Visual Coordination Networks

Mgr. David Šafránek, Ph.D.

Doctoral thesis

Abstract:

Concerning software systems, there has been developed a huge scale of architectural formalisms, socalled Architectural Description Languages (ADL), which support formal specification and analysis of software architectures and architectural styles, e.g., Wright, UniCon, or Darwin. However, all these architectural languages lack of features suitable for abstract description of other kinds of systems such as complex synchronous or asynchronous hardware circuits. During our five years long experience of working in a team specialized on a software/hardware codesign and development of a highspeed hardware accelerated network monitoring hardware, we found it very encouraging to rise the notion of software architectural description to architectural description of a computerbased system of any kind. To this end, we decided to develop a framework of Visual Coordination Diagrams (VCN) which would make a step towards satisfaction of the above mentioned needs. In this thesis, a visual formalism Visual Coordination Networks (VCN) for description and analysis of system architectures is developed. This formalism puts together ideas of exogenous coordination models and principles of architectural description and incorporates them in order to achieve an architectural description framework suitable for description and analysis of such a scale of systems for which the family of traditional architectural description languages is insufficient. Moreover, VCN is aimed to serve as a generic coordination model, which allows modeling of a variety of coordination primitives in a single language (from asynchronous Lindalike coordination to synchronous channelbased communication). The most significant properties we are taking into account are compositionality and hierarchy, which are important factors in componentbased design.

Keywords

formal specification, architectural description, architectural compatibility, visual formalism

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 14. 12. 2006

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 15. 12. 2006
• Supervisor: prof. RNDr. Luboš Brim, CSc.

Masaryk University

Faculty of Informatics

Doctoral programme / field:
Informatics / Informatics