George Giorgidze

(University of Nottingham)

"Declarative Hybrid Modelling and Simulation in Haskell"

Mathematical modelling and simulation of physical systems plays an important role in design, implementation and analysis of systems in numerous areas of science and engineering, e.g., electrical engineering, astronomy, particle physics, biology, climatology, automotive industry and finance (to mention just few). To cope with ever increasing size and complexity of real-world systems, a number of declarative domain specific languages (DSLs) have been developed for mathematical modelling and simulation.

In the first half of the talk, I will give a brief overview of the state-of-the-art languages for modelling and simulation and identify their shortcomings with respect to reusability, composability and hybrid (mixed discrete and continuous time) simulation. Next, I will introduce a Haskell-embedded DSL for declarative modelling and simulation that addresses some of these shortcomings. The DSL features first-class implicitly formulated equational constrains allowing for higher-order modelling and simulation of highly structurally dynamic, hybrid systems that goes beyond what current languages can simulate. In particular, it allows repeated generation and just-in-time (JIT) compilation of updated equational constrains during the simulation, depending on the results thus far.

The embedding approach that we use should be of general interest and usable in other domains as well. In the second half of the talk, I will describe the embedding approach in detail. I will show how to use mixed-level (combination of deep and shallow) embedding and LLVM JIT compiler to implement an iteratively staged DSL (characterised by repeated program generation, compilation and execution) efficiently in a host language that does not provide built-in multi-stage programming capabilities. This is a joint work with Henrik Nilsson.

Bio: George Giorgidze is a research PhD student and a member of Functional Programming Laboratory at the University of Nottingham. He is working on Functional Hybrid Modelling (FHM) project that is about design and implement of a new language for declarative modelling and simulation of physical systems. Before moving to Nottingham, George defended his MSc thesis about Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg.

Zeit:	Mittwoch, 10.02.2010, 14.30 Uhr
Ort:	Kaiserslautern, Bau 49, Raum 206