This part, PART IIB [2], of the document “HIGH-SPEED TOOLS FOR GLOBAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT. II. Specifications and Uses of the Transparent Query Language (TQL)” [1–6] contains the specifications for the operations that provide the arithmetic capabilities for Transparent Query Language. PART IIB references PART IIA [1] and PART IIC [3]. Concise definitions of Transparent Query Language terms, Conclusions and Acknowledgments are given in PART IIF [6].

Due to enormous pressure from national and international marketplaces, computer integrated manufacturing ( cim) has become a tremendously important area for both research and development. However, the current state of the art is still characterized by islands of automation. In order to connect these islands, appropriate frameworks have to be developed to integrate heterogeneous computer aided design ( cad) tools. We present in this paper a federated approach to tool integration in distributed and heterogeneous environments making tools evolve in an autonomous way. We have experimented this approach by integrating propel and spex cad tools in the dmms ( design management and manufacturing system) environment backed by a common pcte providing an open repository for software development. We use in our experiment an implementation of pcte 1.5 named Emeraude V12.5, product of gie emeraude repository.

Quality of product is an important consideration in engineering design activity, certain levels of which can be obtained by utilizing the available resources. Traditionally, a demand for increased levels of quality in the product required the deployment of additional resources. However, it has been reported earlier that it may be possible to increase the product quality, without increasing the resources, by improving the process [1]. Therefore, fundamental effort of this study is in the direction of improving the design process in the design level by offering a feedback tool in the evaluation of the processes called Design Process Monitoring (PROMO) [2]. The purpose of this tool is to monitor the design level activities of a process. The model can be classified as descriptive, or analytical rather than prescriptive; the goal is to study and understand the nature of the design process. In contrast, prescriptive models are for describing the processes which guide the future execution.

Computer-based Systems are used in a wide range of complex systems like automobile assembly lines, power plants, etc. These systems consist of heterogeneous subsystems having a multitude of interactions with other subsystems and environments. Designing software for such systems is a difficult task due to the inherent complexity both at conceptual and implementation levels. When developing a large system, the constituent subsystems may be developed separately. Those subsystems may work well on their own, but may fail to work together with other subsystems and fail to respond to interfacing events. This paper presents OBJ-NET, an object oriented system design tool, which provides a suitable framework for the specification and simulation of complex dynamic systems. The theoretical basis of OBJ-NET is from Category Theory and Petri Nets. OBJ-NET helps users to integrate complex systems by modeling a system as a hierarchy of components. It accepts the flow of control from one set of objects to another and simulates the flow of control among the various components of the system. This will allow a user to validate the correctedness of design and interactively change the design to refine the working of the system. This paper describes the various components of OBJ-NET in detail and illustrates the application of OBJ-NET using, as a working example, the specification and simulation of an Automotive Dashboard System.

We give a simple transformation from normal programs with no stratification (local, weak, modular, etc.) into a subclass of the locally stratified programs, called Explicitly Locally Stratified (ELS) programs, for which there are efficient evaluation techniques. One set of predicates are generated for the true tuples and a different set of predicate are generated for the true and undefined tuples. A similar transformation is given that incorporates a magic sets like transformation. Previous approaches to magic sets transformations of unstratified programs either restricted the class of sips used or generated a program that required special treatment of the magic sets predicates. Our transformation does not suffer from these flaws.

Aquarius-II is a cache coherent multiprocessor system designed for the parallel execution of Prolog programs. It contains two tiers of memory: synchronization memory and high bandwidth (HB) memory. The synchronization memory consists of snooping caches connected to a bus and is used to store rendezvous points, synchronization bits, synchronization variables such as locks and semaphores and most of the write shared data. The HB memory is used to store the bulk of the application program code and data. It contains caches and an inexpensive VLSI chip based crossbar interconnection network to memory. The caches connected to the crossbar do not have full snooping capability. The architecture is evaluated by a full simulation of parallel execution of Prolog programs on Aquarius-II. The design details of the components of the architecture and simulation results are presented. Simulation results indicate that the two tier memory system significantly reduces memory interference and speeds up synchronization when compared to a single bus multi. This shared memory multiprocesor architecture has the potential to support other parallel programming paradigms.

Most documents have a hierarchical structure, which can be made explicit by markup languages such as SGML. In this paper we propose a formal model for representation of hierarchically structured documents, to be used as the basis for document query languages. The model uses a redundant representation of the document elements to simplify the expression of common queries. As an illustration of the power of the model we show how queries might be expressed, both as set-theoretic expressions and in a simple algebra, and outline how queries might be evaluated in a practical system.

This paper describes experiences with three CMS-2 to Ada language translators. It describes the evolution of an effort whose initial goal was trial usage of a single translator, into an effort which ultimately used three translators and made some comparisons of their outputs. The following points represent key findings and conclusions from these experiences. All three of the translator tools successfully generated Ada source code. However, further evaluations would be beneficial. Translation will be useful to systems and software engineers as a part of an overall transition scheme. This paper describes experiences by personnel from the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD) and their support contractor CSC. The work was supported by the organizations that developed the translators: Computer Command and Control Company (CCCC), Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), and the Navy Command, Control, and Ocean Surveillance Center (NCCOSC) Research and Development Division (NRaD). Translator operation data were collected and reviewed to develop conclusions and recommendations for further development of CMS-2-to-Ada translation technology. Two of the translators (those from CCCC and NRaD) were installed at NSWCDD and operated by NSWCDD and CSC. The third translator was operated in its native environment at JHU/APL. All three of the translators were used to translate the same segment of operational CMS-2 code—a weapons selection function.

The process of determining user requirements for software systems is often plagued with uncertainty, ambiguity, and inconsistency. Rapid prototyping offers an iterative approach to requirements engineering that can be used to alleviate some of the problems with communication and understanding. Since the systems development process is characterized by changing requirements and assumptions, involving multiple stakeholders with often differing viewpoints, it is beneficial to capture the justifications for the decisions in the development process in a structured manner. Thisdesign rationale captured during requirements engineering can be used in conjunction with the rapid prototyping process to support various stakeholders involved in systems development. CAPS (the Computer Aided Prototyping System) has been built to help software engineers rapidly construct prototypes of proposed software systems. REMAP (Representation and MAintenance of Process knowledge) provides a conceptual model and mechanisms to represent and reason with (design) rationale knowledge. In this paper, we describe how in the context of evolving requirements, the CAPS system augmented with REMAP helps firm up software requirements through iterative negotiations via examination of executable prototypes and reasoning with design rationale knowledge.

We propose a normal form for nested relations, called NF-NR, which removes undesirable anomalies from a nested relational database schema. Both functional dependencies and multivalued dependencies are considered. NF-NR reduces to 3NF/4NF if the nested relation considered is actually a flat relation. Especially, NF-NR removes global redundancies among a set of nested relations. Two approaches to NF-NR database design, namely the restructuring rules approach and the ER approach, are discussed. We relate NF-NR to ER-NF, a normal form of ER defined earlier, by defining a simple mapping from an ERD in ER-NF to a set of nested relations in NF-NR. This approach effectively removes ambiguitics and redundancies on a semantic level and hence gives a set of nested relations with clean semantics and yet in good normal form. A set of desirable properties for any normal form for nested relations are described and an evaluation of several existing normal forms is given based on this set of properties. The evaluation shows that NF-NR improves over previously proposed normal forms in various aspects and is a more practical normal form for nested relations.