Section: New Results

A pivot in between synchrony and asynchrony

Participants : Thierry Gautier, Paul Le Guernic, Jean-Pierre Talpin.

Our time modeling framework requires a pivot specification paradigm to materialise a spectrum of models of computation and communication ranging from synchrony to asynchrony, from software to hardware, and accommodate with (abstractions of) software behaviors (software, functional blocks, tasks) and requirements (temporal properties, contracts, regular expressions) through logical, periodic, multi-periodic or affine time. We aim at developing a framework comprising dataflow networks (communications) and synchronous automata (computations) controlled by synthesised wrapper enforcing abstractions of specified constraints from the software viewpoint (timing requirements).

Relations between Kahn networks and classes of synchronous dataflow graphs (SDF) as well as synchronous languages have been studied in the past (e.g. Lustre), yet never in the full generality of relating the domain-theoretic model of Kahn networks to it most general synchronous incarnation (one that at least allows to express several clock domains) [17] . We are currently elaborating such a model to characterise morphisms between untimed asynchronous networks and multi-clocked, synchronous, dataflow networks. In this prospect, we developed the first constructive operational semantics of Signal [21] , which opens to further investigations on its full abstraction relation with a denotational characterisation using Kahn networks over a polychronous domain.