Designing the Same, but in Different Ways: Determinism in Graph-Rewriting Systems for Function-Based Design Synthesis

This paper compares methods for identifying determinism within graph-rewriting systems. From the viewpoint of functional decomposition, these methods can be implemented to search efficiently for distinct function structures. An additional requirement is imposed on this comparison that stems from a cooperative design application where different organizations contribute to a distributed graph-rewriting system: Inspecting the definitions of production rules is not allowed for identifying determinism because production rules are considered to be confidential corporate knowledge. Under this assumption, two approaches were selected and empirically compared with respect to random search and guided search scenarios. The results suggest that the herein proposed dynamic rule independence analysis outperforms traditional approaches in light of the above restriction.