Towards A Common Computational Synthesis Framework with Object-Process Methodology

Computational Synthesis: From Basic Building Blocks to High Level Functionality

Volume

Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

The field of computational synthesis is emerging is an interdisciplinary effort that encompasses applications in a variety of knowledge domains. Each domain has its own ontology, modeling methods, set of symbols, and syntax. The crosscutting commonalities among the various implementation domains, which make computational synthesis a research domain in its own right, are articulated for the most part only in natural language. The computational synthesis community may greatly benefit from an agreement on a domainindependent paradigm and modeling methodology that are shared among the various fields of knowledge in which computational synthesis is or will be applied. This paper proposes Object-Process Methodology (OPM) as a unifying framework for modeling in a balanced and transparent way how the architecture, i.e., the combination of structure (objects) and behavior (processes) of the system being evolved fulfill the functional requirements (measured by fitness) for its survival in the environment. OPM specifies not only the evolvable life form as a final product, but also the universal computational synthesis metamodel -- the model of the system that makes this evolution happen.