Physical/Information Co-Design

Pervasive computing requires a new kind of software design, in fact a new kind of co-design. Pervasive system design must incorporate the characteristics and constraints of a dynamic physical environment. The critical constraint of the physical world are defined in terms of space and time; and the complexity of the real world often requires uncertainty modeling. The pervasive computing systems situated in this world are highly dynamic in terms of both composition and tasking. Pervasive computing software design requires the specification and implementation of a dynamic architecture in terms of physical, electronic, and software constraints – a co-design task The co-design environment we are building combines our leading-edge symbolic system design/analysis technology with links to implementation in an open agent architecture. The emphasis is on the specification and implementation of architectures in terms of dynamically changing physical constraints. INTRODUCTION Almost all current software design is highly abstracted from the computational environment that will execute it. Indeed, that is one of the great accomplishments of computer science. Drivers, operating systems, and compilers provide layers of abstraction that free the designers from the need to understand the underlying hardware architecture (see Figure 1). The hardware architecture itself in fixed; in fact, a side-effect of this paradigm is that the daunting cost of creating and maintaining the abstraction layers makes the introduction of new hardware architectures very rare.