Spencer Breiner

John D. Foley, Spencer Breiner, Eswaran Subrahmanian et al.

As the complexity and heterogeneity of a system grows, the challenge of specifying, documenting and synthesizing correct, machine-readable designs increases dramatically. Separation of the system into manageable parts is needed to support analysis at various levels of granularity so that the system is maintainable and adaptable over its life cycle. In this paper, we argue that operads provide an effective knowledge representation to address these challenges. Formal documentation of a syntactically correct design is built up during design synthesis, guided by semantic reasoning about design effectiveness. Throughout, the ability to decompose the system into parts and reconstitute the whole is maintained. We describe recent progress in effective modeling under this paradigm and directions for future work to systematically address scalability challenges for complex system design.

Spencer Breiner, John S. Nolan

When designing plans in engineering, it is often necessary to consider attributes associated to objects, e.g. the location of a robot. Our aim in this paper is to incorporate attributes into existing categorical formalisms for planning, namely those based on symmetric monoidal categories and string diagrams. To accomplish this, we define a notion of a "symmetric monoidal category with attributes." This is a symmetric monoidal category in which objects are equipped with retrievable information and where the interactions between objects and information are governed by an "attribute structure." We discuss examples and semantics of such categories in the context of robotics to illustrate our definition.