Integral and uniform modeling of hardware (both analog and digital), software (both system and application), and cyberware (knowledge structures, ontology contents, and data structures) of complex systems in the pre-embodiment and embodiment phases of development seems to be a challenge. Finding methods and tools, which cover each of the three domains, is difficult in the literature. Please advise if any trans-disciplinary method exist for architectural and operational, or possibly for a hybrid modeling, of complex systems.
Dear professor Horvath, this is what professor Shai and me are currently working on.
Dear Imre,
The most expressive infrastructure/tool suite that I have found for modelling pre-embodiment and actual embodiment of SW and HW architectures and their implementations is Ptolemy-II at http://ptolemy.eecs.Berkeley.edu/ptolemyII/ by the team at Berkeley led by Prof. Edward A. Lee. The system uses a work-flow among functional "actors" within performance contexts defined by "director" abstractions, and these workflows can be laid out in a 2-D graphics environment and has a very powerful ability for taming heterogeneity and complexity. It's is a weakness that it does not contain extensive Ontology support.
On the Ontology/Cyberware side of your question, I found Protege by Stanford at http://protege.stanford.edu/ to be very powerfull, but also other tools in the semantic web list at http://answers.semanticweb.com/questions/3316/list-of-ontology-modeling-tools.
I hope this helps a little
We do not use computer tools. We use a holistic representation in mathematical equations.
When the data structure is an n-d array/tensor, analysis and optimizations are possible at all levels .
When structure is used I.e, shapes, to view things, linear transformations may be used as the glue which link these layers mechanically.
You might need a set number of tools to be assessed against your detailed requirements, it is very difficult to find all what you need in one particular tool.
I would suggest you to have a look at Modelica tool. https://www.modelica.org/
also SysML specification allows modelling hardware, software, artifacts and human all together. Some SysML tools in the market can deal with sufficient level of verification and simulation.
Dear Prof. Hou,
Thank you very much for reply. In the last days, I made an extended search on the web for papers from your research team that address the issue of concurrent and formal modeling of analog and digital hardware, system and application software, and media contents and knowledge/data structures of complex systems, such as socialized and personalized cyber-physical systems. The search was not successful. Therefore, I would be the most grateful to you if you could e-mail some of them to me. Thanks a lot indeed.
Warm regards, Imre Horvath
Dear Prof Horvath,
I have been pondering over this question for a while. Design and development of Complex systems (Pre-embodiment and embodiment) using Models / ontology, as you rightly claim is a big challenge. I have a paper on similar lines (Ragavan, S. Veera, et al. "Unified meta-modeling framework using bond graph grammars for conceptual modeling." Robotics and Autonomous Systems (2015).). (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277025808_Unified_meta-modeling_framework_using_bond_graph_grammars_for_conceptual_modeling). If you find it interesting, I would be pleased to discuss this further online or offline. Thanks Veera
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