This paper presents an informal description of a methodology called the Total System Design (TSD) Methodology. It consists of two phases that deal with the transformation of a system requirements specification to a processing model (in the architecture design phase) and the subsequent generation of hardware and software requirements (in the binding phase). The proposed design strategy is based primarily on an extension of the concept of abstract machine hierarchies to distributed systems, while the binding strategy could be viewed as a most constrained first policy
