Projects

In recent years there have been a number of studies in the area of behavioural detection (Zhao et al, 2010; Moskovitch et al, 2008; Filiol et al, 2008; Jacob et al, 2008), while other researchers have used different detecting techniques to identify suspicious behaviours. In addition, Singh and Lakhotia (2003) have integrated model checking with linear temporal logic to address the problem of verification of virus and worm behaviour. However, while many solutions have been proposed for the problem of detecting unknown viruses, there is a lack of research into how these can be utilised in the real world and used in antivirus products. Filiol et al (2008) claim that "behaviour-based detection has not really been implemented in antivirus software. The lack of a thorough model for such a detection [system] seems to be the reason why it [has] not [been] efficiently implemented yet". It is apparent that detecting unknown viruses is an ongoing area in computer security and that how existing techniques can be used in the real world is a matter of concern (Jacob et al, 2008). Therefore, our research will try to fill the gap by asking why behavioural detection is not used in antivirus products and by proposing a runtime verification technique based and AnaTempura.

The aims of the research are:

• To identify and detect computer viruses in terms of their behaviours.
• To identify and define the meaning of behavioural detection systems in computer security.
• To explore, propose and develop a runtime verification based framework that supports the use of behavioural detection in antivirus software.
• To produce, implement, steer and evaluate a prototype antivirus system developed using the models referred to above.

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There are two closely related research in this area. The First study is by Prof. Thomas Henzinger on the Verification of Hybrid Automata (HYTECH). HyTech is an automatic tool for the analysis of embedded systems. HyTech computes the condition under which a linear hybrid system satisfies a temporal requirement. Hybrid systems are specified as collections of automata with discrete and continuous components, and temporal requirements are verified by symbolic model checking. If the verification fails, then HyTech generates a diagnostic error trace. The Second study is by Dr. Paritosh Pandya about the Interval Duration Logic (IDL Valid). Duration Calculus is a dense time interval temporal logic with constructs which allow measurement of amount of time for which a proposition holds in a time interval. Interval Duration Logic is its variant where models are finite timed state sequences. While the validity of formulae in these logics is undecidable, for practical applicability there has been considerable interest in finding techniques and tools for validity and model checking of formulae of these logics. Above tools do a-priori verification which suffers from the state explosion problem. Using Runtime Verification avoids this problem.

The main aim of the investigation is to explore tools and formal runtime Verification of hybrid control systems. In particular, we aim to:

• Provide a Classification of Verification methods for hybrid control systems.
• Model the behaviour of hybrid systems using Duration Calculus and Interval Temporal Logic.
• Develop a runtime Verification workbench based on runtime verifier AnaTempura.

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During development of web applications, the developers are focusing on the functionality of the application and the services to attract the users to this application. Developers disregard the security aspect of web applications. Thus, the web application will be exposed to any existing vulnerabilities exploit by hackers. There are various types of vulnerability such as that one allowing SQL injection and XSS attacks.

There are many tools to detect or scan that types of vulnerability such as Acunetix web vulnerability Scanner, IBM Rational Appscan and HP Webinspect.

There are also many attempts try to protect these applications vulnerability such as, SAFELI , SQLIVs, ARDILLA vulnerability detection. In our approach will focus on SQL injection and XSS and we shall developing a novel technique of detecting and preventing these type of vulnerability.    The aim of the research is to make web applications more secure against the unauthorized access via the web application vulnerabilities. in particular:

• Provide classification of web application vulnerabilities.
• Provide a framework for detection and protection technique against vulnerabilities in web applications.
• Evaluate the result of our framework approach by using case study and compare it with other existing approaches.

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Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a new emerging network technology derived from ad hoc networks; vehicles are free to move and organise themselves arbitrarily, whilst they can exchange information between themselves and Road Side Units (RSU). This promising technology for future smart vehicle systems and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) has the potential to increase road safety. VANETs can also be used to enhance passenger comfort by providing services such as exchanging traffic information, weather information, interactive communication and offering internet access. Compared to the limited resources available in traditional ad hoc networks, vehicles can store and process large amounts of information. These data will be obtained via the vehicles sensors and may also include drivers' personal information, raising the issue of privacy. There have been concerted efforts by the research community in message encryption, digital signature, key management etc. However, many challenges especially related to privacy issues remain to unresolved. A key concern of privacy is that individuals should be able to keep and manage access to their personal information by choosing to which entities information should be disclosed in a discretionary way. In addition to access controls, there also should be provision to control the flow of private information and mechanisms that ensure that the trust in communication partners to maintain ones privacy is justified.

The key objectives are:
We will address the dissemination control and trust management problem in VANETs in order to manage trust between entities. The objective of the approach is to keep message contents private to a originator defined subset of nodes in the VANET, and to develop a data tracing mechanism that allows for the detection of trust-breaches by members of this subset. Our research will develop an architecture in which originator controlled security policies that can be exchanged together with confidential information. We will develop mechanisms by which trusted partners can incorporate information and policies into their own information system to honour the trust agreement expressed in the policy.

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The aim of the project is to explore new techniques to protect Internet services from attack and provide support for effective forensic incident response using hardware information. Hardware information can be considered a fixed point as hardware's part numbers inside the computer are difficult to tamper with. Therefore hardware information can be used in multi factor authentication to determine user identify. In addition this information can reused together with IP traffic and usage profiles to identify malicious behaviour. Usage profiles can be obtained by correlation of hardware information and user behaviour when accessing Internet services.

The key objectives are :

1. Develop a computational model for holistic Internet security in which hardware information are used.
2. Develop a novel technique for the analysis of properties /patterns of the computational model.
3. Develop approach for the modeling dynamic behaviour of users.
4. Formulate user profiles based (2, 3) and develop a new technique for analyse of Internet service security based on these profile.

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Risk analysis is an essential part in managing software system. Consequently, Performing risk analysis dynamically that anticipate change management decisions. In order to deal with risks in the software system at runtime monitoring. Whilst most current risk management works, they are analyzing risks as non-reactive system (i.e. they do analysis statically), On the other hand the artifact is usually considered as black box. This is representing as a transformational program. A transformational program is the more conventional type of program, whose role is to produce a final result at the end of a terminating computation. Furthermore, the challenges and realities in applying dynamic analysis at run time are not easy in reactive system. In particular, managing the changes of risk analysis and identify them into reactive systems. However, in reality risk analysis should carry formalize the deployment and the artifact should be considered as reactive system.

Aims and objective:

• To formalise the notion of Risk in reactive systems environment where the risk is fundamental both in system specification and requirements analysis. The formalization will be based on Interval Temporal Logic.
• To design dynamic risk management architecture together with analysis techniques based on the runtime verification system, known as Ana Tempura.
• To evaluate our technique using case studies such as medical system.

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With the revolution of the internet use and its services, and with evolving of e-learning systems with World Wide Web, teaching and learning using the internet has become a trend in modern higher educational institutes and universities all over the world these days. Currently, a wide demand for e-learning platforms is raising as the use of e-learning becomes more widespread. In order to support today's growingly personalized eLearning requirements, the next generation of e-learning needs to provide more flexibility and dynamism.

Tracking students in e-learning environments can be referred to `trace of use'. Most virtual learning environments have limited functionality to track, analyze, and report students' online learning activities as the built-in student tracking functionality is far from satisfactory. On the other hand, There are many works and research focus on instruments and methods propose for assessing of students learning style. Therefore, this led some solutions to be developed by researcher and developers to support assessments and learning process by produce tracking systems and tools to track and observe students' activities and the use of contents.

The aim of our research is to explore and establish a novel technique for real-time tracking and monitoring system. Such a tracking system will be implemented as integral part of e-learning environment.

In particular:

1. Construct a state-based formal model for tracking and monitoring in which non-terminating computations are core.
2. Establish tracking and monitoring policies and formalise them using 1.
3. Design real-time tracking architecture and algorithm based on AnaTempura.
4. Evaluate our approach on a current e-learning package.

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Aims and Objectives

Transactional memory (TM) is a hot research area and many recent works have proposed efficient implementation techniques to enhance its performance. Not much work has been done in the formal modelling and verification of Transactional memory especially those with nested transactions and contentions management. Our objective is therefore:

• To define correctness criteria for Transactional Memory
• To define a formal model for Transactional Memory
• To prove the correctness criteria of Transactional Memory using the formal model.

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Interval Temporal Logic has currently only future time operators. But it is for some systems, e.g. security systems that use history-based accces control policies, more natural to use past time operators. By adding past time operators to Interval Temporal Logic one has to redefine the executable subset Tempura. Furthermore one has to come up with a new mechanism that can execute past time operators, for future time operators one starts in the initial state and subsequently compute the next state. For past time operators one starts at the end and one computes the previous state. It is also investigated how this can be used to add backtracking to the Tempura interpreter thereby increasing the expressiveness of Tempura.

Aims and Objectives

• Add past time operators to Interval Temporal Logic.
• Define an executable subset for Interval Temporal Logic with past time operators.
• Built an interpreter for executable subset for Interval Temporal Logic with past time operators.
• Investigate realtionship between past time operators and backtracking in the interpreter to increase the executable subset of Interval temporal Logic.

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Aims and Objectives

• Classification of Computer Viruses and Worms.
• Model behaviour of Computer Viruses and Worms using Finite State Automata, State Charts and Pi-calculus based formalisms.
• Detection Framework for Computer Viruses and Worms.
• Protection Framework against Computer Viruses and Worms.

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Aims and Objectives

To examine the relationship and effect of religion, culture on computer forensics applications. Also, to examine the effect of Islam and Arabic culture on computer forensics issues (the current computer forensic workplace situation, policy and organization, education, and law) in comparison with western cultures such as in UK.

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The literature identifies several drivers for the need of national health services information security. These drivers include the improvement and promote quality of the health services. Security of the records and data helps to promote the quality of the services through safe handling and accessing the health patient's medical records. The second driver is the cost. Information security policy in national health services need to ensure against any abuse of the system. System abuse is the unauthorised, deliberate, and internally recognisable misuse of computers of any organisation's information system by individuals. Organisation management and organisation culture play an important role in the national health service information security. Knapp et al. (2006) proposed a theoretical model for determining the influence of top management on the organisation security culture and level of security policy enforcement.

None of the above research address the analyses of consistency of policies or the conformance of national health trust's organisational reality with those policies. The proposed research will address both consistency and conformance and thus fill the existing gap in the literature.

Aims and Objectives

This research aims to explore, investigate and analyse information systems security in health services. This will be done through study of:

• The current situation of information systems security.
• The role and impact of organisation culture on the information systems security.
• The identification of problems and barriers for information security systems with respect to organisational reality. The identification of changes needed to improve systems' security.
• The identification the main factors to promote information system security in health services.

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Aims and Objectives

Explore novel techniques for the management of large- scale IT Projects. In particular

• Critical analysis of current and recent large-scale projects.
• Constructing a management model for the study and the analysis of management techniques.
• Articulate management process and draw guidelines.

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Bridging the gap between business goal and its supporting IT infrastructure is challenging and it can not be closed. One of the reasons of this gap comes from the imprecision of the requirements and specifications in business language handed over to the IT. To better match the specification of requirements, a growing and promising trend in software construction advocates the encapsulation of software building blocks as features. The value of features comes from their reusability. The feature-oriented software development is a paradigm for software product lines where software can be seen as compositions of features. Previous investigations were done to bridge the gap on component-based software development in order to aid the procurement decision-making process. The Feature-Oriented software development is a promising area in which such gap could be bridged more efficiently than with component-based development. A powerful and useful model, known as K-Mediator, was presented. Such model can be seen as an architect in the procurement process which aids in decision making at an early stage of software development life cycle.

Aims and Objectives

The main aim of this investigation is to produce a new framework to bridge the gap between business and its supporting Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. The investigation will be based on feature-oriented development; in particular we aim to:

• Develop a framework within which features, their functionalities, cost and effort measurements are analysed.
• Develop a computational model for feature-oriented development.
• Provide sound operators over features.
• Modify the K-Mediator approach to adopt features-oriented development as first-class entities.
• Evaluate our approach using a case study for E-Banking.

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In view of the importance of electronic commerce (or e-commerce for short) and its direct impact on people's lives, economically and socially, many studies have been conducted in recent years to determine the factors influencing the adoption of e-commerce. These attempts to identify the adoption factors of e- commerce, taking into account the characteristics of each community; and more research in this area will help further the spread of e-commerce into other societies.

This research forms one of these studies. The objective of this research is to gain better understanding of the factors affecting the e-commerce adoption of Saudi people. It borrows from different adoption theories to build a theoretical framework proposing 19 factors that are likely to influence individuals' use of e-commerce, and then utilises two data generation methods, providing both quantitative and qualitative data, to examine and explain these factors and what could emerge during the study.

Aims and Objectives The aim of this research is to gain better understanding of the factors affecting on e-commerce adoption of Saudi people.

• Develop an adoption Model to Investigate the Factors Affecting the Adoption and Acceptance of e-commerce In Saudi Arabia.
• Build a prototype of e-shopping in Saudi Arabia for experiments.
• Practitioner government and/or organisation list of recommendations to ensure greater participation of individuals in e-commerce within Saudi Arabia.
• Present and/or publish several papers related to subject in key conferences/journals.

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The growth of technology, particularly the sharp increase of digital storage against the decrease in its cost, has reflected real challenges in crime investigation laboratories. Although a number of developments in this area have been introduced, current generation forensic tools use a technique to search based on keywords that have been taken manually from a case profile. However, this basic method has been found to have many shortcomings and limitations. For instance, it may lead to mistakes without accountability. This work introduces a new technique for automatic integration of surrounding case related evidence such as interview statements using text mining to extract all interesting words that are applicable semantically to be a basis for search and integration.

Aims and Objectives

• Developing a framework that assists in integration between normal investigators and computer technician based on keywords analysis of entities and relational activities;
• Improve the process of computer forensic analysis and the quality of interrogation.
• Reduce the chance of mistakes in creation the keywords of analysis;
• Supporting the investigators with relevant information (clues and evidence) that will assist them in investigation hypothesis;

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In e-commerce, protocols are needed to organize the communication between parties included in a transaction. E-commerce protocols should be well designed and secured to support users to use them for purchasing and selling products. Having such protocols will protect truthful users from not truthful users; and as a result a lot of people will use e-commerce systems. There are a lot of groups of protocols that can be used for fairly exchanging items between parties. These protocols are termed fair exchange protocols. A lot of existing electronic commerce (e-commerce) systems Supposed that sellers are trusted and buyers have to pay for transactions in advance of goods being delivered. Therefore a major involve of buyer is that they may suffer the loss when a seller behaves unfairly and obtains payment without sending the ordered item. Fair-exchange requires that either both parties receive each other's items or none do . The protocol applies the principle of true fair-exchange to the process of purchase and physical delivery via an ecommerce system, whilst maintaining customer and merchant anonymity.

Aims and Objectives

• Development of efficient optimistic fair exchange protocols
• Specification of the efficient optimistic fair exchange protocols
• Built in automatic dispute resolution
• Analysis of the new protocols for completeness
• A proof of concept implementation

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• To discover and design trust model in e-banking.
• To propose a framework for trust, risk and uncertainty.
• To identify trust categories.
• To identify main factors that affect trust in e-banking.

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The specification and design of "dependable" systems requires a rigorous approach within which system quality is paramount. We shall investigate fundamental issues in Software Quality and their integration within system’s requirements. In particular, we want to:

• Build a sound model for Software Quality. This will involve integrated quality measurement and a uniform approach for expressing quality requirements.
• Design a set of testable criteria for Software Quality. These criteria should be sound with respect to the above model.
• Novel technique for tracing quality through the development life cycle. We shall consider only two consecutive phases, e.g. specifications and design.
• Evaluate the above using various open source systems such as a Java library and Linux system.

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The main aims of this research are:

• To extend Job Submission Description Language to mobility based policy.
• Architecture design of mobile Grid.
• To produce a distributed policy enforcer in the presence of mobility.

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Policy-based management (PBM) can be considered as an adaptable security policy mechanism in information systems (IS) that confirm only authorized users can access information. A few decades ago, the traditional PBM has focused on a closed system, where enforcement mechanisms are trusted by system administrators who define access control policies. However, providing services to consumers or users via new technologies (e.g. active networks, mobile agents) and the use of the Internet increase the security concerns associated with today's networked environments. Most of current work on the PBM systems focuses on designing a centralized policy decision point (PDP), the component that evaluates an access request against a policy and reports the decision back, which have performance drawbacks. The performance is a major concern for applications in such military, electronic patient records (EPR) and police domains where it is desirable to increase situational awareness through collaboration and to decrease the length of the decision making cycle. The efficient distribution of enforcement mechanisms is therefore key in building large scale policy managed distributed systems.

Moving from the traditional PBM systems to history-based PBM systems aims at supporting dynamic adaptability of behavior by changing policy without recoding or stopping the system. The SANTA history-based dynamic PBM system has a formal underpinning in Interval Temporal Logic (ITL) allowing for formal authorization and verification to take place.

The project will be based on the formal policy model of SANTA to provide a high level of assurance. It will automatically distribute enforcement in the system in order to provide resilience against network attacker/failure and both correctness and efficacy of policy decision making.

The main aim of the proposed research is to address the challenge of security, performance and manageability by a novel framework. Security is the prime research issue which balance the desire to distribute systems for flexibility whilst maintaining sufficient security over their operations. Our research will propose the efficiency of security mechanisms and their resilience against network failures/ attacks in distributed information systems. Moreover, unlike other PBM systems, highly correctness policy decision making is essential. Performance, the distribution of PDPs will be based on a sound theory of refinement in which correctness is preserved to decrease the length of the decision making cycle. Finally, manageability is designing a manageable system which can be readily understood and safely managed by administrators as well as analyse to resulting in fewer security breaches due to administrative errors. The objectives of the research are:

• Providing a formal framework for the automated decomposition of dynamic security policies to accomplish high assurance safety-critical information systems.
• Improving the response time of security mechanisms and their resilience against unintentional and intentional network failures in distributed information systems.
• Develop tool prototypes using above decomposition techniques that enable administrators to manage and deploy policies for large-scale systems.

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Vast amount of information is spread over the Internet, so there is a need to control that information otherwise if the information keep growing then at one stage it would become difficult to handle the information spread over the internet. In web search today, a user types a few keywords and gets back links to web pages consisting of unstructured data. This leaves a lot to be desired for when there are structure data stores or the user includes some structural semantics in their query.

With our work we aim to allow web results to include information from structured data sources ranging from fully relational databases, to flat tables and XML files to hidden data accessible only via web forms. Additionally, we aim to automatically extract semantics associated with structure from the query and use it improve relevance of results.

Our techniques will be generalized and applicable to many domains, such as shopping, recipes, autos, real estate, travel and others.

Aims and Objectives

• To develop a new framework that will enable the use of Semantic Web in modern Search Engines so that the search engines would be able to store and retrieve data from their databases semantically.
• To develop a new Page Rank technique for prioritizing the WebPages which will be used in parallel with the existing Page Rank technique used by Current Search Engines.
• To evaluate our framework by conducting hierarchical and empirical analysis and evaluating our results with existing search engines.

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In recent years the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education has become an area of ever growing research and development interest as well as a topical application area. The emerging next generation eLearning systems will be highly adaptable, where the student modeling, domain modeling, and the use of new software architectures (especially service-oriented ones) play an important role.

The aim of the research is to develop flexible, adaptable, and collaborative multi-layered software architecture for the effective support of on-line distance eLearning. In general, the architecture has to support creation and interpretation of electronic content which can be managed in the context of three main models - domain model, student model, and pedagogical model (including the educator model as well).

The adaptability is examined in relation to users, subjects to be studied, pedagogical aims to be persuaded, types of the user devices for accessing of teaching material, etc. In the architecture the adaptability will be assisted by using different standards - for example, e-content (SCORM), user and devise profiles (CC/PP). In addition, the educational domains are modeled by means of appropriate ontologies.

Collaborative technologies have the potential to enhance the effectiveness of teamwork within and between education organizations. The roles played by the participants in a collaborative learning activity are important factors in achieving the pedagogical goals. We intend to support collaborative eLearning systems by designing and implementing of intelligent agents, which can plan and synchronize the needed learning activities.

In order to extend the architecture for enabling mobile access to the learning material we adopted the InfoStation-based networking model.

A prototype implementation of the proposed architecture for eLearning in `Software Engineering' module is developed. The application is J2EE-based, where the supporting agents are implemented by means of the JADE environment. For the development of ontologies we are using the Protege editor.

Aims and Objectives

The aim of the research is to develop flexible, adaptable, and collaborative multi-layered software architecture for the effective support of on-line distance eLearning. In general, the architecture has to support creation and interpretation of electronic content which can be managed in the context of three main models - domain model, student model, and pedagogical model (including the educator model as well).

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In the area of the higher education the integration and inter-institutional processes between different universities are intensified. They include student mobility, Combined Course Programmes development, virtual mobility and others. These integration processes are very important for the development of the united area of new collaborative education, joining the efforts of educationalists and increase of the effectiveness of the education.

Rapidly developing integration processes between universities are not supported by information systems in current use. The only technical attempts to integration educational processes support consist in creation of search sites for retrieval of information about learning programmes in different universities and development of technologies for interaction of different Learning Objects Repositories. These attempts can't cover the area of Combined Course Programmes support fully. It is proposed to use multi-agent policy-based approach for support of the inter-institutional processes in education.

During the system development Combined Course Programmes features, students' academic and virtual mobility should be considered. Flexibility and collaborative nature of multi-agent approach is utilized for effective automation of these processes. Course programmes that are produced should conform to regulations in the educational area. This is guaranteed by policy based management. Policy language should be expressive enough for representing all the necessary types of requirements to the educational processes and programmes.

Aims and Objectives

Aims and Objectives} The main goal of the project is to develop a system for the combined course programmes support in the area of higher education. This system should support integration processes in the area of higher education (student mobility, Combined Course Programmes development and virtual mobility). The system will utilize multi-agent policy-based approach.

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Nowadays information management systems for universities and education support have come to be in great demand. They are used to manage different needs of universities, because there are various processes and tasks in institutes of higher education that need infotainment.

The recent increase of joint educational programmes being introduced between two and more universities needs to have a relevant response in information management systems for universities. When educational bodies want to organize a joint course they face a problem how to design a joint course programme and to produce a course specification. To do this, they need to compare courses that they have. Nowadays this process is carried out manually. The research taken is focused on automation of the comparison of universities' educational programmes using a formal ontology-based approach.

The comparison of educational programmes is based on comparison of information about the courses extracted from programme specifications and module templates, which are the documents that contain "the definitive publicly available information on the aims, intended learning outcomes and expected learner achievements of programmes of study" (Quality Assurance Agency, UK). It is proposed to investigate on how this knowledge can be represented in the form of ontologies. A novel provable Description Logic based ontology alignment algorithm for ontologies representing Module Templates and Course Specifications of different universities should be introduced. This will enable to find correspondences and differences between similar Courses held by different Universities.

Aims and Objectives

The main aim of the research work is to investigate on automation of the comparison of educational programmes held by Universities using a formal ontology-based approach. The main objectives of the research are as follows:

• to introduce a novel semi-automated ontology-building methodology to build ontologies from Module Templates and Course Specifications;
• to introduce a novel provable Description Logic based ontology alignment algorithm for ontologies representing Course Specifications of different universities;
• to implement and validate semi-automated ontology-building methodology and ontology alignment algorithm based on Course Specifications of De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) and Bauman Moscow State Technical University (Moscow, Russia).

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We aim to explore novel techniques for policy-based QoS for Service Oriented applications (SOC).

Aims and Objectives

• Produce computational model for SOC applications where "policy" is first-class citizen.
• Explore notion of "observation" that observe behaviour of services and its associated architecture.
• Design algorithm for analysing observations that are constraint by policies.
• Build a prototype system for evaluating our models within the financial sector (consumer sector).

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a new paradigm of computing that considers a "services" as fundamental elements for developing applications/solutions. SOC has many advantages that could support IT to improve and enhance their capabilities. Web Services are example of SOC which have become in recent years more powerful and sophisticated. This leads initially to explore the "Quality" aspect of the services. Quality of Service (QoS) ascribes to many of techniques that prioritize one type of traffic or program that operates across a network connection. For example, QoS has rules to determine what priority is requested and uses these rules to specify the priority to real-time communications. These rules can be sophisticated and expressed as policies that constraint the behaviour of these services. However, the SOC, and in particular web services, services are black-boxes where behaviours may be completely determined by its interactions with other services. The main challenge here is how to guarantee and agreed QoS knowing little of services themselves. Hence we propose the design and implementation of the "behaviour of services" which constraint by QoS polices.

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Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), from the systems engineering perspective, is to improve the robustness and interoperability. Unfortunately, there is a big gap between legacy systems and ubicomp systems due to the lack of features commonly characterised in ubicomp systems. Ubicomp environments change rapidly and continuously, this necessitates the establishment of an agile approach for reengineering. An approach was proposed to support legacy systems by providing an application coordination mechanism via the tuplespace programming model. Besides, Manuel et al develop a middleware OS-Gaia, which views an ActiveSpace (framework) and its devices as analogous to a traditional OS with the resources and peripherals it manages. Futhermore, other work combines program slicing and Hypothesis-Base Concept-Assignment (HB-CA) techniques to extract higher-level executable source code. Tonella considered using formal concept analysis to organise decomposition slices. However, all current appraoches do not consider special aspects such as mobility, portability and, in particular, context-awareness. The proposal is to study a cost-effective novel approach to extracting 'just-in-need' legacy code segments with sound transformation techniques to correctly migrate them into the target system applicable in the ubicomp environments.

Aims and Objectives

The main aim of the investigation is to propose a model-based approach to reengineering applications targeting the ubiquitous computing environment. Specifically, we aim to

• analyse the technology requirements for the ubiquitous computing environment,
• develop a sound program transformation theory for the reengineering process,
• design and implement a toolset to execute the developed transformation rules, and
• evaluate our approach on various cases study targeting hand-held devices.

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