Composing Structures and Behaviours: a New Approach to System Design
Project leader
Dates
April 2012 to March 2015
Sponsors
Faculty of SAgE Research Fellowship
Description
This project involves the development of a new compositional approach to system design.
Modern hardware and software design methodologies are mature. They provide support for structural compositionality. They are adept at composing a large structure out of smaller sub-structures. But they have poor support for behavioural compositionality. This is required when a system’s behaviour is gradually enriched by introducing more complicated functionality built on top of an already existing skeleton.a
Such incremental behavioural extension often results in an explosion of a possible number of system states. The composition of multiple behavioural patterns adds to the problem. This makes conventional methods, such as those based on finite state machines, impractical. We will address this challenge with a novel design and synthesis methodology based on the algebra of graphs. This provides a unified mathematical language for describing both structures and behaviours. It allows their compositional development.