The Conceptual-Level Approach to Complex System Design
David Lidsky
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
UC Berkeley
October 31, 1996
Hogan Room, 531 Cory Hall
4:00-5:00 p.m.
Abstract:
The increasing complexity and heterogeneity of current day systems
makes early design trade-offs and analysis a necessity. Typically such design
exploration is performed at a time that specifications are incomplete or ill
defined, and no behavioral or structural descriptions have been formulated.
In current day design practices, this level of design abstraction, henceforth
called the conceptual-level, is addressed in an ad-hoc fashion without much
support from tools or without fully utilizing existing data and models.
We believe that in order to design the complex systems of tomorrow (and
today) will require that more design energy and tools be focused at this
conceptual level. This talk will discuss some of our early ideas and tools
for conceptual-level design. The need for a distributed data modeling
environment combined with a set of appropriate user interfaces will be
discussed. The status of our work as well as areas where we believe there can
be some cross-group efforts will also be presented.