This award supports Professors Qi Lu and Berzins of the Naval Postgraduate School, plus a postdoctoral associate, for research visits to the Institute for Systems Engineering of the German National Research Center for Computer Science (GMD), where they will collaborate primarily with Dr. Bernd J. Kraemer. The objective of their proposed research collaboration is to extend the rapid prototyping language PSDL, which applies to hard, real-time systems, to include specification concepts and implementation techniques suitable for distributed applications. Several major components of the plan will be development of a semantic model supporting both prototyping and available verification techniques for distributed programs, scheduling and resource allocation issues related to prototype execution on multiple processors in the presence of resource contention, and a two level approach to prototype execution which uses both executable specifications and reusable software components. The project plan relies on partly complementary skills in language and tool design, experimentation, and theoretical analysis of the cooperating parties to reduce the use of resources in solving problems of common concern. Some of the best work in this area in the world is being done in Germany, and the U.S. senior investigators are highly regarded. Finding effective and efficient methods for determining and validating the requirements for a software system is an important unsolved problem in software engineering. Prototyping is an iterative development and evolution process that promises to produce reliable and user-accepted software. The emergence of multiprocessor systems poses new challenges to software specifica- tion, design, and validation. Correctness checking and deadlock detection become crucial because the nondeterminism and infinite behaviors commonly found in distributed programs make it impossible to test them sufficiently. The research proposed here will make a solid contribution to these problems.
