Decomposition Recovery Extension to the Computer Aided Prototyping System (CAPS) Change-Merge Tool

This is a NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY CA report procured by the Pentagon and made available for public release. It has been reproduced in the best form available to the Pentagon. It is not spiral-bound, but rather assembled with Velobinding in a soft, white linen cover. The Storming Media report number is A388733. The abstract provided by the Pentagon follows: A promising use of Computer Aided Prototyping System (CAPS) is to support concurrent design. Key to success in this context is the ability to automatically and reliably combine and integrate the prototypes produced in concurrent efforts. Thus, to be of practical use in this as well as most prototyping contexts, a CAPS tool must have a fast, automated, reliable prototype integration capability. The current CAPS Change Merge Tool is fast, automated, and uses a highly reliable formalized semantics based change merging method to integrate, or change merge, prototypes which are written in Prototype System Description Language (PSDL). This method can guarantee correct merges, but it loses the prototype's design decomposition structure in the process. The post merge prototype is fully functional, but the design decomposition structure vital to prototype understandability must be manually recovered before post merge prototyping can continue. The delay incurred is unacceptable in a rapid prototyping context. This thesis presents a software design and Ada implementation for a formalized algorithm which extends the current CAPS Change Merge Tool to automatically and reliably recover a merged prototype's design decomposition structure. The algorithm is based in formal theoretical approaches to software change merging and includes a method to automatically report and resolve structural merge conflicts. With this extension to the Change Merge Tool, CAPS prototyping efforts, concurrent or otherwise, can continue post merge with little or no delay.