A system model is developed where the criterion to partition the world into a system and a rest is based on the functional relation between its states. This approach implies that the gestalt of systems becomes very dynamic. Especially interactions between systems may create temporary super systems "on the fly". The reference to the function notion establishes the link to computation. Based on the distinction between the intended determinism versus nondeterminism of the interaction, two classes of system interactions are distinguished: composition and cooperation. Composition means that by interaction super systems are created and the interacting systems become subsystems. Cooperation means that systems sensibly interact loosely without creating any identifiable super system function and therefore without super system creation from the perspective of the interacting systems. Cooperative system interactions are described with the help of the protocol notion based on shared states, interpreted as the stateful exchange of characters via Shannon channels between roles - the projection of systems onto the interaction channels. It is shown that roles can be internally coordinated by a set of rules, leading to a very flexible process notion which unfolds its full potential only in a new type of execution environment capable of executing spontaneous transitions. The system model has immediate implications for componentization which can be viewed as an attempt to either hide functional recursion and provide only functionality whose composition behavior is easy to understand, or to provide loosely coupled interactions via protocols. To be complete, component models should therefore at least support three general classes of components: one for loose coupling, one for hierarchical composition, and one for pipes.
In @cite_43 David Harel and Amir Pnueli distinguish between ''transformational'' and ''reactive'' systems. They define: "A transformational system accepts input, performs transformation on them and produces outputs'' - which is consistent with the definition of a system. They further define ''Reactive systems ... are repeatedly prompted by the outside world and their role is to continuously respond to external inputs ... A reactive system, in general, does not compute or perform a function, but is supposed to maintain a certain ongoing relationship, so to speak, with its environment.''
@cite_43
2130154921 1546220007 2066381067 2071906671
We deal with nonlinear dynamical systems, consisting of a linear nominal part perturbed by model uncertainties, nonlinearities and both additive and multiplicative random noise, modeled as a Wiener process. In particular, we study the problem of finding suitable measurement feedback control laws such that the resulting closed-loop system is stable in some probabilistic sense. To this aim, we introduce a new notion of stabilization in probability, which is the natural counterpart of the classical concept of regional stabilization for deterministic nonlinear dynamical systems and stands as an intermediate notion between local and global stabilization in probability. This notion requires that, given a target set, a trajectory, starting from some compact region of the state space containing the target, remains forever inside some larger compact set, eventually enters any given neighborhood of the target in finite time and remains thereinafter, all these events being guaranteed with some probability. We give a Lyapunov-based sufficient condition for achieving stability in probability and a separation result which splits the control design into a state feedback problem and a filtering problem. Finally, we point out constructive procedures for solving the state feedback and filtering problem with arbitrarily large region of attraction and arbitrarily small target for a wide class of nonlinear systems, which at least include feedback linearizable systems. The generality of the result is promising for applications to other classes of stochastic nonlinear systems. In the deterministic case, our results recover classical stabilization results for nonlinear systems. Some observations are made concerning the process of developing complex systems. A broad class of systems, termed reactive, is singled out as being particularly problematic when it comes to finding satisfactory methods for behavioral description. In this paper we recommend the recently proposed statechart method for this purpose. Moreover, it is observed that most reactive systems cannot be developed in a linear stepwise fashion, but, rather, give rise to a two-dimensional development process, featuring behavioral aspects in the one dimension and implementational ones in the other. Concurrency may occur in both dimensions, as orthogonality of states in the one and as parallelism of subsystems in the other. A preliminary approach to working one’s way through this “magic square” of system development is then presented. The ideas described herein seem to be relevant to a wide variety of application areas. Abstract This article describes computer simulation of the dynamics of a distributed model of the olfactory system that is aimed at understanding the role of chaos in biological pattern recognition. The model is governed by coupled nonlinear differential equations with many variables and parameters, which allow multiple high-dimensional chaotic states. An appropriate set of the parameters is identified by computer experiments with the guidance of biological measurements, through which this model of the olfactory system maintains a low dimensional global chaotic attractor with multiple “wings.” The central part of the attractor is its basal chaotic activity, which simulates the electroencephalographic (EEG) activity of the olfactory system under zero signal input (exhalation). It provides the system with a ready state so that it is unnecessary for the system to “wake up” from or return to a “dormant” equilibrium state every time that an input is given (by inhalation). Each of the wings may be either a near-limit cycle (a narrow band chaos) or a broad band chaos. The reproducible spatial pattern of each near-limit cycle is determined by a template made in the system. A novel input with no template activates the system to either a nonreproducible near-limit cycle wing or a broad band chaotic wing. Pattern recognition in the system may be considered as the transition from one wing to another, as demonstrated by the computer simulation. The time series of the manifestations of the attractor are EEG-like waveforms with fractal dimensions that reflect which wing the system is placed in by input or lack of input. The computer simulation also shows that the adaptive behavior of the system is scaling invariant, and it is independent of the initial conditions at the transition from one wing to another. These properties enable the system to classify an uninterrupted sequence of stimuli. A higher order recurrent neural network architecture learns to recognize and generate languages after being “trained” on categorized exemplars. Studying these networks from the perspective of dynamical systems yields two interesting discoveries: First, a longitudinal examination of the learning process illustrates a new form of mechanical inference: Induction by phase transition. A small weight adjustment causes a “bifurcation” in the limit behavior of the network. This phase transition corresponds to the onset of the network's capacity for generalizing to arbitrary-length strings. Second, a study of the automata resulting from the acquisition of previously published training sets indicates that while the architecture is not guaranteed to find a minimal finite automaton consistent with the given exemplars, which is an NP-Hard problem, the architecture does appear capable of generating non-regular languages by exploiting fractal and chaotic dynamics. I end the paper with a hypothesis relating linguistic generative capacity to the behavioral regimes of non-linear dynamical systems.