Zhao, Haiyan is associate professor in the School of Computer Science, and a visiting professor in National Institute of Informatics, Japan. She obtained her B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Peking University, China in 1988 and 1991, and Ph.D. from the University of requirements engineering and software product line in general, and requirements reuse and adaptation, and model-based software development, modeling techniques in particular.
Dr. Zhao has published more than 60 research papers, and most of them are published in the flagship conferences and journals in requirements engineering, modeling, and software product line, such as FSE, RE, SPLC, ICSR, MODELS, and Journal of RE, IEEE Software. She has served in the Organization Committee of multiple international conferences including RE, MODELS, RE workshop selection, AWASE, as well as the Program Committee of international conferences including ICMT, MODELSWARD, and APRES. She is serving as the reviewers for various journals including Transactions on Service Computing, Transactions on Reliability, Frontier of Computer Science, and Software & Systems Modeling.
Dr. Zhao has taken multiple research projects including NSFC, 863 project etc. Her research achievements are summarized as follows:
1) Requirement reuse and management: One critical issue in the requirement reuse is how to organize and model the requirements to make it highly customizable. She proposed a feature model centric approach to managing and reusing requirements, which adopts feature models as the centric representations to organize and manage the reusable requirements by taking advantage of the feature model’s capability of variability modeling. Concretely speaking, the framework integrates traceability and model transformation techniques together, on the basis of investigating both the structures and the modelling techniques of requirements. It encompasses 1) the structures of feature models and the mechanism for requirements family evolution; 2) the construction of traceability between feature models and other models and artefacts, such as use cases and software architecture; 3) the reuse of feature-oriented requirements through customization; and 4) the derivation of products/artefacts based on feature model configurations.
2) Requirements elicitation and modeling: One of the difficulties in requirements engineering is to capture the requirements from different stakeholders with diverse background and knowledge, and to ensure that the captured requirements objective and complete. She proposed a collaborative framework for eliciting and modelling requirements with collective intelligence, by integrating a scenario-based problem-driven requirements eliciting approach, and a graph-based model merging mechanism.
3) Software adaptation: For the software system that runs in dynamic, open, ever-changing environments, one major challenge is how to enable the software to change its behaviors and properties in response to the inevitable changes meanwhile satisfying its volatile requirements. She proposed a model-based approach to modeling software system and its running environment in a unified model to facilitate reasoning through the relationships between them; and capturing the users’ requirements in weighted goal model to enable the quantification of non-functional requirements, as well as organizing the adaptation logic and knowledge through intention rules to preserve the user’s goal during the adaptation.
