Design Locality

1
2007 Science of Design (SoD) PI Meeting Project
Nuggets
Key IdeaDesign for Verifiability Analyze small
subsystems
Key ChallengeState explosion Cannot be analyzed
efficiently
(e.g., pairs of components)

• Project Description and Outcomes
• Goal(s) of the project The project's objective
  is to develop a design methodology for building a
  large complex component-based software systems so
  that verification is tractable. The central idea
  is design locality synthesis, verification and
  analysis are applied to small subsystems local
  properties are verified for subsystems in
  isolation and then combined to deduce global
  properties. We are applying our method to three
  ambitious case studies an elevator system (a
  canonical Software Engineering problem),
  composition of aspect mechanisms, and composition
  of components in the SCIRun scientific
  computation software.
• This work is notable because (potential
  contributions to the Science of Design) Other
  mechanical methods for reasoning about behavior
  (of finite state systems) generally rely on
  exhaustive state-space search to generate all the
  possible behaviors, and thus susceptible to state
  explosion. This project develops a novel mixed
  methodology top-down for design, bottom-up for
  analysis and verification, that avoids state
  explosion. The method is backed up by theory, and
  evaluated in practice.
• Progress so far
• CBSE 06 Behavioral compatibility without state
  explosion a case study in designing a
  componentized elevator control system. This paper
  presents the pairwise method of verification,
  which is a central idea in the work supported by
  the project.
• OOPSLA 05 Pluggable AOP Designing Aspect
  Mechanisms for Third-party Composition . This
  paper presents design guidelines for a
  disciplined composition of aspect mechanisms.
• ICSE 06 Modeling Aspect Mechanisms A Top-Down
  Approach. This paper presents an abstract model
  for aspect mechanisms.
• ICSE 07 Identifying Feature Interactions in
  Multi-Language Aspect-Oriented Frameworks. This
  paper characterizes a set of properties and
  typical interactions that need to be verified in
  composition of aspect mechanisms.
• ACM Transactions on Computation Logic (in
  submission) On the refinement of liveness
  properties of distributed systems. This paper
  presents a method for proving that the behavior
  of an implementation is correct with respect to
  the liveness properties given by a specification.