Analyzing Reconfigurable Systems Using Attribute Grammars

Abstract:

Reconfigurable systems have pervaded many fields of computing and are
becoming more and more important. To make them amenable to systematic
design and analysis methods, formal modeling languages are required. One
such language is AADL (Architecture Analysis and Design Language), which
is gaining widespread acceptance in automobile, avionics and aerospace
industries for comprehensively modeling safety-critical distributed
systems by capturing functional, probabilistic and hybrid aspects. In
particular, AADL supports the specification of dynamic reconfiguration
of systems in the form of mode transitions which (de-)activate
components and their communication connections. However it turns out
that one has to use this mechanism carefully as it can give rise to
cyclic dependencies between communication ports, which are forbidden.

In this talk we show that the problem of cyclic data port dependencies
in AADL specifications is closely related to the circularity problem in
attribute grammars, a  well-known formalism for describing
syntax-directed translations such as the semantic analysis or code
generation in compilers for programming languages. Exploiting this
relation, we are able to reuse existing circularity tests for analyzing
AADL specifications.