The use of task graphs for modeling complex system behavior

Abstract

Task graphs have been used for the specification and analysis of real time systems for some time. We are currently developing a mobile code management system that uses such a representation for specification, analysis, and execution time scheduling, dispatch, and resource allocation decisions. We describe our three level limited hierarchical task graph model. We discuss graph topology, the use of task graphs for both specification and description, and planned software engineering tools that will take advantage of our model. We concentrate on the use of task graphs to model iteration, branching structures, optional execution, and parallelism within a function execution.