Software is the essential enabler for science and the new economy. It creates new markets and new directions for a more reliable, flexible and robust society. It empowers the exploration of our world in ever more depth. However, software often falls short of our expectations. Current software methodologies, tools, and techniques remain neither robust nor sufficiently reliable for a constantly changing and evolving market, and many promising approaches have proved to be no more than case-by-case oriented methods that are not fully automated.

This book explores new trends and theories which illuminate the direction of developments in this field, which we believe will lead to a transformation of the role of software and science integration in tomorrow's global information society.

Discussing issues ranging from research practices, techniques and methodologies, to proposing and reporting the solutions needed by global world business, it offers an opportunity for the software science community to think about where we are today and where we are going.

The book aims to capture the essence of a new state-of-the-art in software science and its supporting technology, and to identify the challenges that such a technology will have to master. It contains extensively reviewed papers presented at the 16th International Conference on New Trends in Intelligent Software Methodology Tools, and Techniques, (SoMeT_17) held in Kitakyushu, with the collaboration of Kitakyushu city and Kitakyushu University", from September 26–28, 2017.

(http://somet2017.iwate-pu.net/). This round of SoMeT_17 is celebrating the 16th anniversary. SoMeT

Previous related events that contributed to this publication are: SoMeT_02 (the Sorbonne, Paris, 2002); SoMeT_03 (Stockholm, Sweden, 2003); SoMeT_04 (Leipzig, Germany, 2004); SoMeT_05 (Tokyo, Japan, 2005); SoMeT_06 (Quebec, Canada, 2006); SoMeT_07 (Rome, Italy, 2007); SoMeT_08 (Sharjah, UAE, 2008); SoMeT_09 (Prague, Czech Republic, 2009); SoMeT_10 (Yokohama, Japan, 2010), and SoMeT_11 (Saint Petersburg, Russia), SoMeT_12 (Genoa, Italy), SoMeT_13 (Budapest, Hungary), SoMeT_14(Langkawi, Malaysia), SoMeT_15 (Naples, Italy), SoMeT_16 (Larnaca, Cyprus).

This conference brought together researchers and practitioners to share their original research results and practical development experience in software science and related new technologies.

This volume forms part of both the conference and the SoMeT series by providing an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and experiences in the field of software technology; opening up new avenues for software development, methodologies, tools, and techniques, particularly with regard to intelligent software, by applying artificial intelligence techniques in Software Development, and tackling human interaction in the development process for better high-level interface. The emphasis has been placed on human-centric software methodologies, end-user development techniques, and emotional reasoning, for an optimally harmonized performance between the design tool and the user.

The adjective “intelligent” as applied to SoMeT emphasizes the need to apply artificial intelligence principles to software design for systems application, for example, in disaster recovery, or other systems supporting civil protection and in other instances where intelligence is a requirement in system engineering.

A major goal of this has been to assemble the work of scholars from the international research community to discuss and share their research experience of new software methodologies and techniques. One of the important issues addressed is the handling of cognitive issues in software development in order to adapt it to the user's mental state. Tools and techniques related to this aspect are included among the contributions to this book. Other subjects raised at the conference were intelligent software design in software ontology and conceptual software design in practical human-centric information system applications.

The book also investigates other comparable theories and practices in software science, including emerging technologies, from their computational foundations in terms of models, methodologies, and tools. This is essential for a comprehensive overview of information systems and research projects, and to assess their practical impact on real-world software problems. This represents another milestone in mastering the new challenges of software and its promising technology addressed by the SoMeT conferences, and provides the reader with new insights, inspiration and concrete material to further the study of this new technology.

The book is a collection of carefully selected papers, refereed by the reviewing committee and covering (but not limited to):

1) Software engineering aspects of software security programs, diagnosis and maintenance

2) Static and dynamic analysis of software performance models

3) Software security aspects and networking

4) Agile software and lean methods

5) Practical artefacts of software security, software validation and diagnosis

6) Software optimization and formal methods

7) Requirement engineering and requirement elicitation

8) Software methodologies and related techniques

9) Automatic software generation, re-coding and legacy systems

10) Software quality and process assessment

11) Intelligent software systems design and evolution

12) Artificial Intelligence Techniques on Software Engineering, and Requirement Engineering

13) End-user requirement engineering, programming environment for Web applications

14) Ontology, cognitive models and philosophical aspects on software design

15) Business oriented software application models

16) Emergency Management Informatics, software methods and application for supporting Civil Protection, First Response and Disaster Recovery

17) Model Driven Development (DVD), code centric to model centric software engineering

18) Cognitive Software and human behavioral analysis in software design.

We received many high-quality submissions. Referees on the program committee carefully reviewed all submissions, and on the basis of technical soundness, relevance, originality, significance, and clarity, 65 papers were selected. They were then revised on the basis of the review reports before being accepted by the SoMeT_17 international reviewing committee. It is worth stating that there were 3 to 4 reviewers for each paper published in this book. The book is divided into 7 Chapters, each dealing with a category based on paper topics and their relevance to each chapter-related theme as follows:

CHAPTER 1 Intelligent software systems design, and software evolution techniques

CHAPTER 2 Artificial Intelligence Techniques on Software Engineering, and Requirement Engineering

CHAPTER 3 Medical Informatics and bioinformatics, Software methods and application for biomedicine and bioinformatics

CHAPTER 4 Commercial Business oriented software application models and Emergency Disaster Recovery Software Systems

CHAPTER 5 Software Engineering Models, Methodologies, Tools, Designs and Techniques

CHAPTER 6 Trends and Practices in Software Engineering Disciplines

CHAPTER 7 Modelling, Analysis and Applications of Intelligent Systems

This book is the result of a collective effort by many industrial partners and colleagues throughout the world. In particular we would like to acknowledge our gratitude for the support provided by NICT (National Institute of Communications and Technology) Japan, Kitakushu City, Kyushu University, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Iwate Prefectural University, and all those authors who contributed their invaluable support to this work. We would also like to take the opportunity to thank the SOMET2017 keynote speakers: Professor Volker Gruhn, Software Technology Universitat Duisburg - Essen, Germany, Professor Dr. Enrique Herrera-Viedma, Vice president of Research and Knowledge Transfer, University of Granada, Spain, Prof. Dr. Imre Rudas, Ex-vice President, and Professor Emeritus of Óbuda University, Hungary, and Professor Dr. Yinglin Wang, School of Information Management and Engineering at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, China. Most especially, we want to thank the reviewing committee and all those who participated in the rigorous reviewing process and the lively discussion and evaluation meetings which led to the selection of the papers which appear in this book. Last but not least, we would also like to thank the Microsoft Conference Management Tool team for their expert guidance on the use of the Microsoft CMT System as a conference-support tool during all phases of SoMeT_17.

Hamido Fujita Ali Selamat Sigeru Omatu