Lessons learned from wrapping systems

This paper describes lessons we have learned over the last ten years from our "wrapping" approach to large-scale system development. Our research program in integration for constructed complex systems has led to several results with system engineering applications: the wrapping expression notation wrex for communication among distributed entities, the problem posing interpretation that inserts knowledge-based polymorphism into any programming language, and a new systematization of design patterns. We show how we implement wrappings and describe example applications. A little bit of this theory goes a long way, since it was designed for extremely large systems, such as space systems, with their hundreds of organizations, thousands of components, and millions of lines of code.