Ethan's Research Interests
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The Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) group, within RiSE, explores many research directions in the area of model-based
design of software systems.
Model-based design (also called model-driven development)
is a modern approach to top-down design using formal domain-specific abstractions and model transformations. These are often
packaged into reusable units called domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs). A key issue in tool architectures for
model-based design is how to support the rapid (i.e. cost-effective) construction of formalized DSMLs. Model-based design
encourages the engineer to build links between different levels of abstraction. This raises a number of interesting questions
regarding the composition and relationships between DSMLs. Below is a more detailed breakdown of my research interests. These
topics are studied in collaboration with Wolfram Schulte, Nikolaj Bjorner, and Margus Veanes (to name a few).
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Theoretical Issues in Model-based Design
- Understand a category-theoretical view of domain composition
- Better composition mechanisms of structural semantics with behavioral semantics
- Clarify the relationships between run-time enforcement of structural invariants and the characterization of “behavioral properties” with temporal logics
- Extending model-based techniques to dynamic architectures
Foundational Tools for Model-based Design
- Constructive theorem proving for automatic generation of domain models
- Light-weight domain-specific modeling environments
- Semantic anchoring infrastructures for model-based development
- Automated analysis of model transformations for correctness
Applying Model-based Design to Software Systems
- Supporting separation of concerns in safety critical embedded systems
- Protocol synthesis for service-oriented business applications
- Code synthesis techniques for service-oriented business applications
- Generation of untrusted adaptors for dynamic architectures
