehensive, institution-wide, software-based solution for balancing safety and openness on any campus environment. SINERGY architecture addresses three main capabilities: Situational awareness (SA), security control (SC), and emergency response management (ERM). A safe and open campus environment can be realized through the development of a network-centric system that enables the creation of a COP of the campus environment shared by all campus entities. Having a COP of what goes on campus at any point in time is key to enabling effective SC measures to be put in place. Finally, common SA and effective SC lay the foundation for an efficient and successful ERM in the case of a man-made tragedy. Because this research employs service orientation principles to architect SINERGY, this dissertation also addresses a critical area of research with regards to SOA; that area is SOA security. Security has become a critical concern when it comes to SOA-based network-centric systems of systems due the nature of business practices today, which emphasize dynamic sharing of information and services among independent partners. As a result, the line between internal and external organization networks and services has been blurred making it difficult to assess the security quality of SOA environments. In order to do this evaluation effectively, a hierarchy of security indicators is developed. The proposed hierarchy is incorporated in a well-established evaluation methodology to provide a structured approach for assessing the security of an SOA-based network-centric system of systems. Another area of focus in this dissertation is the architecting process. With the advent of potent network technology, software/system engineering has evolved from a traditional platform-centric focus into a network-centric paradigm where the “system of systems” perspective has been the norm. Under this paradigm, architecting has become a critical process in the life cycle of software/system engineering. The need for a structured description of the architecting process is undeniable. This dissertation fulfills that need and provides a structured description of the process of architecting a software-based network-centric system of systems. The architecting process is described using a set of goals that are specific to architecting, and the associated specific practices that enable the realization of these goals. The architecting process description presented herein is intended to guide the software/system architects.
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    File Formats, Transformation, and Migration
    Leidig, Jonathan; Alon, A. J.; Chigani, Amine; Gopalakrishnan, Mahima; Park, Sung Hee (2009-10-09)
    This module covers the principles and applications of the transformation and migration processes for the preservation of digital content, as well as key issues surrounding digital preservation strategies.
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    Guiding Network-Centrtic Architectural Design: a Style-Based Approach
    Chigani, Amine (Virginia Tech, 2007-12-12)
    With the advance of reliable network technology, software development has progressed from traditional, platform-centric software construction to network-centric software evolution. An evidence of this change is largely reflected in the technologies that are supporting the emerging theory of Network-Centric Operations (NCO). Amongst these technologies is software architecture as a software engineering sub-discipline. Although the concepts of network centricity are widely recognized within the software and system engineering communities, no unified characterization of network-centric software systems is unanimously adopted. The state-of-the-practice is characterized by differing interpretations about how we should design and implement this class of systems. In this research, our focus is twofold: 1) Providing a characterization framework to reason about network-centric software systems and 2) introducing one solution approach to designing this class of system based on a new architectural style, the network-centric architectural style. In so doing, we set the stage for the software architecture community to analyze the "fitness of use" of current architectural styles and architecture design practices within this new network-centric paradigm. In addition, we set the stage for our continued research that will address further software engineering challenges pertinent to network-centric software systems, which include capability-based requirements engineering and quality attributes-based design.