Enabling design-space exploration for domain-specific modelling

Abstract

Design-Space Exploration (DSE) looks for a suitable candidate solution to a problem, with respect to a set of criteria, by searching through a space of possible solution designs. Domain-Specific Modelling (DSM) allows language engineers to create Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) for a particular domain, allowing non-technical domain experts to use the DSL to model a system, analyse, optimise or transform the model, generate code or documentation, etc. This paper presents a framework to enable DSE for DSM, so that non-technical domain experts can define DSE input using DSL syntax, and obtain DSL instances as a result of execution the DSE. The contribution of our framework is twofold: (1) automatic generation of a family of related DSLs (to describe structural constraints as well as constraints on simulation results) for modelling a DSE problem at the DSL level from a given DSL definition, and (2) generic support for executing a DSE algorithm, which searches the design space and generates suitable DSL instances. The framework can be applied to any explicitly defined DSL with an explicitly defined semantic domain. We evaluate this claim by applying our framework to a user-defined Simulink library. The approach is explained using a DSL for modelling electronic filters.