Design-Space Exploration for Decision-Support Software

Abstract

Presence monitoring or intrusion detection in a location/area are examples of decision-support applications. Decision-support applications are applications where monitoring is used to collect (heterogeneous) data and create situational awareness, which further requires decisions and/or actions. As such, decision-support software consists of different interconnected components with very diverse roles, whose communication and synchronization are essential for the application functionality and performance. Despite this complexity, software design for decision-support is often driven by short-term functional requirements and only supported by designers’ previous experience. In the current non-systematic approach, mistakes can be easily made, and can be very difficult to repair. In this work, we describe our systematic method for efficient and effective decision-support software design, based on application design-space exploration (DSE). To this end, we describe how to build a design space and present structured methods to traverse the design space towards software solutions that meet user requirements for both functionality and performance.