SYSTEM APPROXIMATION AND CANONICAL DESIGN

ABSTRACT:

The aim of this talk is to consider some of the basic concepts that may be useful in developing formalisms to support system design at various levels of detail. Two such concepts discussed here are system approximation and canonical design, neither of which leads to easy definition. Even the word "and" in the title is a discontenting conjunction relating these two seemingly indefinable notions. In system theory and system design, canonical representations of artefacts are well known; so too the idea of one system approximating another. Mostly, the application of system approximations and canonical representations has been considered for particular problem domains. To achieve our goals we want to generalise the concepts to any system and to derive some principles that will assist in the specification and design development of (software, hardware, systems) artefacts and tools to aid in their development (e.g., axiomatic design, Suh, 1990). This talk will give details of these concepts and examine some examples to illustrate their usefulness.

  Prof. Charles Rattray graduated in mathematics (U. of Adelaide, S. Australia), and did postgraduate work in optimization theory (UMIST, Manchester, UK). His career has included periods in industry (control engineering, software engineering) and in university (UMIST, Macquarie University, University of Stirling). He is chairman of the IFIP Working Group 10.1 (CAST). Research interests are mainly directed to specification and design in software and engineering.