ISR Seminar Series

The Institute for Software Research Presents:

Yuanfang Cai, Drexel University

Thursday, April 19 2007
11:50 am, NSH 3305 ***NOTE TIME***

Lunch will be provided
 
Title: Modularity in Design: Formal Modeling and Automated Analysis 

Abstract: 

Reasoning about the evolvability properties and economic implications
of design structures is critical to high-consequence decision-making,
but it remains difficult, in part due to the lack of formal theories
linking design structures to evolvability and economic properties, and
of automated techniques facilitating value-based decision-making.

One key impediment is the lack of analyzable high-level design
representations that both convey design architectures and enable
designers to reason precisely about their modularity properties and
economics. This talk presents such a formal and analyzable
representation. It supports formal design modeling and enables the
automation of a number of evolvability and economic-related analyses.

We model both design decisions and relevant external conditions using
an augmented form of constraint networks (ACNs). From an ACN, we
derive an intermediate, state-machine-based design space model, which
we call a design automaton (DA). To support traditional design
coupling structure analysis, we derive a pair-wise dependence relation
(PWDR) from a DA, based on which we can then derive a Design Structure
Matrix (DSM), and apply Baldwin and Clark's modularity theory (among
others). We created a divide-and-conquer approach to addressing
scalability issues in constraint solving and solution enumeration that
a DA requires.

This framework formally accounts for the key concepts of important but
informal theories, enables the derivation of pair-wise dependence
relations from formal models, enables the automation of a range of
architectural analysis methods related to evolution and economic
value, and generalizes to provide an account of both object-oriented
and aspect-oriented notions of modularity in a unified, declarative
framework.

Bio: Yuanfang Cai is an assistant professor at Drexel University. She
received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 2002 and 2006 respectively from
the University of Virginia, advised by Kevin Sullivan. Her primary
research interest is to develop design representations and automated,
quantitative analysis techniques to reason about design structure and
related outcomes early in the development process. Before she came to
the US in 2000, she was a senior software architect working for the
North China Institute of Computing Technology, one of the top computer
research institutions in China.