A Catalytic Infrastructure for the Design, Development, and Deployment of Formal Modeling Tools

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

0429640 Mats Per Erik Heimdahl University of Minnesota-Twin Cities A Catalytic Infrastructure For the Design, Development, and Deployment of Formal Modeling Tools Modeling is crucial in software development. Unfortunately, modeling languages and tools are currently static and cannot accommodate evolving needs. This project will develop the foundation for extensible and flexible modeling-language processing tools that will allow: easy extension and modification of formal modeling notations, easy construction of high-quality translations from modeling notations to analysis tools, and controlled reuse of trustworthy tool fragments. The research hypothesis is that extensible languages defined using attribute grammars with forwarding hold the key to hyper-flexible, catalytic tools infrastructures. The hypothesis will be tested by evaluating the tools and techniques with multiple diverse modeling-languages on realistic systems. The project is innovative: it provides a radically new way of thinking about modeling-language design, execution environments, and translation as an extensible and flexible abstract syntax tree defined through attribute grammars. The results are significant; they provide an extensible infrastructure for the development, use, and evaluation of new languages and analysis tools. The impact is broad; it provides technology commercial tool vendors can use to design tools for flexibility, a common and open tools infrastructure for various research groups, and tools for teaching software engineering, formal methods, programming languages, and compilers at all levels.