Applied Intelligence integrated with Software is an 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. Software, however, often falls short of our expectations, with current software methodologies, tools, and techniques still not sufficiently robust or reliable for a constantly changing and evolving market, and many promising approaches proving to be no more than case-oriented methods which are not fully automated.

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

By discussing issues ranging from research practices, techniques and methodologies, to proposing and reporting on the solutions needed for 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 21st edition of the International Conference on New Trends in Intelligent Software Methodology Tools, and Techniques, (SoMeT_22) held in Kitakyushu, with the collaboration of University of Aizu, Fukushima, Japan, from 20–22 September 2022.

(https://www.somet2022.com/) With this round of SoMeT, the conference celebrates its 21st edition. The SoMeT conference has a B ranking among other high-ranking Computer Science conferences worldwide. (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), SoMeT_17 (Kitakyushu, Japan), SoMeT_18 (Granada, Spain), SoMeT_19 (Sarawak, Malaysia), SoMeT_20 (Kitakyushu, Japan), SoMeT_2021 (Cancun, Mexico).) In 2022, the event is supported by the i-SOMET Incorporated Association, (www.i-somet.org) established by Prof. Hamido Fujita.

The 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 the conference and the SoMeT series, providing an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and experiences in the field of software technology. It opens up new avenues for software development, methodologies, tools, and techniques, especially 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 interfaces. 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 word “intelligent” in the conference’s title emphasizes the need to apply artificial intelligence issues to software design for systems application, for example, in disaster recovery and other systems supporting civil protection and in other fields where human intelligence is a requirement in system engineering.

A major goal of this book is to assemble the work of scholars from the international research community to discuss and share research experiences of new software methodologies and techniques. One of the important issues addressed is the handling of cognitive issues in software development to adapt it to the user’s mental state. Tools and techniques related to this aspect form the subject of a number of the contributions in 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 application.

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 the mastering of the new challenges of software and its promising technologies as 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 refereed papers, carefully selected 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 artifacts of software security, software validation and diagnosis

6) Software optimization and formal methods

7) Intelligent decision support systems

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 applications 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, and from these we have carefully selected the best revised articles for publication in this book. All the submissions were carefully reviewed by referees from the program committee for technical soundness, relevance, originality, significance, and clarity before the 58 papers presented here were selected. These were then revised on the basis of the review reports before being selected by the SoMeT_22 international reviewing committee. It is worth pointing out that each of the papers in this book was evaluated by three or four reviewers. The book is divided into 9 Chapters, classified based on paper topic and relevance to the chapter-related theme as follows:

CHAPTER 1. Software System with Intelligent Design

CHAPTER 2. Software Systems Security and Techniques

CHAPTER 3. Formal Techniques for System Software and Quality Assessment

CHAPTER 4. Applied Intelligence in Software

CHAPTER 5. Intelligent Decision Support Systems

CHAPTER 6. Cyber-Physical System

CHAPTER 7. Knowledge Science and Intelligent Computing

CHAPTER 8. Ontology in Data and Software

CHAPTER 9. Machine Learning in Systems Software

This book is the result of a collective effort from many industry partners and colleagues throughout the world. In particular, we would like to acknowledge our gratitude to the keynote speakers Professor Volker Gruhn, Professor Enrique Herrera-Viedma, and Professor Vincenzo Loia. We also want to take this opportunity to extend our gratitude to the University of Aizu, Fukushima Japan, for the support provided by them, and to all the authors who have contributed their invaluable support to this work. Most especially, we thank the program committee, reviewing committee and all those whose participation in the rigorous reviewing process and the lively discussion and evaluation meetings 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 the phases of SoMeT_22.

The Editors