Advanced Design Concepts for Open Distributed Systems Development

Experience with the engineering of large scale open distributed systems has shown that their design should be specified at several well defined levels of abstractions, where each level aims at satishing specific user, architectural and implementation purposes. Therefore designers should dispose of a comprehensive design methodology, which allows them to conceive a specification at a certain abstraction level and transform this specification into a conforming specification at a lower abstraction level. The collection of these transformations should abridge the total design trajectory from initial user requirements to final implementation. This paper presents and discusses some advanced design concepts that provide a basis for such a design methodology.