Olaf Zimmermann
Title
Dr.
Last Name
Zimmermann
First name
Olaf
Email
olaf.zimmermann@unisg.ch
6 results
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Item type:Publication, Overcoming the research-practice gap: Root cause analysis and topics of practical relevance in software architecture and distributed systemsThis instalment of “Dear Researchers” first shares my thoughts regarding reasons for the research-practice gap. It then identifies practically relevant research problems in software architecture, the architectures of distributed systems in particular, requiring enterprise application integration, remote Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and cloud-native application design.Type:journal articleJournal:Journal of Systems and SoftwareVolume:230Scopus© Citations 4 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, AI Assistance for Architectural Decision Making: Domain-Driven Context and Prompt EngineeringGenerative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is receiving a lot of focus in research and practice at present; positions vary from euphoria to "just another tool" to skepticism. Software architecture analysis, synthesis, and evaluation offer many opportunities for AI, e.g., support for knowledge-intensive tasks such as making and recording architectural decisions. It is not yet fully understood how architects can be assisted by AI effectively and efficiently: AI services have to be supervised via input specifications and output validation, requiring architecting skills and application domain expertise. In this paper, we identify architecturally significant requirements to drive the design of a future ecosystem of AI-Assisted Decision Assistance tools (AID). We apply Domain-Driven Design (DDD) to establish a logical component architecture for AID that leverages model-driven knowledge management concepts to accelerate context and prompt/skills engineering and to guard response processing.Type:conference paperJournal:Workshop on Intelligent & Data-driven Engineering for Software Architecture (IDEA-ARCH) - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Granularity Patterns for Programming Cyber-physical Systems with Business ProcessesBusiness process management (BPM) systems and corresponding notations have shown their applicability and flexibility in modeling, automating, and mining business processes in enterprise applications and service-oriented architectures for many decades. Becoming increasingly open and accessible via software-based interfaces, cyber-physical systems (CPS)--systems interacting with the physical world via sensors and actuators--benefit from BPM-based automation too, as they are inherently process-driven and software-intensive. We present four patterns discussing the choice of appropriate levels of detail (granularities) and corresponding decision forces regarding what to model in executable business processes and what to implement in traditional programming languages in CPS software. Two patterns give advice on when to model sensing in CPS at a more fine-grained or on a more coarse-grained level in business processes. Similarly, two patterns discuss these granularity choices for actuation in CPS. These four patterns guide the modeling and implementation of executable business processes that can be used for combining and automating sensing and actuation of CPS.Type:conference paperJournal:European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, People, and Practices (EuroPLoP) - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Heterogeneous Application Orchestration in Cyber-Physical Systems(Springer, 2026-06); ; Spillner, JosefCyber-physical systems (CPS) operate across a computing continuum of heterogeneous devices with varying support for execution formats such as containers, Wasm, and native binaries. While Kubernetes is the de facto orchestration standard, its container-centric model and operational overhead make it unsuitable for resource-constrained embedded devices in CPS deployments. We present an adaptive orchestration system that treats format heterogeneity as a first-class concern, enabling distributed deployment across heterogeneous CPS environments. The system selects and places components based on device capabilities and user-specified non-functional requirements (NFRs). Through a MAPE-K control loop, local device agents continuously monitor and report constraints to a central orchestrator. Upon detecting a constraint violation, the orchestrator directs the agents to locally adapt through execution format transformations, redeployments, or component suspensions. Evaluation on a distributed image processing pipeline of five microservices demonstrates deployment initialization in < 5 minutes, rapid execution format transformation in < 3 seconds, and a stable agent memory footprint of 30-40 MB even under active load. These results establish that dynamic, NFR-driven heterogeneous orchestration can be achieved with minimal overhead in resource-constrained CPS environments.Type:conference paperJournal:International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, What Will Remain Human in Software Architecture? A Focus Group Report(2026-09-24); Kohls, ChristianAI development agents are increasingly used to support and partially automate software architecture tasks. To explore how practitioners perceive this shift, specifically what changes, what remains, and what new responsibilities emerge, we conducted a focus group at the 31st European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, People, and Practices (EuroPLoP 2026). Twenty-two participants from industry and academia discussed current practices, trust and validation strategies, the boundaries of AI autonomy, governance challenges, and implications for education. Among others, we found broad consensus that architectural decision-making, accountability, and the authoring of architectural guardrails remain fundamentally human tasks. A central emergent concept was harness engineering: the discipline of building the system that governs AI-assisted system creation, comprising validation mechanisms, knowledge lay- ers, and company-specific standards. The participants agreed that criticality, understood as the combination of uncertainty and cost of change, serves as the universal criterion for calibrating human oversight. A further concern was cognitive debt: the progressive erosion of human understanding of the system when AI-assisted decisions are accepted without full intellectual engagement. In this report, we present the findings of the focus group and describe directions for future work.Type:conference paperDOI:10.48550 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Multimodal Process Monitoring with On-Demand Disambiguation(2026); ; Torres-huitzil CesarType:conference contribution