SAGA: A project to automate the management of software production systems

The Software Automation, Generation and Administration (SAGA) project is investigating the design and construction of practical software engineering environments for developing and maintaining aerospace systems and applications software. The research includes the practical organization of the software lifecycle, configuration management, software requirements specifications, executable specifications, design methodologies, programming, verification, validation and testing, version control, maintenance, the reuse of software, software libraries, documentation, and automated management

The ancestor width of grammars and languages

AbstractThe ancestor width is a new measure for the structure of derivations of arbitrary grammars. For every production used in a derivation or equivalently for every leaf we consider the strings of ancestors. The ancestors define a complexity measure with a local flavour. Obviously, context-free grammars have ancestor width one. We show that languages with ancestor width two are contextfree. However, every recursively enumerable set can be generated by a grammar with ancestor width three. For λ-free grammars the ancestor width is closely related to nondeterministic space complexity. Then languages such as {wcwc¦w ∈ {a,b}∗rcub;, {anbncn¦n⩾ 1} or {(anc)n¦n⩾ 1} can be generated with ancestor width four. Moreover, any language can be generated with ancestor width three, if padding is used and the language is represented with tails

Bisimulation equivalence and regularity for real-time one-counter automata

A one-counter automaton is a pushdown automaton with a singleton stack alphabet, where stack emptiness can be tested; it is a real-time automaton if it contains no ε -transitions. We study the computational complexity of the problems of equivalence and regularity (i.e. semantic finiteness) on real-time one-counter automata. The first main result shows PSPACEPSPACE-completeness of bisimulation equivalence; this closes the complexity gap between decidability [23] and PSPACEPSPACE-hardness [25]. The second main result shows NLNL-completeness of language equivalence of deterministic real-time one-counter automata; this improves the known PSPACEPSPACE upper bound (indirectly shown by Valiant and Paterson [27]). Finally we prove PP-completeness of the problem if a given one-counter automaton is bisimulation equivalent to a finite system, and NLNL-completeness of the problem if the language accepted by a given deterministic real-time one-counter automaton is regular.Web of Science80474372

SAGA: A project to automate the management of software production systems

The SAGA system is a software environment that is designed to support most of the software development activities that occur in a software lifecycle. The system can be configured to support specific software development applications using given programming languages, tools, and methodologies. Meta-tools are provided to ease configuration. The SAGA system consists of a small number of software components that are adapted by the meta-tools into specific tools for use in the software development application. The modules are design so that the meta-tools can construct an environment which is both integrated and flexible. The SAGA project is documented in several papers which are presented

Knowledge Based Systems: A Critical Survey of Major Concepts, Issues, and Techniques

This Working Paper Series entry presents a detailed survey of knowledge based systems. After being in a relatively dormant state for many years, only recently is Artificial Intelligence (AI) - that branch of computer science that attempts to have machines emulate intelligent behavior - accomplishing practical results. Most of these results can be attributed to the design and use of Knowledge-Based Systems, KBSs (or ecpert systems) - problem solving computer programs that can reach a level of performance comparable to that of a human expert in some specialized problem domain. These systems can act as a consultant for various requirements like medical diagnosis, military threat analysis, project risk assessment, etc. These systems possess knowledge to enable them to make intelligent desisions. They are, however, not meant to replace the human specialists in any particular domain. A critical survey of recent work in interactive KBSs is reported. A case study (MYCIN) of a KBS, a list of existing KBSs, and an introduction to the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Project are provided as appendices. Finally, an extensive set of KBS-related references is provided at the end of the report