Toward a methodology for designing large systems and verifying their properties

: The purpose of this report is to provide general information concerning software design methodologies to technical management personnel. In particular, the report is aimed at managers who are in the planning stages of a software development and are facing the decisions of whether to use a formal design methodology and which methodology to use. To accomplish this objective a definition of design methodology is presented, explained and illustrated. Major design philosophies are discussed and the kinds of applications which they address are described. Following this introductory information, various management perspectives on software design methodologies are presented. In general, these perspectives pertain to the current state of software design methodology development and support tools, as well as relevant application experiences. (author)

This paper presents an FPGA implementation of the front-end of a single-carrier coherent optical receiver for optical networks. The receiver is based on a number of spectral-efficient techniques, such as polarization multiplexing and 16-QAM modulation formats. The FPGA implementation was tested with received traces (time series) obtained from optical simulation for scenarios that operate with channel data rates of 112 Gb/s. Primary emphasis is given to the use of powerful high-level design tools and to efficient testing methodology for FPGA implementation.

This paper contributes toward a more formal theory and methodology for design by mathematically modeling the functional relationships between design decisions and the ultimate overall worth of a design. The conventional approach to design evaluation is limited in two respects. First, the direct measurement of attribute performance levels does not reflect the subsequentworth to the designer. Second, ad hoc methods for determining the relative importance or priority of attributes do not accurately quantify beneficial attribute tradeoffs. This information is critical to the iterative redesign process. A formal Methodology for the Evaluation of Design Alternatives (MEDA) is presented which resolves these problems and can be used to evaluate design alternatives in the iterative design/redesign process. Multiattribute utility analysis is employed to compare the overall utility or value of alternative designs as a function of the levels of several performance characteristics of a manufactured system. The evaluation function reflects the designer's preferences for sets of multiple attributes. Sensitivity analysis provides a quantitative basis for modifying a design to increase its utility to the decision-maker. Improvements in one or more areas of performance and tradeoffs between attributes which would increase desirability of a design most are identified. A case study of materials selection and design in the automotive industry is presented which illustrates the steps followed in application of the method.

A modified conjugate gradient solver for very large systems

Medical database security plays an important role in the overall security of medical information systems and networks. This is both because of the nature of this technology and its widespread use today. Database security not only involves fundamental ethical principles, but also essential prerequisites for effective medical care. The development of appropriate secure medical database design and implementation methodologies is an important research problem in the area and a necessary prerequisite for the successful development of such systems. The general framework and requirements for medical database security are given and a number of parameters of the secure medical database design and implementation problem are presented and discussed in this paper. A secure medical database development methodology is also presented which could help overcome some of the problems currently encountered.

In this paper, we mainly explore how to design and implement the user interfaces of Electricity Operation Information System based on Android. The paper extends its process as the following four aspects---requirements analysis, UI design, interaction design and programmatic implementation. In response to user actions fluidly and friendly, we add modules to handle exceptions. In the end, we give a briefly test on the system UI to ensure it run smoothly and make less mistakes. There are limited studies focusing on the flow design of UI combined with programmatic implementation. The UI design and implementation methodology has good reference at the early stage of developing an application, especially on Android platforms.

ABSTRACTThis article makes a case for a reconceptualisation of aid and development programme design. Specifically, it questions the role of the international “development expert” in the design and implementation process. We argue that by employing “design thinking” as a guiding principle, the way in which aid programmes are envisaged and delivered can be radically overhauled, resulting in dramatically improved outcomes for the users of aid. We argue that practical improvements in delivery are achievable through locally rooted, “user-driven” development solutions that originate from the beneficiaries themselves. Design thinking as applied here goes significantly further than other programme design and implementation methodologies that champion locally owned, needs-driven assistance. Furthermore, we make a case for this approach addressing wider problems within the sector, namely the perception, in some quarters, that aid is intrinsically “neo-imperialist” in design and ideologically driven.

New software design and implementation methodologies are proposed in an attempt to overcome the high failure rate of eHealth projects. These new methodologies and architectures are based on Participatory Design principles, and Model Driven Development techniques. Their possible use is explained in the context of an example application in the coordination of treatment and wellness programs for the frail aged and chronically ill in community care settings.

The MPC adventures: Experiences with the generation of VLSI design and implementation methodologies

The recent years have witnessed a variety of new embedded applications. Typical examples include mobile multimedia gadgets, digital televisions, high-end cell phones, wireless network applications, etc. The salient features of these applications include more comprehensive functionalities, higher performance demand, and low-power consumption. These requirements render the traditional single processor-based embedded systems no longer an appropriate realization for such applications. On the other hand, the continual advance of VLSI technologies enables more and more transistors to be integrated on a single chip. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicts that chips with a billion transistors are within reach. As a result, the push (application demands) and pull (VLSI technology) forces together give birth to the multi-processor system-on-chips (MPSoCs).Heterogeneous MPSoCs are different from traditional embedded systems in many aspects and they ask for new design and implementation methodologies. Heterogeneous MPSoCs are not merely a hardware design. The complexity and heterogeneity of the system significantly increase the complexity of the HW/SW partitioning problem. Meanwhile, evaluating the performance and verifying its correctness is much more difficult compared to traditional single processor-based embedded systems. Constructing a simulator to simulate the system’s behavior and evaluate its performance takes more effort compared to conventional embedded systems. The verification of the system also becomes challenging.Programming a heterogeneous MPSoC is another challenge to be faced. This problem arises simply because there are multiple programmable processing elements and since they are heterogeneous, software designer needs to have expertise on all of these processing elements and needs to take a lot of care on how to make the software running as a whole.There are a lot more issues that do not appear or easier to tackle on traditional embedded systems, trade-offs between performance and low-power will dominate the design life time. However, the incoming challenges also brought us many opportunities either to industry and academic research.

Formal methods can only gain widespread use in industrial software development if they are integrated into software development techniques, tools, and languages that are used in practice. The objective of this tutorial is to show how formal specification and deductive verification of object-oriented programs can be done within a software development platform that supports contemporary design and implementation methodologies. The KeY System (developed by the tutorial presenters) is used for demonstration purposes, which implements our approach and integrates formal methods into the commercial CASE tool Borland Together Control Center 6.2 and, alternatively, the open extensible IDE Eclipse.

Converting Existing Mediterranean Districts into Positive Energy Districts: A Design and Implementation Methodology

There is considerable interest within office automation for the creation of methodologies to describe the needs of offices and build tools to support those needs. Most of the analysis, design, and implementation methodologies, however, involve only a single type of support — the creation of tools to automate procedures found in the office. Although the procedures to be supported are generally less well structured than the procedures supported by classic data processing, the focus is still on procedures. These procedurally-oriented methodologies are likely to work extremely well in only one kind of office, which the author and Sprague have called the Type I department [10]. There is another general category of offices, Type II, that handles the firm's nonroutine information processing chores. Examples are the offices of top executives, the offices of line managers, legal departments, and engineering departments. In these offices, procedures exist, but immediately jumping from functional analysis and goals to the analysis of procedures is not likely to be helpful. First, the procedures in these offices are usually few, so their automation is not likely to bring extensive gains. Second, the strategies that Type II offices do need are likely to be professionally complex and nonprocedural. To strong a procedural focus in a methodology could blind analysts to the real needs of the office. Two studies were conducted in an attempt to test a broader analysis methodology that the author had earlier proposed to study Type II offices as well as Type I offices. While it was concluded that there were differences in Type I and Type II office support, it was found that people in both kinds of offices tended to pick mundane applications. A major goal for the future should be to find ways to help office principals articulate more visionary goals that can be made possible because of computer support. Type II offices present a major problem to designers of office methodologies. The traditional procedural analysis skills taught in systems analysis and office analysis methodologies are not likely to be central to the needs of the office. The strategies that must be designed and supported, rather, are likely to depend very heavily on the professional content of the work being done in that office. It is possible that the office analyst in the future will be less a driving force in the design of support systems than a catalyst to help users define their own needs — just as designers of decision support systems are increasily helping managers define their own data needs [13]. Critical success factors and external contribution analysis are likely to be only preludes to comprehensive methodologies to help office principals define their goals and strategies.

Finite state machine based formal methods in protocol conformance testing: from theory to implementation

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are systems which are derived from the field of neuroscience and are characterized by intensive arithmetic operations. These networks display interesting features such as parallelism, classification, optimization, adaptation, generalization and associative memories. Since the McCulloch and Pitts pioneering work (McCulloch, W.S., & Pitts, W. (1943), there has been much discussion on the topic of ANNs implementation, and a huge diversity of ANNs has been designed (C. Lindsey & T. Lindblad, 1994). The benefits of using such implementations is well discussed in a paper by R. Lippmann (Richard P. Lipmann, 1984): “The great interest of building neural networks remains in the high speed processing that can be achieved through massively parallel implementation”. In another paper Clark S. Lindsey (C.S Lindsey, Th. Lindbald, 1995) posed a real dilemma of hardware implementation: “Built a general, but probably expensive system that can be reprogrammed for several kinds of tasks like CNAPS for example? Or build a specialized chip to do one thing but very quickly, like the IBM ZISC Processor”. To overcome this dilemma, most researchers agree that an ideal solution should relay the performances obtained using specific hardware implementation and the flexibility allowed by software tools and general purpose chips. Since their commercial introduction in the mid- 1980’s, and due to the advances in the development of both of the microelectronic technology and the specific CAD tools, FPGAs devices have progressed in an evolutionary and revolutionary way. The evolution process has allowed faster and bigger FPGAs, better CAD tools and better technical support. The revolution process concerns the introduction of high performances multipliers, Microprocessors and DSP functions. This has a direct incidence to FPGA implementation of ANNs and a lot of research has been carried to investigate the use of FPGAs in ANNs implementation (Amos R. Omandi & Jagath C. rajapakse, 2006). Another attractive key feature of FPGAs is their flexibility, which can be obtained at different levels: exploitation of the programmability of FPGA, dynamic reconfiguration or run time reconfiguration (RTR), (Xilinx XAPP290, 2004) and the application of the design for reuse concept (Keating, Michael; Bricaud, Pierre, 2002). However, a big disadvantage of FPGAs is the low level hardware oriented programming model needed to fully exploit the FPGA’s potential performances. High level based VHDL synthesis tools have been proposed to bridge the gap between the high level application requirements and the low level FPGA hardware but these tools are not algorithmic or application specific. Thus, special concepts need to be developed for automatic ANN implementation before using synthesis tools. In this paper, we present a high level design methodology for ANN implementation that attempts to build a bridge between the synthesis tool and the ANN design requirements. This method offers a high flexibility in the design while achieving speed/area performances constraints. The three implementation figures of the ANN based back propagation algorithm are considered. These are the off-type implementation, the on-chip global implementation and the dynamic reconfiguration choices of the ANN. To achieve our goal, a design for reuse strategy has been applied. To validate our approach, three case studies are considered using the Virtex-II and Virtex-4 FPGA devices. A comparative study is done and new conclusions are given.