MSDL 2006 Summer Presentations

MSDL 2006 Summer Presentations
Monday 28 August 2006, Trottier 0070

Map of the downtown McGill campus with the Trottier building. Room 0070 is in the basement.

Have a look at the pictures of the presenters in action (during the talks, and during the dinner at California Pizza !

9:30 - 10:00 Hans Vangheluwe
Modelling, Simulation and Design Lab Roadmap

The Modelling, Simulation and Design Lab (MSDL)'s focus is on modelling and simulation based design of complex systems. The term Computer Automated Multi-Paradigm Modelling (CAMPaM) is used to capture all aspects of MSDL research. The different facets of the MSDL research and how they inter-relate will be presented. This will briefly cover some "history" (previous work), will show how current work fits into the "big picture" and will outline future research directions.
presentation [pdf]

Theme: applications of meta-modelling and model transformation

10:00 - 10:25 Eugene Syriani
Modelling syntax and semantics of piDEMOS in AToM³

The talk is about a process-oriented language that emphasises the control of synchronisation, scheduling and event list processing. I have designed a metamodel of this timed system as well as a graph grammar. We will see how AToM³ can be used to provide such a design.
main presentation, PiDemos Graph Grammar, Example Simulation Run [pdf]

10:25 - 10:50 Sagar Sen (presented by HV)
A Model-based approach to Design-space Exploration for Physical Systems

The ever growing complexity of engineered systems has led to the development of modelling tools. These modelling tools encode scientific laws and engineering principles in a modular and reusable format to facilitate the creation and simulation of practically accurate models in software form. We present a methodology based on the framework of model-driven engineering to model an engineered physical system at different abstraction levels. Modelling languages, based on meta-modelling, are specified for managers, engineers, physicists, and mathematicians since each of them have a different perspecitive of the system. For instance, a physicist is concerned with the physical meaningfulness of the model and hence he builds a model that allows him to verify laws of conservation while a manager is only concerned with a high-level view. We specify several transformations to automatically transform models between abstraction levels (high to low). We finally suggest a set of heuristics rules that can be applied to a physical system model to enhance its properties for specific tasks.
presentation [pdf]

10:50 - 11:10

slack, discussions, coffee

Theme: new foundations for CAMPaM and its tools

11:10 - 11:35 François Plamondon
Re-writing the Graph Rewriting Kernel

Presentation cancelled. Brief overview given by HV.

11:35 - 12:00 Denis Dubé
Modelling and Synthesizing Visual Modelling Environments

The complexity of web-based applications has been steadily increasing in recent years, in particular applications based on the AJAX framework. Although the benefits of using AJAX are many, currently there is no means of modelling such an application, entirely and at a high level, and then synthesizing it. Through the example of a digital watch application, it will be shown how it is possible to seperately model the abstract and concrete syntax of the language of digital watches and to ultimately synthesize an animated digital watch in an SVG enabled web browser.
presentation [pdf]

12:00 - 12:25 Francisco Perez
Relating Meta-modelling and Concrete Textual Syntax

Within the multi-formalism paradigm, we may want to use different languages to represent different aspects of a single problem. Nowadays, many model driven techniques are based on meta-modelling, which provides us with a framework to specify domain-specific visual languages that fit the problem domain quite well. There is however often a need to add constraints that complement the semantics of the model, as OCL does to UML. This presentation tries to show two compatible approaches to deal with how to introduce a textual, possibly stand alone, representation for meta-modelling, which can be easily and elegantly combined with a visual representation. It will thus be possible to have many possible concrete syntaxes for the same abstract syntax.
presentation [pdf]

12:25 - 13:30

walk to and lunch at Eaton food court

Theme: Formalisms: Theory and Tools

13:30 - 13:55 Ernesto Posse
kiltera: a formalism for concurrent, interacting, mobile, timed systems

This talk introduces kiltera, a formalism for describing dynamic, interacting systems whose behaviour depends on the evolution of time, and which may undergo structural changes in their life-time. I'll introduce kiltera in the context of the problem of translating Statechart models into DEVS models, and present a demo.
presentation [pdf]

13:55 - 14:20 Alexandre Denault
Model-Based Design of Game AI

The complexity of modern computer games has increased drastically over the last decade. In this presentation, it will be shown how it is possible to model, simulate, and synthesize the Game AI of EA's TankWars. The formalism used is a variant of Rhapsody Statecharts for which a compiler was developed.
presentation [pdf]

14:20 - 14:45 Bill Song
An infrastructure for DEVS modelling and experimentation

This infrastructure provides supports for facilitating the DEVS modelling process at four different levels. At the modelling level, a DEVS Visual Modelling Environment is implemented, in which DEVS models can be drawn grapically. In the visual modelling environment, graphical models can be trasformed into models represented in the modelling language Modelica. At the (syntactic) verification level, our Modelica Compiler can verify models at both modelling language and modelling formalism levels. At the simulation level, simulation traces are standardized by an XML DTD. The direct benefits of trace standardization are that one trace plotting tool can plot traces generated by different simulators, and traces from one simulator can be plotted by different tools. At the validation level, a Visual DEVS trace plotter has been implemented. This is the first visual trace plotting tool specific for DEVS. It is very useful for DEVS behaviour analysis and debugging. In this presentation, we will discuss the design and implementation of the Infrastructure, and present demonstrations of how to use the infrastructure solving real problems.
presentation [pdf]

14:45 - 15:10

slack, discussions, coffee

Theme: applications of CAMPaM

15:10 - 15:35 Miriam Zia
adapID - advanced applications for electronic IDentity cards in Flanders / model-checking

The design process for advanced e-health applications, which make use of electronic identity cards, is a flow of manual and computer automated activities. From the gathered requirements, a design model is created at an appropriate level of abstraction, and in a suitable formalism. From this model, analysis, simulation and execution models may be generated by automated transformations. The analysis model will be used for model verification purposes, whereas the simulation allows for checking of performance metrics, and animation. In this presentation, we will define electronic identity cards, and their use in e-health applications. We will introduce a use case for mining of electronic health records which makes use of eID authentication technology. Finally, we will outline our modelling and simulation approach to designing and checking complex e-health applications.
presentation [pdf]

15:35 - 16:00 Ximeng Sun
adapID - advanced applications for electronic IDentity cards in Flanders / simulation and animation
Model-Driven Assessment of Use Cases for Dependable Systems

The first part of this talk is about how to apply a DEVS-based modelling and simulation process to adapID project. A DEVS model is built based on an E-Health use case of adapID project and the simulation results are used for analysis by plotting and animation. The second part of the talk is about a model-driven approach for analyzing the safety and reliability of requirements based on use cases. We introduce and use DA-Charts, a probabilistic extension of Statecharts, to model the system requirements. A visual modelling environment for DA-Charts supporting automatic probability analysis has been implemented in AToM³.
presentation [pdf]

16:00 - 16:25 Chahe Adourian
Integrating CAD (geometry) and Modelica (multi-physics dynamic) models for multi-domain simulation

Engineers develop complicated systems using specialized design software. The design tools are usually specialized to deal with one or a few of the subsystems at a time, and might permit to simulate/assess some of the needed performance/design metrics. So we frequently end up with a heterogeneous set of tools that cannot talk to each other and cannot allow the system engineer to assess overall system performance and behaviour easily. A system level simulator can be created, but it is a labour-intensive process and slow in incorporating changes made throughout the system. These delays can greatly reduce the usefulness of the simulator since the engineers need a quick performance evaluation otherwise they will probably use more arcane and less accurate methods. To respond to this problem, we need to create a framework that can pull-in the resources created in the heterogeneous set of engineering tools and allow to easily create system level simulators where the subsystem interactions could be evaluated, and performance metrics calculated. We will focus on two tools in particular: a CAD package - SolidEdge - and a multi-physics modelling and simulation tool - Dymola.
presentation [pdf]

16:25 - 17:00 all

conclusions, discussions, coffee