NSF-CNPq Collaborative Research: Mathematical and Engineering Foundations for Interoperability via Architecture

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9900334 Meseguer, Jose GLarge software systems are increasingly complex and costly. The design, development, and maintenance of a system can be greatly helped by good documentation of its architecture, that is, of how it is structured into meaningful subsystems or components, and how those subsystems are glued together to form the overall system. A key unresolved problem is the interoperability problem, namely, how the architectural pieces and their multiple and possibly heterogeneous semantic descriptions corresponding to the different views fit together to make a coherent whole, and how these different descriptions impose constraints on each other. The main objectives of this collaborative project are (1) developing mathematical foundations for integrating and interoperating in a coherent and mathematically rigorous way diverse architectural descriptions, formal specifications, and executable prototypes of object-based distributed systems and (2) based on such foundations, developing a methodology for system design, development, and evolution that supports a seamless integration of the different formal and informal system descriptions and makes explicit the constraints that these different views of a system impose on each other. The development of mathematical foundations will be driven by substantial case studies and will begin with an in-depth study of a wide range of notations and formalisms and of their mutual relationships that seem particularly promising for describing systems at different levels. Rewriting logic will play an important role, not only as an executable specification formalism, but also as a reflective metalogical framework in which the chosen formalisms and their relations can be formalized. These formalizations can be executed using the meta tools developed in the Maude language, an implementation of rewriting logic. It is expected that these foundations and experimental methodology will advance the state of the art in software development and evolution, and will lead to new tools and methods that, when used properly, will substantially reduce the cost and effort of software development and maintenance.