Software architecture, model driven development and fault tolerance

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Many practical and foundational problems in software engineering are essentially about representing the structure of software artifacts. Today's software intensive systems are very large and complex. They must be designed and implemented in parts that are manageable by engineers. This requires schemes for putting together parts to represent the whole. Analysis methods must be able to navigate between parts and whole to take advantage of complexity reduction in focusing on parts and then being able to "promote" the results to be applied to the whole. Structure may be imposed in at least two ways: the first is the usual hierarchical structuring typified by the part/whole relationship, a kind of vertical structuring, and the second may be seen as having various views of a whole, each representing different, but possibly overlapping, information about the whole, a kind of horizontal structuring. The main objectives for the proposed work include: (i) advancing the modelling and analysis of software architecture (a part/whole form of structuring), by undertaking the development of: (a) a new model of concurrency that distinguishes synchronisation of actions by identification and having them occur simultaneously, (b) an approach to aspects in architectural design founded on the notion of a transformation applied to an underlying architecture, and (c) a more abstract model of dynamic reconfiguration than adopted in earlier work;; (ii) developing further a component based (part/whole) modelling approach for fault tolerance and its analysis; and (iii) developing an understanding of multi modelling paradigms (which use horizontal structuring), such as those used in Model Driven Engineering, in terms of the underlying models described in various formalisms and the relationships between them, The underlying mathematical "technology" to be applied, and the concept that ties these varied objectives together into a coherent whole is the use of category theory, to represent structure, and universal constructions, to provide operations for manipulating such structures.