A Program Family Approach to Developing Mesh Generators

Abstract

<p>This thesis presents a systematic approach for rapid development of a program family of special-purpose 2D structured mesh generators, where a mesh is a discretization of a geometric domain into small simple shapes, such as triangles or quadrilaterals. Mesh generators are commonly used to produce the input files for finite element and other numerical analysis programs that solve partial differential equations.</p> <p>Despite the existence of many general-purpose mesh generators, there is a lack of research attention on the design of special-purpose generators suitable for small and specific meshing problems. The program family approach shown in this thesis supports reuse and code customization by identifying the commonalities and variabilities between mesh generators. The program family we developed accommodates variabilities in geometry, topology, material properties, boundary conditions, system parameters and output file format. Developing mesh generators using the program family approach results in the quality of special purpose mesh generators being improved in terms of usability, reusability and maintainability.</p> <p>The contribution of this thesis centres on the design documentation and the system implementation. The complete documentation of our design includes a commonality analysis, requirements specification, and module guide. The contributions with respect to the implementation include the use of a domain-specific language (DSL) written in XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) to model the seed specification required to produce a mesh generator family member, as well as applying XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) to allow flexible customization of the output file(s).</p>