Conceptual Design of Parallel Systems

• Authors: Jacky Akoka
• Venue: Selected Papers from the Symposium on Conceptual Modeling, Current Issues and Future Directions
• Year: 1999

The aim of this paper is to present a parallel object-oriented design method which integrates both object orientation and parallelism. The concept of object-orientation has initially emerged from programming. It has evolved to become a conceptual approach. In this paper, object-orientation is seen as a mean of conceptual modelling. Parallelism is seen as a source of structural simplicity in the conceptual design phase. It is the cornerstone of communication between objects. Our approach is characterized by objectorientation and concurrency. It can be summarized by the following points : ▪ The design method allows us to identify the objects, their relationships, events, and messages. ▪ Its underlying model is represented as a collection of concurrently executable objects. The latter are the primal agents of the information system and can be entities and/or relationships. The objects can be manipulated by actions which are seen as public or private methods. ▪ The interactions among the components of the parallel system are represented as message transmissions among objects. The messages are one way to manage parallelism. In this paper, parallelism can also be managed by cardinalities and/or integrity constraints. ▪ The design method and its underlying model present an adequate formalism in which various concurrent activities, interactions between objects, and inheritance mechanism are expressed naturally. Several constructs are presented to show how the design method can take into account different types of parallelism problems. These constructs are illustrated by examples. The design method is not specific to databases and can be applied to concurrent systems design.