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

410 Conclusions and Future Work
13.5 Future Work
To make SHE into a mature industrially applicable specification method, a lot of work
remains to be performed:
The concept of inheritance, typing and subtyping have to be incorporated into the
method consistently.
The theories of , ¡ , ¢ and Char, that were assumed to be parameters of the
semantics, have to be made explicit.
The method has to be extended with proper multicast and broadcast primitives.
The graphical models of the method have to be extended with primitives that deal
with real-time.
The possibilities of formal (real-time) verification have to be investigated. A new
(POOSL-based) language has to be developed that allows the specification of (realtime)
temporal properties and of assertions.
The possibilities of system parameter (such as performance) estimation have to be
investigated.
The current transformation system is only able to modify channels and boundaries
of specifications. In future other transformations have to be developed. Examples
are transformations that split or combine process objects, and transformations that
implement a simple channel by a collection of collaborating process objects.
A co-operative collection of software tools has to be developed. Important tools
are:
– (graphical) model editing tools supporting the different views;
– simulation tools;
– transformation tools;
– (formal) verification tools;
– synthesis tools for hardware/software implementations;
– system parameter (performance) estimation tools.
To evaluate the suitability of the method and to obtain new heuristics and guidelines,
several case studies in different fields of application have to be performed.