This award provides support for a portion of the work of the Arcadia project. Arcadia is a major, joint research effort, the aim of which is to gain fundamental understandings about desirable architectures for the integration of software tools into environments and particularly in support of software testing, analysis and evaluation. Arcadia is an experimental research project which aims to gain these understandings through the creation and experimental evaluation of an actual environment prototype--Arcadia-1. A key innovative feature of the approach being taken by Arcadia is to consider software processes to be items of software themselves and to view an environment as a mechanism for specifying, compiling and interpreting these processes, using software tools and software workers as interpretation primitives. Work at the university of California at Irvine on the Arcadia project will focus on the interrelated areas of software environment architectures, user interface management systems, and techniques for aiding in the development of reliable concurrent and real-time software. The architecture component is concerned with the formalization and automation of software development and maintenance activities (supporting both product-oriented and process- oriented views), principles underlying the management of persistent data objects, tool activation management (including exploitation of parallelism), and tool integration. Work in the user interface management systems area is aimed at determining appropriate abstractions and designs such that concurrency within the system is maximized, environment extensibility is effectively supported, and integration with the environment's object management system is achieved.
