Related papers: A Systems-Theoretical Formalization of Closed Syst…
Software engineering concepts and processes are worthy of formal study; and yet we seldom formalize them. This "research ideas" article explores what a theory of software engineering could and should look like. Software engineering research…
Building software-driven systems that are easily understood becomes a challenge, with their ever-increasing complexity and autonomy. Accordingly, recent research efforts strive to aid in designing explainable systems. Nevertheless, a common…
Formal methods refer to rigorous, mathematical approaches to system development and have played a key role in establishing the correctness of safety-critical systems. The main building blocks of formal methods are models and specifications,…
This chapter serves as an introduction to systems engineering focused on the broad issues surrounding realizing complex integrated systems. What is a system? We pose a number of possible definitions and perspectives, but leave open the…
This paper discusses the concept of model-driven software engineering applied to the Grid application domain. As an extension to this concept, the approach described here, attempts to combine both formal architecture-centric and…
Requirements engineering is crucial to software development but lacks a precise definition of its fundamental concepts. Even the basic definitions in the literature and in industry standards are often vague and verbose. To remedy this…
This paper outlines a general formal framework for reasoning systems, intended to support future analysis of inference architectures across domains. We model reasoning systems as structured tuples comprising phenomena, explanation space,…
The concept of intelligent system has emerged in information technology as a type of system derived from successful applications of artificial intelligence. The goal of this paper is to give a general description of an intelligent system,…
A (closed) dynamical system is a notion of how things can be, together with a notion of how they may change given how they are. The idea and mathematics of closed dynamical systems has proven incredibly useful in those sciences that can…
In this paper we present a formal framework for analysis and optimisation of the requirements specifications of systems developed to apply in several countries. As different countries typically have different regulations/laws as well as…
There is a deeply entrenched view in philosophy and physics, the closed systems view, according to which isolated systems are conceived of as fundamental. On this view, when a system is under the influence of its environment this is…
Context and motivation: Requirements engineering of complex IT systems needs to manage the many, and often vague and conflicting, organisational rules that exist in the context of a modern enterprise. At the same time, IT systems affect the…
Classic problem-space theory models problem solving as a navigation through a structured space of states, operators, goals, and constraints. Systems Engineering (SE) employs analogous constructs (functional analysis, operational analysis,…
In the last two decades, the popularity of self-adaptive systems in the field of software and systems engineering has drastically increased. However, despite the extensive work on self-adaptive systems, the literature still lacks a common…
The current ISO standards pertaining to the Concepts of System and Architecture express succinct definitions of these two key terms that lend themselves to practical application and can be understood through elementary mathematical…
We propose here to look at how abstract a model of a usable system can be, but still say something useful and interesting, so this paper is an exercise in abstraction and formalisation, with usability-of-design as an example target use. We…
Engineering methods are centered around traditional notions of decomposition and recomposition that rely on partitioning the inputs and outputs of components to allow for component-level properties to hold after their composition. In…
Recent advances in large pretrained models have led to their widespread integration as core components in modern software systems. The trend is expected to continue in the foreseeable future. Unlike traditional software systems governed by…
We develop a general formalism for representing and understanding structure in complex systems. In our view, structure is the totality of relationships among a system's components, and these relationships can be quantified using information…
This book explores an alternative to the current dominant paradigm where a discrete computer model is constructed as an attempt to approximate some continuum theory. We focus on a class of discrete computer models that are based on simple…