A Grand Challenge: Full Reactive Modeling of a Multi-cellular Animal

One of the central issues in software and system engineering over the last couple of decades has been to develop languages, methods and tools for the reliable construction reactive systems. The term, coined in 1985, denotes systems whose complexity stems not necessarily from complicated computation but from complicated reactivity over time. Such systems are most often highly concurrent and time-intensive, and exhibit hybrid behavior that is predominantly discrete in nature but has continuous aspects too. Their structure consists of many interacting, often distributed, components. Very often the structure itself is dynamic, with its components being repeatedly created and destroyed during the system’s life span. The heart of the problem is the need for good approaches to modeling and analyzing the dynamic behavior of such systems.