Communication Centric Design in Complex Automotive Embedded Systems

Automotive embedded applications like the engine management system are composed of multiple functional components that are tightly coupled via numerous communication dependencies and intensive data sharing, while also having real-time requirements. In order to cope with complexity, especially in multi-core settings, various communication mechanisms are used to ensure data consistency and temporal determinism along functional cause-effect chains. However, existing timing analysis methods generally only support very basic communication models that need to be extended to handle the analysis of industry grade problems which involve more complex communication semantics. In this work, we give an overview of communication semantics used in the automotive industry and the different constraints to be considered in the design process. We also propose a method for model transformation to increase the expressiveness of current timing analysis methods enabling them to work with more complex communication semantics. We demonstrate this transformation approach for concrete implementations of two communication semantics, namely, implicit and LET communication. We discuss the impact on end-to-end latencies and communication overheads based on a full blown engine management system

Embedding object-oriented design in system engineering

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a collection of techniques intended to document design decisions about software. This contrasts with systems engineering approaches such as for exampleStatemate and the Yourdon Systems Method (YSM), in which the design of an entire system consisting of software and hardware can be documented. The difference between the system- and the software level is reflected in differences between execution semantics as well as in methodology. In this paper, I show how the UML can be used as a system-level design technique. I give a conceptual framework for engineering design that accommodates the system- as well as the software level and show how techniques from the UML and YSM can be classified within this framework, and how this allows a coherent use of these techniques in a system engineering approach. These ideas are illustrated by a case study in which software for a compact dynamic bus station is designed. Finally, I discuss the consequences of this approach for a semantics of UML constructs that would be appropriate for system-level design

Integrating security and usability into the requirements and design process

According to Ross Anderson, 'Many systems fail because their designers protect the wrong things or protect the right things in the wrong way'. Surveys also show that security incidents in industry are rising, which highlights the difficulty of designing good security. Some recent approaches have targeted security from the technological perspective, others from the human–computer interaction angle, offering better User Interfaces (UIs) for improved usability of security mechanisms. However, usability issues also extend beyond the user interface and should be considered during system requirements and design. In this paper, we describe Appropriate and Effective Guidance for Information Security (AEGIS), a methodology for the development of secure and usable systems. AEGIS defines a development process and a UML meta-model of the definition and the reasoning over the system's assets. AEGIS has been applied to case studies in the area of Grid computing and we report on one of these

A UML-based static verification framework for security

Secure software engineering is a new research area that has been proposed to address security issues during the development of software systems. This new area of research advocates that security characteristics should be considered from the early stages of the software development life cycle and should not be added as another layer in the system on an ad-hoc basis after the system is built. In this paper, we describe a UML-based Static Verification Framework (USVF) to support the design and verification of secure software systems in early stages of the software development life-cycle taking into consideration security and general requirements of the software system. USVF performs static verification on UML models consisting of UML class and state machine diagrams extended by an action language. We present an operational semantics of UML models, define a property specification language designed to reason about temporal and general properties of UML state machines using the semantic domains of the former, and implement the model checking process by translating models and properties into Promela, the input language of the SPIN model checker. We show that the methodology can be applied to the verification of security properties by representing the main aspects of security, namely availability, integrity and confidentiality, in the USVF property specification language

Towards a Precise Semantics for Object-Oriented Modeling Techniques

In this paper we present a possible way how a precise semantics of object oriented modeling techniques can be achieved and what the possible benefits are .We outline the main modeling techniques used in the SysLab project sketch how a precise semantics can be given and how this semantics can be used during the development process.Comment: 6 pages, 0 figure

Using Ontologies for the Design of Data Warehouses

Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on our experience, we have detected a set of situations we have faced up with in real-world projects in which we believe that the use of ontologies will improve several aspects of the design of data warehouses. The aim of this article is to describe several shortcomings of current data warehouse design approaches and discuss the benefit of using ontologies to overcome them. This work is a starting point for discussing the convenience of using ontologies in data warehouse design.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure