the present paper aims to investigate the effects of modularity and the layout of subsystems and parts of a complex system on its maintainability. for this purpose, four objective functions have been considered simultaneously: i) maximizing the level of accordance between system design and optimum modularity design,ii) maximizing the level of accessibility and the maintenance space required,iii...

Verification of imperative programs means reasoning about modifications of a program state. So proper representation of state spaces is crucial for the usability of a corresponding verification environment. In this paper we discuss various existing state space models under different aspects like strong typing, modularity and scalability. We also propose a variant based on the locale infrastruct...

We study discrete models of interactive distributed systems structured into components and operating concurrently in a time frame. For such models of the data or signal flow in interactive system we assume that there is a source and a cause for each communication event and its associated information. To understand the logical dependencies for the events of systems causality is a key issue for r...

This paper discusses a module-based vision for designing BDI-based multi-agent programming languages. The introduced concept of module is generic and facilitates the implementation of different agent concepts such as roles and agent profiles, or to adopt common programming techniques such as encapsulation and information hiding. This vision is applied to 2APL, which is an existing BDI-based age...

Modularity and efficiency are often contradicting requirements, such that programers have to trade one for the other. We analyze this dilemma in the context of programs operating on collections. Performance-critical code using collections need often to be hand-optimized, leading to nonmodular, brittle, and redundant code. In principle, this dilemma could be avoided by automatic collection-speci...

Originally, software applications, databases, and expert systems were designed and constructed by a reduced group of software or knowledge engineers, which had overall control of the entire life cycle of IT artifacts. But this time has long gone as software and knowledge engineering practice has shifted from the implementation of custom-made stand-alone systems to component-based engineering; d...

Detecting communities using modularity maximization is an important operation in network analysis. As the size of the networks increase to petascales, it is important to design parallel algorithms to handle the large-scale data. In this paper we introduce a shared memory (OpenMP-based) implementation of the Louvain method, one of the most popular algorithms for maximizing modularity. We discuss...

Organizational and managerial theories of modularity applied to the design and production of complex artifacts are used to interpret the rise and success of Free/Open Source Software methodologies and practices in software engineering. Strengths and risks of the adoption of a modular approach in software project management are introduced and are related to the achievements of the GNU/Linux proj...

We introduce composition in the function-behaviour-structure framework for design, as described by John Gero, in order to deal with complexity. We do this by connecting the frameworks for the design of several models, in which one is constrained by the others. The result is a framework for the design of an object that supports modularity. This framework can easily be extended for the design of ...