SHF:Small: Techniques for Pruning Problem and Solution Spaces to Enable Methodical Exploration of Software Development Alternatives

软件工程师在开发过程中要做出成千上万的设计决策。这一过程仍然是人工的，容易出错，而新的研究进展往往是局部的，彼此脱节的。一个关键的原因是，流行的方法跨应用领域（例如，游戏、银行、航空电子）统一处理软件系统。不同类型的软件系统之间的差异导致一些研究人员将他们的关注点缩小到特定的领域。特定于领域的方法工作得很好，但只在领域的范围内。该项目正在开发简单但功能强大的技术，使软件工程师能够在不同的领域中扩展领域特异性的好处，并指导和支持工程师建模和分析复杂问题。该项目进一步推进了模型驱动工程（MDE）的最新进展。MDE有两个已知的缺点：(1)现有技术为应用领域生成软件建模支持，但没有分析和仿真工具；(2)实现生成仅限于特定的领域、语言和工具集。这与两个额外的缺点相结合：(3)由MDE工具集生成的建模编辑器不支持设计空间探索；(4)最优的系统部署取决于形成大量选择空间的参数。本项目针对以上四个缺点。它定义了一个具有可扩展语义的MDE平台，并自动合成用于软件系统设计、分析、仿真和生成的模型解释器。这个项目最大的预期影响在于它有可能改变软件工程师的开发方法。特别是，做出大量非关键但也不明显的决策的负担被转移到工具上，允许工程师专注于重要的事情。这提供了一个机会来改变软件工程师的培训方式，从今天的主导的一刀切的课程到更合适的领域驱动的专门化。

Software engineers make thousands of design decisions during development. That process remains manual and error-prone, while new research advances tend to be partial and disconnected from one another. A key reason is that prevailing approaches treat uniformly software systems across application domains (e.g., games, banking, avionics). The variations among different kinds of software systems have led some researchers to narrow their focus to specific domains. Domain-specific approaches work well, but only within the confines of a domain. This project is developing simple, but powerful techniques that enable software engineers to extend the benefits of domain-specificity across diverse domains, and that guide and support engineers in modeling and analyzing complex problems.The project furthers the advances to-date in model-driven engineering (MDE). MDE has two known shortcomings: (1) existing techniques generate software modeling support for an application domain, but not analysis and simulation tools; (2) implementation generation is restricted to specific domains, languages, and toolsets. This is coupled with two additional shortcomings: (3) modeling editors generated by MDE toolsets provide no support for design space exploration; (4) optimal system deployment depends on parameters that form a massive space of options. This project targets the above four shortcomings. It defines an MDE platform with extensible semantics and automatically synthesizes model interpreters for software system design, analysis, simulation, and generation. The biggest envisioned impact of this project is in its potential to change how software engineers approach development. In particular, the burden of making a possibly overwhelming number of non-critical, but also non-obvious, decisions is shifted to tools, allowing engineers to focus on things that matter. This presents an opportunity to change the way software engineers are trained, from the predominant one-size-fits-all curricula of today to the more appropriate domain-driven specializations.