Interactive elaboration of generic designs

The paper describes a family of tools called Binders that support the elaboration of generic designs. Rather than taking the approach of building new languages and environments, a Binder is designed to inter-operate with existing languages and tools. Binders support grammatical extensions to a language (for example, a language to describe architectures or a language to describe processes) that permits the inclusion of uninstantiated descriptions in the language. Design elaboration is performed interactively-the Binder informs the designer as to which elements of the design require further elaboration, and suggests possible ways in which the elaboration may be performed. The Binder relies upon application specific knowledge bases of design constraints to be satisfied, and methods for satisfying those constraints. Two Binders have been developed using the above methodology: an Architecture Binder for developing software architectures from generic architectures, and a Process Binder that supports refinement of generic processes during process enactment