Extracting and restructuring the design of large systems

Extraction of the structural and, to a lesser degree, functional and dynamic properties of systems composed of modules and subsystems is treated. The process is equivalent to reverse engineering a system-level design description. The approach used is to map the resource exchange among modules and then derive a hierarchical design description using a system-restructuring algorithm. The medium for the design description is a module interconnection language, NuMIL. The performance of the algorithm shows that it is practical.<>