Intermediate Architectural Representation for the KBSA-ADM.

Abstract : The Knowledge-Based Software Assistant (KBSA) originally assumed automatic programming fundamental support technology. The KBSA Concept Demonstration project and the last decade of research in the Knowledge-Based Software Engineerng (KBSE) community have demonstrated that practical automatic programming is much farther away than initially anticipated. The KBSA CDS showed that a complete functional specification of a system written in a high level specification language can be effectively manipulated, evaluated, verified, and executed in a single process environment. It also showed that fully automatic transformation of such a specification into efficient target code running in a distributed computing environment is still a distant vision. Many architectural and non-functional constraints that are not expressed in current KBSA functional specifications must be taken into account in the process of constructing and implementing a system. This report describes the research to partition the specification-to-code transformation process into discrete, interactive (user-assisted) stages. Each stage introduces new architectural and non-functional constraints and produces a more complete and refined system model, with the last stage producing an efficient system implementation. This research focused on the domain of real-time, distributed systems.