Walter Mann

Specification and analysis of system architecture using Rapide

Rapide is an event-based, concurrent, object-oriented language specifically designed for prototyping system architectures. Two principle design goals are: (1) to provide constructs for defining executable prototypes of architectures and (2) to adopt an execution model in which the concurrency, synchronization, dataflow, and timing properties of a prototype are explicitly represented. This paper describes the partially ordered event set (poset) execution model and outlines with examples some of the event-based features for defining communication architectures and relationships between architectures. Various features of Rapide are illustrated by excerpts from a prototype of the X/Open distributed transaction processing reference architecture. >

Event Mining with Event Processing Networks

Event Mining discovers information in a stream of data, or events, and delivers knowledge in real-time. Our event processing engine consists of a network of event processing agents (EPAs) running in parallel that interact using a dedicated event processing infrastructure. EPAs can be configured at run-time using a formal pattern language. The underlying infrastructure provides an abstract communication mechanism and thus allows dynamic reconfiguration of the communication topology between agents at run-time and provides transparent, location-independent access to all data. These features support dynamic allocation of EPAs to machines in a local area network at run time.

Inferred designs

To meet the needs of rapid software evolution, the authors introduce models and tools for a new methodology: inferred designs.

A methodology for formal specification and implementation of Ada packages

The authors present a methodology for formal specification and prototype implementation of Ada packages using the Anna specification language. Given the formal specification of a package resulting from the methodology for package specifications, the methodology allows implementors of packages to follow a few simple steps to implement the package. The implementation is meant to be a prototype. This methodology for specification and implementation is applicable to most Ada packages. Limitations of this approach are pointed out, and software tools which help the process of specification and implementation are presented.<<ETX>>