Current Projects - Information System Thermodynamics

Approach

• Represent an information system as two sets: devices and information
• Represent the devices with a directed graph of processing and storage device vertices connected by communications device arcs
• Label both vertices and arcs of the device graph with the device physical volume, device capacity, instantaneous device load, sets of the operations that the device can execute and the energies the device dissipates when it executes those operations; the devices of an information system determine the physical limits of the computational environment within which the information of the information system executes and therefore exists
• Represent the information in an information system with a directed bipartite graph of a set of model properties connected to a set of model dependencies
• Label the model properties with the instantaneous property value, property representation size and a set of all admissible property values
• Label model dependencies with the dependency representation size and sets of independent variable properties, dependent variable properties, mappings from all admissible independent variable values to all possible dependent variable values, executable operations and computational work that must be performed to execute each operation
• Map the models represented into the information system devices and initiate execution; at any moment in time, the information system state can be defined by the values of all of the properties of all of the instances of all of the models that the information system represents; similarly, at any moment in time, the next information system state is determined by the set of dependencies that the information system devices are currently executing; execution of this set of dependencies changes the information system state
• Represent the set of all the possible property states that the information system dependencies could generate from all of the possible input property states as a directed graph with accessible property states as vertices and executable transitions between those states as arcs; each dependency represents the mapping between input property states (i.e., independent variable values) and output property states (i.e., dependent variable values); this mapping defines a set of transitions between property states
• Derive approximate relationships between the properties of the device, model and state space graphs from thermodynamic considerations