Toward a Classification Approach to Design

This paper addresses the problem of how to construct re-nements of speciications formally and incrementally. The key idea is to use a taxonomy of abstract design concepts, each represented by a design theory. An abstract design concept is applied by constructing a speciication morphism from its design theory to a requirement specii-cation. Procedures for propagating constraints, computing colimits, and constructing speciication morphisms provide computational support for this approach. Although we conjecture that classiication generally applies to the incremental application of knowledge represented in a tax-onomy of design theories, this paper mainly focuses on algorithm design theories and presents several examples of design by classiication.