A brief history
The SIGNAL language was first designed for signal processing applications in the beginning of the 1980s. It has been proposed to answer the demand of new domain-specific language for the design of signal processing applications, adopting a dataflow and block-diagram style with array and sliding window operators. P. Le Guernic, A. Benveniste, and T. Gautier have been in charge of the language definition. The first paper on SIGNAL was published in 1982, while the first complete description of SIGNAL appeared in the PhD thesis of T. Gautier. The symbolic representation of SIGNAL via z/3z (over [-1,0,1]) has been introduced in 1986. A full compiler of SIGNAL based on the clock calculus on hierarchy of Boolean clocks, was described by L. Besnard in his PhD thesis in 1992. The clock calculus has been improved later by T. Amagbegnon with the proposition of arborescent canonical forms.
During the 1990s, the application domain of the SIGNAL language has been extended into general embedded and real-time systems. The relation-oriented specification style enabled the increasing construction of the systems, and also led to the design considering multi-clocked systems, compared to the original single-clock-based implementation of Esterel and Lustre. Moreover, the design and implementation of distributed embedded systems were also taken into account in SIGNAL. The corresponding research includes the optimization methods proposed by B. Chéron, the clustering models defined by B. Le Goff, the abstraction and separate compilation formalized by O. Maffeïs, and the implementation of distributed programs developed by P. Aubry.
The Portable Operating System Interface is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system and user-level application programming interfaces (APIs), along with command line shells and utility interfaces, for software compatibility (portability) with variants of Unix and other operating systems. POSIX is also a trademark of the IEEE. POSIX is intended to be used by both application and system developers.
In computer science, formal methods are mathematically rigorous techniques for the specification, development, analysis, and verification of software and hardware systems. The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the expectation that, as in other engineering disciplines, performing appropriate mathematical analysis can contribute to the reliability and robustness of a design.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to software engineering:
Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is a software design approach for the development of software systems. It provides a set of guidelines for the structuring of specifications, which are expressed as models. Model Driven Architecture is a kind of domain engineering, and supports model-driven engineering of software systems. It was launched by the Object Management Group (OMG) in 2001.
Formal equivalence checking process is a part of electronic design automation (EDA), commonly used during the development of digital integrated circuits, to formally prove that two representations of a circuit design exhibit exactly the same behavior.
In computer programming, dataflow programming is a programming paradigm that models a program as a directed graph of the data flowing between operations, thus implementing dataflow principles and architecture. Dataflow programming languages share some features of functional languages, and were generally developed in order to bring some functional concepts to a language more suitable for numeric processing. Some authors use the term datastream instead of dataflow to avoid confusion with dataflow computing or dataflow architecture, based on an indeterministic machine paradigm. Dataflow programming was pioneered by Jack Dennis and his graduate students at MIT in the 1960s.
Esterel is a synchronous programming language for the development of complex reactive systems. The imperative programming style of Esterel allows the simple expression of parallelism and preemption. As a consequence, it is well suited for control-dominated model designs.
A metamodel or surrogate model is a model of a model, and metamodeling is the process of generating such metamodels. Thus metamodeling or meta-modeling is the analysis, construction and development of the frames, rules, constraints, models and theories applicable and useful for modeling a predefined class of problems. As its name implies, this concept applies the notions of meta- and modeling in software engineering and systems engineering. Metamodels are of many types and have diverse applications.
A synchronous programming language is a computer programming language optimized for programming reactive systems. Computer systems can be sorted in three main classes: (1) transformational systems that take some inputs, process them, deliver their outputs, and terminate their execution; a typical example is a compiler; (2) interactive systems that interact continuously with their environment, at their own speed; a typical example is the web; and (3) reactive systems that interact continuously with their environment, at a speed imposed by the environment; a typical example is the automatic flight control system of modern airplanes. Reactive systems must therefore react to stimuli from the environment within strict time bounds. For this reason they are often also called real-time systems, and are found often in embedded systems.
Lustre is a formally defined, declarative, and synchronous dataflow programming language for programming reactive systems. It began as a research project in the early 1980s. A formal presentation of the language can be found in the 1991 Proceedings of the IEEE. In 1993 it progressed to practical, industrial use in a commercial product as the core language of the industrial environment SCADE, developed by Esterel Technologies. It is now used for critical control software in aircraft, helicopters, and nuclear power plants.
Esterel Technologies is a supplier of model-based design, validation, and code generation tools for safety-critical software and hardware applications. Esterel's tools create formal specifications that produce control designs code in software and/or hardware.
ATL is a model transformation language and toolkit developed and maintained by OBEO and AtlanMod. It was initiated by the AtlanMod team. In the field of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), ATL provides ways to produce a set of target models from a set of source models.
KM3 or Kernel Meta Meta Model is a neutral computer language to write metamodels and to define Domain Specific Languages. KM3 has been defined at INRIA and is available under the Eclipse platform.
Kermeta is a modeling and programming language for metamodel engineering.
Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) is a publicly available specification from the Object Management Group (OMG). KDM is a common intermediate representation for existing software systems and their operating environments, that defines common metadata required for deep semantic integration of Application Lifecycle Management tools. KDM was designed as the OMG's foundation for software modernization, IT portfolio management and software assurance. KDM uses OMG's Meta-Object Facility to define an XMI interchange format between tools that work with existing software as well as an abstract interface (API) for the next-generation assurance and modernization tools. KDM standardizes existing approaches to knowledge discovery in software engineering artifacts, also known as software mining.
Joseph Sifakis is a Greek-French computer scientist. He received the 2007 Turing Award, along with Edmund M. Clarke and E. Allen Emerson, for his work on model checking.
A metaCASE tool is a type of application software that provides the possibility to create one or more modeling methods, languages or notations for use within the process of software development. Often the result is a modeling tool for that language. MetaCASE tools are thus a kind of language workbench, generally considered as being focused on graphical modeling languages.
The Clock Constraint Specification Language or CCSL, is a software language for modeling relations among so-called clocks. It is part of the time model defined in the UML Profile for MARTE.
The SARL programming language is a modular agent-oriented programming language. It aims at providing the fundamental abstractions for dealing with concurrency, distribution, interaction, decentralization, reactivity, autonomy and dynamic reconfiguration.
A language workbench is a tool or set of tools that enables software development in the language-oriented programming software development paradigm. A language workbench will typically include tools to support the definition, reuse and composition of domain-specific languages together with their integrated development environment. Language workbenches were introduced and popularized by Martin Fowler in 2005.
