Discussion Seminar: Model-driven Engineering of Complex Systems

Speaker: Peter Fritzson, Linkoping University, Sweden.

When: 10:00, Thursday 6th March 2008

Venue: 78-622

Increasingly complex systems are engineered, consisting of interacting software and hardware components. How can such systems be engineered in a consistent and safe manner? Traditionally, programming languages with powerful abstractions have been suggested. Modelica, supporting acausal equations and components, is used to model increasingly complex engineering application systems. The recent Modelica 3.0 with automatic balancing of equations in each component, will probably enable modeling of an order-of-magnitude more complex systems than the previous version.

Recently software modeling approches such as MDA with UML have gained increasing popularity. Why? They offer visual programming but rather less abstraction power then conventional programming languages. Is their success in certain domains due to the fact that certain diagram types might be used as domain-specific languages?

Similar notations, e.g. Behavior trees, are proposed not only for requirement specification but also for programming? For certain application domains or in general? These constructs are to be good at transforming certain kinds of requirements to code, but seem to lack many programming abstractions found in programming languages.

Our work with ModelicaML tries to integrate software modeling with UML with physical modeling using acausal equations and hierarchical components and graphical connections in Modelica, to provide an integrated approach. Is this a good idea? (Also note recent SysML extension to UML).

About the Author: Peter Fritzson is professor at Linkoping University, Sweden, and director of PELAB - the Programming Environment Lab. He is also chairman of the Scandinavian Simulation Society, Secretary of EuroSim, vice chairman of the Modelica Association, and has published ten books/proceedings and over 170 scientific papers.

Peter is now spending a one year sabbatical at UQ, ACCS, and is interested in possible collaborations.

Hospitality: Ariel Liebman

Contact: Robert Colvin (SSE seminar co-ordinator) (robert@itee.uq.edu.au)

SSE seminar web page: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~sse/Seminars.html