CRII: SHF: Leveraging Synthesis for Dynamic Design Space Analysis

University Of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln NE

Investigators

Abstract

Designing large, complex systems that demand certain functional and quality of service (QoS) objectives remains a significant engineering problem. Design space exploration and tradeoff analysis can play a pivotal role by revealing designs that human designers might miss, illuminating sensible and nonsensical tradeoffs, and helping decision-makers to balance tradeoffs that design decisions impose on diverse stakeholders. Despite its importance, systematic tradeoff design space analysis is perhaps one of the most elusive activities in the design of complex systems, as the cost, effort, and discipline needed to conduct tradespace analysis can be extremely high. This research devises a suite of fully automated techniques to foster systematic analysis of design tradeoff spaces of software systems. By making tradespace analysis of complex software designs less expensive to conduct and more scalable, this project enables the vibrant software industry to improve the quality of its products. The research project contains both analytical and empirical components. The analytical approaches involve developing models and algorithms that can discover design alternatives via automatically synthesizing spaces of design solutions from designers' high-level inputs, comparatively analyze such design spaces via automatically subjecting each design alternative to the execution of diverse evaluation operations, and facilitate support for design space evolution through leveraging a variety of optimization mechanisms. The empirical evaluation component contains conducting experiments in multiple steps: controlled experiments by means of test beds and experiments in the context of real-world systems. The project advances the state-of-the-art by making synthesis-driven software design more scalable and cost effective. The principles resulting from this research will help expand our understanding of the application domains and settings in which synthesis-based approach to design tradeoff space analysis can be practically used.