Specification of Reactive Hardware/Software Systems - Electronic ...

6 Introduction
design team. Therefore, a method must support the creation of appropriate informal
descriptions. Developing a method must be based on a variety of special kinds of
knowledge. The study of concepts must be based on generalisation and classification
of phenomena, that play a role in specification and design. Further the nature and
organisation of modelling activities must be understood. This includes the way of
communicating and evaluating conceptual solutions and design ideas. We would like
to support various paradigms and approaches towards system modelling within the
same framework. The informal part must fit the formal part of the method seamlessly.
1.1.3 Final remarks
The objective to carry out research that leads to an industrially acceptable specification
method, forced us to struggle with an immense and in principle too broad area of
knowledge. There are many techniques available for design-independent software
development. Fewer are available for design-dependent system development. Complex
reactive systems have complex topologies, making their specification more difficult. By
choosing for a joint Ph.D. project we were able to work in a broader research area. The
goal is to join formal approaches with informal approaches, and to join new scientific
knowledge with design experience.
Our joined research aims at the development of:
A specification method integrating design aspects at the appropriate levels of
abstraction. The specification method is called SHE 1 [vdPVS95].
A formal specification language and an adequate set of behaviour-preserving structure
transformations. The specification language is called POOSL 2 .
1.2 Thesis Organisation
This thesis is organised into 13 chapters. A graphical chapter overview is shown in
Figure 1.1.
Introduction. In Chapter 1 the objectives of this thesis are described. This chapter
further gives an overview of the research areas involved.
On specification of reactive hardware/software systems. In Chapter 2 specification of
reactive hardware/software systems is analysed. Requirements are derived for
our new specification method SHE. Requirements are evaluated against a number
of relevant existing specification methods.
Concepts for analysis, specification and design. Chapter 3 explains the fundamental
approach we adopted for the design of our specification method. This fundamental
approach consists of analysing, selecting and combining of compatible concepts.
1 SHE is an acronym for Software/Hardware Engineering.
2 POOSL is an acronym for Parallel Object-Oriented Specification Language.