1.0 Participants

Carnegie Mellon University

Faculty
David Garlan Associate Professor of Computer Science
Mary Shaw Alan J. Perlis Professor of Computer Science, Associate Dean for Professional Programs
Jeannette Wing Professor of Computer Science

Graduate Students

Shawn Butler
Craig Damon
Robert DeLine
Darrell Kindred
Robert Monroe
Robert O'Callahan
Siddhartha Puri
Bridget Spitznagel
Zhenyu Wang
Hao-Chi Wong

Visitors and Postdocs

Staff

James Ivers Project Scientist
Andrew Kompanek Research Programmer
Gregory Zelesnik Principal Research Programmer

The following are the on-going research and development activities for the Composable Software Systems group.

Research continues on the Armani software architecture design language and tools. Armani extends the ACME architecture description language with constructs for capturing architectural design expertise and design constraints. We continued to develop an Armani language reference manual, and prototype tools. We also contined to refine Armani's formal, set-theoretic semantics for architectural constraints: this semantics permits us to incorporate predicates into the type checking rules for architectures, using a PVS-style interpretation of "types as predicates over sets".

We continue to apply Wright to the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) High Level Architecture (HLA) for distributed simulation. Specifically, we extended our model of part of the architecture that concerns distributed time management.

Our Armani design rule checker was made available for limited distribution. It is currently being used as the basis for analysis of dyanamic reconfigurations of the C2 systems at UC Irvine.

We continued to upgrate our architectural design tools to work with the most recent release of Acme.

We continue our research on the next generation of the UniCon language, UniCon 2. We are currently designing the language and the next generation of tools to edit and compile descriptions in the language. UniCon 2 improvements will include improved type checking, improved support for adding connector types, evolvable specifications, support for adding component types, and improvements in multi-level definition handling.  We will also start work on developing a full architectural style for the example domain of education.

Work continues on Rob DeLine's thesis, specifically with respect to repairing packaging mismatches in architectural designs.

We continue to investigate the relationship between modules in advanced programming languages and ADLs and the application SML-mod-rec  as an "intermediate language" into which many existing ADLs can translate. SML-mod-rec has the potential to handle dynamism for ADLs too. We will build support for SML-mod-rec by extending the existing SML TIL compiler.

We continue to make progress on Ladybug, the follow-up to Nitpick written in Java.  Ladybug now fully implements bounded generation.  Work continues an an example based on the HLA.

Progress continues on Revere.  Accomplishments include the implementation of new RV logic that handles honesty and responsibility checks.  Checks additional security protocols for authentication and honesty and responsibility properties.  Drafts of five thesis chapters done

Progress on Ajax continunes.  This includes the implementation of a constraint solver which as at the heart of Java byte code analysis technique and the implemenation of a query language that will be basis of the user interface to Ajax.
 
We continue our work with analyzing security protocols.

On-going support is being provided to users and evaluators of Armani, Aesop, the ACMELib library and toolset, Lackwit, Revere, and the UniCon toolset.

The UniCon toolset has now been acquired by 275 organizations in 36 different countries.

The following represent the accomplishments and the technology transition activities accomplished by the Composable Software Systems group during the reporting period.

Our formal modeling of HLA time management in Wright and contributions to the HLA specification have led to our coauthoring a revision of HLA specification document. We have also worked with DMSO in their efforts to develop HLA as an IEEE standard.

Versions of Acme developer's toolkits, a preliminary version of Armani, and Acme tools including an Acme graphical editor were transitioned to Lockheed Martin for Demo Days 98.

The UniCon toolsuite has matured to the point where it is ready for distribution.  It was successfully transitioned to Lockheed Martin for Demo Days 98.  The graphical editor now has full editing
capability: existing descriptions can be graphically manipulated and then
saved back to text.  In addition, executable systems can be fully generated from the architectural
descriptions for every connector abstraction that we have converted from the original UniCon tool suite.  These
include local and remote procedure calls, global data access, pipes, programming language bundler,
and an ODBC database connector.

In the UniCon 2 tool suite, we have fully implemented conversions to and from ACME.

The UniCon 2 language and tool suite were presented at the EDCS Demo Days '98 Conference in Baltimore.

The UniCon 2 developers worked with Dick Creps and Paul Kogut to support their demonstration at EDCS Demo Days '98.

COLLABORATION WITH INTEGRATORS

Global Transportation Network

Worked with Dick Creps at Lockheed Martin to continue to transition CMU EDCS technology.

We transitioned UniCon 2, AcmeStudio, and Armani to Lockheed Martin for incorporation into their demonstration for EDCS Demo Days '98.

COLLABORATION WITH OTHER PROJECTS IN ARCHITECTURE CLUSTER

        Lockheed-Martin (Creps)

                    We continued to collaborate with Lockheed Martin, transitioning new
                    versions of our design tools to them for incorporation in demos and

                    pilot projects.

        David Wile (USC ISI)

                    We continued to collaborate with Dave Wile at USC ISI on application
                    of Acme to our ADLs and tools.
        Mario Barbacci (SEI)
                    We worked with Mario Barbacci and colleagues at the SEI to help them develop a
                    tool to map MetaH into Acme. This work is described in:
 

Mario R. Barbacci and C. B. Weinstock and J. M. Wing
Programming at the Processor-Memory-Switch Level
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Software Engineering
March 1998

COLLABORATION WITH PROJECTS IN HIGH ASSURANCE CLUSTER

No new progress to report.

COLLABORATION WITH PROJECTS IN DESIGN MANAGEMENT CLUSTER

No new progress to report.

COLLABORATION WITH PROJECTS IN DYNAMIC LANGUAGES CLUSTER

We met with Paul Hudak (Yale) to discuss his proposals for higher-order, polymorphic extensions to ACME.

5.0 Publications

The following are the papers that have been authored by the members of this contract during the reporting period. They have been organized into groups based on their status as submitted, accepted, or published. They represent transition of our research to the community at large.

Published
 

Spitznagel, B and Garlan, D.
Architecture-Based Performance Analysis.
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference
on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE'98), June
1998.
 

Accepted
 
Allen, R., Garlan, D., Ivers, J., Alan, R.
Formal Modeling and Analysis of Component Integration Frameworks.
Accepted for publication at Sixth International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 6).  November 1998.
 
Dingel, J., Garlan, D., Jha, Somesh, Notkin, D.
Reasoning about Implicit Invocation.
Accepted for publication at Sixth International Symposium on the Foundation of Software Engineering (FSE 6).  November 1998.

Vaziri, M., Lynch, N., Wing, J.M.
Proving the Correctness of a Controller Algorithm for the RAID Level 5 System.
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant
Computing.
June 1998.  Also published as CMU-CS-98-117, March 1998.

 

Submitted
 
Garlan, D., Wang, Zhenyu.
A Case Study in Software Architecture Interchange.
Submitted for publication May, 1998.

Wing, J.M, Ockerbloom, J.
Respectful Type Converters
Submitted to  IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
May 1998.  Also published as CMU-CS-98-130.

6.0 Travel

The following are the talks, presentations, panels, lectures, workshops, and demonstrations given by the members of this contract during the reporting period. They represent transition of our research to the community at large.
 

David Garlan:
International Conference on Software Engineering
Kyoto, Japan
April 21-24, 1998
 
David Garlan (invited talk):
An Engineering Basis for Software Architecture
MIT
May 15, 1998

David Garlan:
Workshop on the Role Of Software Architecture
in Testing and Analysis
ROSATEA-98
June 30, 1998
 
Jeannette Wing:
NSF CISE Advisory Board
Washington DC
April 28-30, 1998

Jeannette Wing:
OOPSLA Program Committee
Seattle, WA
June 7-8, 1998

Jeannette Wing:
DARPA, visit with David Tennenhouse
Washington DC
June 11, 1998

Jeannette Wing:
Model Checking and Security Protocols
Workshop associated with Logic
in Computer Science.
co-chair with Nevin Heintze.
Bloomington, Indiana
June 25, 1998

 
7.0 Miscellaneous/Administrative/Problematic Issues

None to report.

8.0 Plans For The Next Reporting Period

We plan to continue our redesign of the UniCon 2 language and toolset. Specifically, we plan to start work on developing a full style for the example domain of education.  Work on Rob DeLine's thesis will continue as planned.

Continue to apply Wright to the HLA, develop Armani language and tools, understand architectural refinement, and higher-order connectors.

We plan to revise our prototype Armani environment and preform user tests on it to evaluate its effectiveness.

We plan to continue work developing Acme-based infrastructure and tools.

We plan to continue work on Ladybug (Nitpick follow-up, including bounded generation), including:

• fine-tuning the implementation, measure its performance on benchmark examples, get it ready for public release
• writing up experience applying Ladybug to HLA specification
• finishing related Ph.D. thesis

We plan to finish work on Revere, including:

• a public release of the revere tool
• finishing related Ph.D. thesis

We plan to continue work on Ajax (Lackwit follow-up for Java), including fine tuning performance to work on large Java programs.

We plan to continue work on SML-rec-mod:

• Thesis proposal (scheduled for July 10, 1998)
• Implementation of SML-rec-mod
• Show applicability to suite of software architecture languages