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Abstract-hrge grain data flow (LGDF) programming is natural and convenient for describing digital signal processing (DSP) systems, but its runtime overhead is costly in real time or cost-sensitive applications. In some situations, designers are not willing to squander computing resources for the sake of program-mer convenience. This is particularly true when the target machine is a programmable DSP chip. However, the runtime overhead inherent in most LGDF implementations is not required for most signal processing systems because such systems are mostly synchronous (in the DSP sense). Synchronous data flow (SDF) differs from traditional data flow in that the amount of data produced and consumed by a data flow node is specified a priori for each input and output. This is equivalent to specifying the relative sample rates in signal processing system. This means that the scheduling of SDF nodes need not be done at runtime, but can be done at compile time (statically), so the runtime overhead evaporates. The sample rates can all be different, which is not true of most current data-driven digital signal processing programming methodologies. Synchronous data flow is closely related to computation graphs, a special case of Petri nets. This self-contained paper develops the theory necessary to statically schedule SDF programs on single or multiple proces-sors. A class of static (compile time) scheduling algorithms is proven valid, and specific algorithms are given for scheduling SDF systems onto single or multiple processors. Index Terms-Block diagram, computation graphs, data flow digital signal processing, hard real-time systems, multiprocessing,

As software systems become more complex, the overall system structure---or software architecture---becomes a central design problem. A system's architecture provides a model of the system that suppresses implementation detail, allowing the architect to concentrate on the analyses and decisions that are most crucial to structuring the system to satisfy its requirements. Unfortunately, current representations of software architecture are informal and ad hoc. While architectural concepts are often embodied in infrastructure to support specific architectural styles and in the initial conceptualization of a system configuration, the lack of an explicit, independently-characterized architecture or architectural style significantly limits the benefits of software architectural design in current practice. In this dissertation, I show that an Architecture Description Language based on a formal, abstract model of system behavior can provide a practical means of describing and analyzing softwar...

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The emerging paradigm of electronic services promises to bring to distributed computation and services the flexibility that the web has brought to the sharing of documents. An understanding of fundamental properties of e-service composition is required in order to take full advantage of the paradigm. This paper examines proposals and standards for e-services from the perspectives of XML, data management, workflow, and process models. Key areas for study are identified, including behavioral service signatures, verification and synthesis techniques for composite services, analysis of service data manipulation commands, and XML analysis applied to service specifications. We give a sample of the relevant results and techniques in each of these areas.

An operational semantics is defined for the language of timed CSP, in terms of two relations: an evolution relation, which describes when a process becomes another simply by allowing time to pass; and a timed transition relation, which describes when a process may become another by performing an action at a particular time. It is shown how the timed behaviours used as the basis for the denotational models of the language may be extracted from the operational semantics. Finally, the failures model for timed CSP is shown to be equivalent to may-testing, and thus to trace congruence. 1 Introduction An operational semantics for a computer programming language defines the meaning of programs written in that language in terms of how a machine is intended to execute them step by step. It therefore offers a direct intuition of how program constructs are intended to behave, in contrast with denotational approaches, which often abstract away from such considerations, and with algebraic approach...

Increasingly, software should dynamically adapt its behavior at run-time in response to changing conditions in the supporting computing and communication infrastructure, and in the surrounding physical environment. In order for an adaptive program to be trusted, it is important to have mechanisms to ensure that the program functions correctly during and after adaptations. Adaptive programs are generally more difficult to specify, verify, and validate due to their high complexity. Particularly, when involving multithreaded adaptations, the program behavior is the result of the collaborative behavior of multiple threads and software components. This paper introduces an approach to create formal models for the behavior of adaptive programs. Our approach separates the adaptation behavior and nonadaptive behavior specifications of adaptive programs, making the models easier to specify and more amenable to automated analysis and visual inspection. We introduce a process to construct adaptation models, automatically generate adaptive programs from the models, and verify and validate the models. We illustrate our approach through the development of an adaptive GSM-oriented audio streaming protocol for a mobile computing application.

An increasingly important trend in the engineering of complex systems is the design of component integration standards. Such standards define rules of interaction and shared communication infrastructure that permit composition of systems out of independently-developed parts. A problem with these standards is that it is often difficult to understand exactly what they require and provide, and to analyze them in order to understand their deeper properties. In this paper we use our experience in modeling the High Level Architecture (HLA) for Distributed Simulation to show how one can capture the structured protocol inherent in an integration standard as a formal architectural model that can be analyzed to detect anomalies, race conditions, and deadlocks. KEYWORDS Component integration standards, component-based software, protocol families, software architecture, formal specification. 1 Introduction Component integration standards are becoming increasingly important for commercial sof...

An abstract semantic model based on augmented transition network (ATN) to model multimedia presentations and temporal/spatial multimedia database searching is presented in this paper. The inputs for ATNs are modeled by regular expressions. Regular expressions provide an efficient means for iconic indexing of the temporal/spatial relations of media streams and semantic objects. An ATN and its subnetworks are used to represent the appearing sequence of media streams and semantic objects. The arc label is a substring of a regular expression. In this design, a presentation is driven by a regular expression. Each subnetwork has its own regular expression. Database queries relative to text, image, and video can be answered via substring matching at subnetworks. Users have the flexibility to select any part of the presentation to watch by issuing approximate database queries. This means that ATN and its subnetwork can be included in the multimedia database systems which is controlled by a dat...

Refactoring is an essential approach toward improving the internal structure of a software system while preserving its external behavior. Traditional refactoring techniques have focused on the implementation stage, with source code as the primary artifact of the refactoring process. However, a recent trend is to apply the concepts of refactoring to higher levels of abstraction. Consequently, model refactoring is emerging as a desirable means to improve design models using behavior-preserving transformations.