Reusable Engineering Software Components: Interface Issues

这项研究的目标是通过开发相关的方法、符号和工具来促进工程软件组件和系统的集成和重用。随着对多学科分析和模拟、面向施工的设计和制造以及分析、设计和决策支持工具的集成的需求日益增长，需要这些能力才能在工程和建筑市场保持竞争力。为了实现集成和重用，软件组件必须通过它们的功能属性来表征，即对它们所提供的服务的描述。否则，人们只能检查程序文本本身，尝试描述其行为，并尝试将各个部分组合在一起。即使是面向对象的语言也不足以促进集成，因为它们不能用来说明组件的功能，只能用来说明它是如何实现的。功能属性的声明性描述提供了描述复杂软件组件和系统的交互的可能性，从而使软件集成和重用成为可能。这项研究将开发用于指定工程软件组件的形式化符号，并通过开发可重用规范手册来应用它们。通过使用形式化方法，得到的规范独立于特定的编程语言，并且可以使用普通数学来处理和组合。

The objective of this research is to promote the integration and reuse of engineering software components and systems by developing pertinent approaches, notations, and tools. Such capabilities are needed to remain competitive in the engineering and construction marketplace with the growing need for multi-disciplinary analyses and simulations, design-for- construction and -manufacturing, and the integration of analysis, design, and decision-support tools. To enable integration and reuse, software components must be characterized by their functional properties, i.e., a description of the services they provide. Otherwise, one can only examine the program text itself, attempt to characterize its behavior, and try putting the pieces together. Even object-oriented languages are inadequate for promoting integration since they cannot be used to state what a component does, only how it is implemented. Declarative descriptions of functional properties offer the potential to characterize the interaction of complex software components and systems, thus enabling software integration and reuse. This study will develop formal notations for specifying engineering software components, and apply them by developing a handbook of reusable specifications. By using formal methods, the resulting specifications are independent of a particular programming language and may be manipulated and combined using ordinary mathematics.