MSDL 2004 Summer Presentation Schedule

Friday 27 August 2004, McConnell 103

Hans Vangheluwe: Modelling, Simulation and Design Lab Roadmap

10:00 - 10:30

The Modelling, Simulation and Design Lab (MSDL)'s focus is on modelling and simulation based design of complex systems. The different facets of the MSDL research and how they inter-relate will be presented. This will cover some "history" (previous work), will show how current work fits into the "big picture" and will outline future research directions.

Yiyi Victoria Yang: OCL 2.0 and its Relationship to Meta-Modelling

10:30 - 11:00 (presentation [pdf])

A model in a formalism such as Entity Relationship Diagrams or UML Class Diagrams is often not complete enough to provide all the relevant aspects of a specification. Typically, there is a need to describe additional constraints. The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is an unambiguously defined language developed as a business modeling language with roots in the Syntropy method. The evolution from UML 1.x OCL to 2.0 improves the limitation of constraints, restricting only one or more values of an O-O model or system and allows expressions such as business rules to describe the model more clearly. An OCL expression can reference an element from a model (an instance of a UML metaclass). Also, elements of the UML metamodel may be adorned with OCL expressions. The UML 2.0 metamodel links these metaclasses to the metaclasses suitable to hold an OCL expression. The talk will show currently relevant work on OCL and meta-modeling.

Denis Dube: Layout in Domain-Specific Visual Modelling

11:00 - 11:30 (presentation [pdf])

Domain-Specific Visual Modelling (DSVM) enables working directly with domain concepts at a high level of abstraction. One tool for working with such models is AToM³ (A Tool for Multi-formalism Meta-Modelling), developed by the Modelling, Simulation and Design Lab, was the basis of this summer's work. Most of the visual aspects of AToM³ were refactored. The behaviour of the graphical user interface was explictly modeled (in the DCharts formalism) and AToM³ now uses code synthesized from this model. Furthermore, a better Icon-Editor, import and export capabilities, a spring-based automatic layout, a force transfer based layout, and various interactive model manipulation improvements were made.

Riandi Wiguna: Play-In/Play-Out and Live Sequence Charts

11:30 - 12:00 (presentation [pdf])

The Play-In/Play-Out Approach is a way to easily generate and test Live Sequence Charts (LCSs). LSCs model all desired system reactions, providing a complete design for the system. The basic idea is to feed both input and desired output into a Play-Engine which generates LSCs automatically. We then run the system through the Play-Engine, making sure the system satisfies our requirements.

Marc Provost: DSheet: The Designed Spreadsheet

13:30 - 14:30 (presentation [pdf])

The DSheet project aims to teach undergraduate students how to properly design a relatively complex application. Most software design examples shown to students come from a confusingly wide range of domains and cover only specific problems. The students are never exposed to the principled design and subsequent construction of a full-scale non-trivial application. The main challenge of this project was to find an application that is complex enough to demonstrate all aspects of good software design, while being simple enough to be understood by students without much prior knowledge. We think that commonly known spreadsheets fulfill this objective. We show that a spreadsheet can be divided into several small components. Each component can then be designed independently. This will allow an iterative progression through increasingly complex prototypes. It is possible to demonstrate the use of design patterns in the prototypes and the incremental development necessitates regressive testing. A document containing the complete design, expressed in UML Class Diagrams, Object Interaction Diagrams and DCharts, is available as a teaching tool. A fully tested, complete, and documented implementation of the presented design is also available. We believe that with DSheet, students will be able to understand more clearly the links between the various constructs used while designing a complex application.

Ernesto Posse: DEVSlang and DEVS Operational Semantics

14:30 - 15:30 (presentation [pdf])

DEVS is a formalism for modelling and simulating timed, discrete-event, composite, reactive and interactive systems. DEVSlang, a language to describe DEVS components, will be introduced. Some recent theoretical results about the DEVS semantics will also be discussed. In particular, a transition-system approach to the DEVS operational semantics will be presented. This approach is shown to be compositional with respect to strong bisimulation.

Jean-Sébastien Bolduc: Past and Future Work: from Quantization to Extended Time

16:00 - 16:30 (presentation [pdf])

Previous work on Quantization of Ordinary Differential Equations will be presented. The wish to explicitly model simulation experiments will lead in a natural way to the need for Extended Time. The path to Extended Time leads over Timed Finite State Automata with Variables (TFSM+V), and via OLAF.

Steven Xu: The Design of the μModelica Compiler

16:30 - 17:30 (presentation [pdf])

This presentation will cover the major design issues in the μModelica project. It includes scoping analysis, name lookup, expanding inheritance, instantiation and flattening of components, type checking, canonical transformation, causality assigment with sorting and loop detection, and code generation.

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