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

3.7 Summary and Concluding Remarks 53
descriptions 2 . The Instance Structure Diagrams visualise this final and consistent structure.
Further details of the framework are described in Chapter 11.
3.7 Summary and Concluding Remarks
The design of a method should not be performed by combining useful features and
elements from other methods in an ad hoc way. Rather, it should be based on selecting
and coalescing compatible concepts. Concepts should be selected and assessed for their
applicability, convenience and compatibility. To check the compatibility of concepts
formal techniques should be applied, either directly or indirectly, as much as possible.
In the following three chapters we describe selected concepts, their definitions, points
of view, their interactions with other concepts and their representations. Chapter 4
describes various aspects and properties of the main concept, the object, which is the
building block for our specification models. Chapter 5 describes concepts for architecture
design, multidisciplinary views, transformations and refinement. Chapter 6 describes
the concepts to model reactive behaviour. Examples are concurrency, synchronisation,
communication, scenario and distribution. We give limited examples about the use
of concepts. The reason is that we want to establish a clear separation between the
conceptual basis of the method and its design, description and application. The latter
aspects will be described in Chapters 11 and 12.
In general, for each concept in Chapters 4,5 and 6, the following items will be described:
Definition of the concept based in the specific method context.
Alternative definitions for a more complete understanding of the concept.
Why is this concept needed and appropriate for reactive systems.
What forms and interpretations can be distinguished.
What notations and primitives have been chosen to represent or support the concept.
What is the dependence and interaction with other concepts.
What is the mapping onto concepts for low-level design and implementation.
2 Achieving consistency between models is further supported by behaviour-preserving
transformations.