Rodger Burmeister, 2013

With the increasing use of the actor model in concurrent programming there is also an increased demand in precise design notations. Precise notations enable software engineers to rigorously specify and validate the non-deterministic behavior of concurrent systems. Traditional design notations are either imperative, too concrete, or do not support the actor model. In this paper, we present a new, TLA-inspired specification language called ReActor that supports a declarative style of specification and selected programming language features in combination. For ReActor a precise operational semantics is defined in terms of action interleavings. We propose ReActor to be used in abstract design specifications and as a supplement to existing design notations, especially if a sound notion of concurrent objects is required.

Rodger Burmeister, Steffen Helke, 2012

With the increasing impact of the actor-model in programming languages, there is also an increased demand for approved solutions for recurring implementation problems. Transferring established design pattern solutions from sequential contexts to concurrent ones requires a rigorous clarification of intentional requirements and concurrency issues. Existing approaches either do not verify concurrent pattern implementations rigorously or do not address the actor model. To solve these insufficiencies we (1) specify intentional requirements using LTL-expressions and an abstract outline, and (2) transfer and verify these for a concrete, actor-based TLA description using model checking techniques. The applicability of our approach is demonstrated for a concurrent version of the well known Observer Pattern. Our work enables software engineers to build up formal requirement catalogs for sequential and concurrent design pattern implementations and to rigorously verify them at a low effort.

Rodger Burmeister, Springer, 2008

Distributed aspects and parallel architectures are increasingly gaining importance today, but developing high-quality concurrent software is still more of an art than an engineering process and requires a lot of experience. The reasons for this are presented within the first part of this paper along with common strategies for addressing them. In the second part, we propose using actor models in conjunction with well-established and well-known object-oriented concepts. Putting together these two concepts – object-orientation and actors – remedies several shortcomings of classical mutual-exclusion techniques and supports the development of concurrent and distributed software in a comfortable and scalable way. In the third part of the paper, we give an overview of our current research activities, where we are developing tools to express and orchestrate concurrent test cases, in particular for testing actors and their behavior. Overall, the combination of consistent constructive and analytical actions, as proposed in this paper, relieves developers of the burden of dealing with concurrency explicitly and provides them with a basis for building high-quality concurrent software.

Stefan Jähnichen, Klaus Brieß, Rodger Burmeister, Springer, 2008

The aim of the Flying Sensors research group is to develop swarm technologies for future, high-performance space-based applications. In a swarm, a large number of autonomous spacecraft cooperate with each other to jointly perform their tasks. Combining them in different formations improves both temporal and spatial sensor coverage and allows the simultaneous combination of different instruments with different perspectives. Swarms are thus valuable for large-scale space and earth observation. Our specific objective is to develop and examine solutions for distributed disaster monitoring, traffic control and atmospheric soundings. Autonomous behaviour for each swarm element and the swarm as a whole is also a basic prerequisite for future deep-space exploration. Ground-controlled setups are mostly inadequate because the radio signals delay is too long to respond to short-term events. Having a large number of systems arranged in a redundant constellation also improves fail safety and makes services more robust (e.g. in the case of solar bursts) compared with a single spacecraft. To limit the costs of such an installation, we intend to develop a small cluster of lightweight (nano-)satellites based on commercial off-the-shelf components and release them as a secondary payload in low earth orbit.

Rodger Burmeister, Christoph Pohl, Siegfried Bublitz, Pascale Hugues, IEEE, 2006

Today's maintenance operations highly depend on access to information and team expertise from various locations. To describe and to transmit such information, different hurdles have to be taken, like providing device independent content descriptions, capability dependent adaptations, integration of various reliable I/O modalities or cumbersome environment restrictions. This paper describes an infrastructure for deploying aircraft maintenance procedures to mobile workers, including a multimodal mark-up language, a semantic framework for rich and lightweight clients, and an adaptation methodology. The presented information demonstrates an approach for integrating mobile information systems into aircraft maintenance and could be used for adapting information technology (IT) to other related mobile application domains.

Rodger Burmeister, Nataliia Sokolovska, Benedikt Fecher, Felix Melcher, 2019

Nataliia Sokolovska, Rodger Burmeister, 2019

Rodger Burmeister, Nataliia Sokolovska, 2018