Backtracking-free design planning by automatic synthesis in metaframe

Abstract

Abstract. We present an environment supporting the flexible and application-specific construction of design plans, which avoids the insurgence of unsuccessful design plans at design time, and is thus backtracking-free. During a planning phase the collection of all complete, executable design plans is automatically synthesized on the basis of simple constraint-like specifications and the library of available tools. The designer's choice of the best alternative is eased by a user friendly graphical interface and by hypertext support for the generation and management of plans, as illustrated along a user session. Example application field is the generation of design plans in a CAD environment for hardware design. MotivationTo master the complexity and variety of system-level design, flexible environments are required, which efficiently support reuse, 'design in the large' strategies and teamwork. In particular, a rich collection of design tools with different application profiles is needed to allow an application-specific treatment of complex design tasks. We focus here on a concrete application domain, and consider the functionality of CAD Frameworks. Themselves large and complex software systems, frameworks like e.g. NELSIS [17], CADLAB [10], or the Jessi CAD Framework [11] have succeeded to provide VLSI designers with sophisticated and user friendly project management wrt. data and design execution flow. As such, they are widely used, mainly to enforce standard design plans, i.e. predefined successions of activities (e.g. synthesis, verification, simulation, test pattern generation, and -at the physical design level -placement, routing, binding, etc...) which are carried out to get from a circuit specification through many successive design steps to the corresponding layout masks for physical realization on chips.CAD frameworks are good at enforcing a prescribed plan of design activities, but they still offer little support for advanced, application-specific synthesis of design plans involving a flexible use and combination of available tools. Flexibility is however increasingly needed, since projects become larger, tool functionalities

Simplicity principles for plug-in development: The jABC approach

“…Figure 3. User-defined synthesis process for the PROPHETS plug-in upon the experience previously gathered in workflow synthesis [22], [23], [24], [25].…”

Scientific workflows with the jABC framework

“…It all started in 1993 with the idea to better organise the combinatorial explosion of potential tool chains as they were implemented in the Concurrency Workbench [25] in a compositional fashion. The DaCapo and later the META-Frame Tool can be regarded as first service-oriented environments where tool building blocks could be graphically composed into workflows [77,111,121]. After an industrial project with Siemens Nixdorf in 1995/96, where this tool was applied to construct a service definition environment for value-added services that has subsequently been sold to over 30 Telecoms world-wide [19,107], the META-Frame tool was again renamed, now to Application Building Center (ABC), and later on re-implemented as the jABC tool in Java since 2003 and applied in numerous industrial and scientific projects (such as [9,10,40,52,73,95]).…”

“…Based on existing model synthesis techniques [77,112,114], it provides means for constraint-driven, synthesissupported workflow design according to its ideas. With PROPHETS, the workflow designer neither needs to model fully executable workflows (as usually necessary) nor to formally specify a synthesis or planning problem in terms of some first-order or temporal logic (as usually required in state-of-the-art planning environments).…”

Demonstration of an Automated Integrated Testing Environment for CTI Systems

“…Local properties specified imperatively are used to check that the parameters are correctly set. Global properties concerning the interactions between arbitrarily distant test blocks of a test graph are expressed in a user-friendly specification language based on the Semantic Linear-time Temporal Logic [3], and are gathered in a constraint library accessed by the environment's model checker during verification. Basic constraints have been formulated for the CTI system, e.g., if a test graph includes an action "hook-on", this must be preceded by an action "hook-off".…”