Due to the increasing complexity of large-scale systems themselves, and their dynamic and unpredictable deployment and operation environments, increasing attention has been given to address challenges of explicitly specifying and modeling uncertainty, and testing complex software-intensive systems under uncertain environments. Uncertainty Modeling, as one of the important aspects, aims to promote and enable explicit specifications of uncertainty and uncertainty related concepts, at various contexts, e.g., developing large-scale Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and Internet of Things (IoTs), for different purposes. Examples include enabling uncertainty-wise requirements specifications, modeling, verification and validation, e.g., facilitating the definition of uncertainty-wise testing strategies), and at different phases of the development of such complex and uncertainty-inherent systems (e.g., requirements, architecture, design, testing and operation). In this talk, I will present various works that we have done in the past to explicitly deal with uncertainty for various purposes such as requirements prioritization, modeling and analysis, and testing. Such works were driven by needs of several industrial partners from different domains. Thus, the works were applied and evaluated with the real-world industrial case studies. Finally, I will conclude the talk by presenting future directions in the area of uncertainty in software systems including how uncertainty handling is critical in future software systems based on quantum computing.

Tao Yue has received the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada in 2010. Before that, she was an aviation engineer and system engineer for seven years. She has nearly 20 years of experience of conducting industry-oriented research with a focus on Model-Based Engineering (MBE) in various application domains such as Avionics, Maritime and Energy, Communications, Automated Industry, and Healthcare in several countries including Canada, Norway, and China. Her present research area is software engineering, with specific interests in Requirements Engineering, MBE, Model-based Testing, Uncertainty-wise Testing, Uncertainty Modeling, Search-based Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, and Product Line Engineering, with a particular focus on large-scale software systems such as Cyber-Physical Systems. Dr. Yue is on the steering committee of MODELS 2018 and serves as a PC co-chair of MODELS 2019, and has been on the program and organization committees of several international conferences (e.g., MODELS, RE, SPLC). She is also on the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering. Dr. Yue is leading the standardization effort of Uncertainty Modeling at OMG and also actively participating in defining international standards in Object Management Group (OMG) such as SysML and UTP.