Extending working environments for the development of reactive/adaptive systems with intelligent controls

Abstract

It is very common for reactive/adaptive systems to face a situation where the system has to make a choice among a set of possible contending reactions. Several events may occur simultaneously and an intelligent choice is crucial. Moreover, this intelligent choice might depend on system mode or some data values. Race controls are those controls that enable an intelligent choice.

Several working environments exist for the specification, analysis, design, and development of reactive systems. Statecharts [H] is a visual formalism that enables a user to specify, analyze, and debug diagrammatic, yet precise, descriptions of real-time embedded systems, and control and communication systems. We choose Statecharts as our extension for two reasons. First it is designed to be capable of a complete description of the system under development so that the developed system can be checked for crucial dynamic properties. Second, an Ada running code can be generated automatically.

The objective of this paper is to extend the expressive power of such working environments to encompass specifications for intelligent behavior and to extend their semantics to enable an automated Ada code generation that implements it. Impact on Ada-9X to facilitate translation of an entire conceptual model, including intelligent controls, into Ada is provided.

This work supported in part by a grant from the U.S. Army Research Office under scientific contract number 1800.