Operads for complex system design specification, analysis and synthesis
This addresses the problem of managing complexity in system design for engineers and developers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing operad theory.
The paper tackles the challenge of specifying, documenting, and synthesizing correct, machine-readable designs for complex and heterogeneous systems by proposing operads as an effective knowledge representation. It argues that this approach supports decomposition and reconstitution of systems, with recent progress in modeling and future work aimed at scalability.
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.