Component-Based Design of Embedded Systems

International audienceIn many engineering disciplines, large systems are built from prefabricated components with known and validated properties. Components are connected via stable, understandable, and standardized interfaces. The system engineer has knowledge about the global properties of the components-as they relate to the system functions-and of the detailed specification of the component interfaces. Knowledge about the internal design and implementation of the components is neither needed, nor available in many cases. A prerequisite for such a constructive approach to system building is that the validated properties of the components are not affected by the system integration. This composability requirement is an important constraint for the selection of a platform for the component-based design of large distributed embedded systems

SystemCSP : a graphical language for designing concurrent component-based embedded control systems

The main contribution of this thesis is the introduction of SystemCSP, a novel graphical design language for specification of interactions in concurrent component based embedded control systems. SystemCSP was developed in the scope of the embedded control systems application area. However, SystemCSP is intended to be used in any kind of software/hardware development dealing with interaction of concurrent components

An initial performance review of software components for a heterogeneous computing platform

The design of embedded systems is a complex activity that involves a lot of decisions. With high performance demands of present day usage scenarios and software, they often involve energy hungry state-of-the-art computing units. While focusing on power consumption of computing units, the physical properties of software are often ignored. Recently, there has been a growing interest to quantify and model the physical footprint of software (e.g. consumed power, generated heat, execution time, etc.), and a component based approach facilitates methods for describing such properties. Based on these, software architects can make energy-efficient software design solutions. This paper presents power consumption and execution time profiling of a component software that can be allocated on heterogeneous computing units (CPU, GPU, FPGA) of a tracked robot

Formal Techniques for Component-based Design of Embedded Systems

Embedded systems have become ubiquitous - from avionics and automotive over consumer electronics to medical devices. Failures may entailmaterial damage or compromise safety of human beings. At the same time, shorter product cycles, together with fast growing complexity of the systems to be designed, create a tremendous need for rigorous design techniques. The goal of component-based construction is to build complex systems from simpler components that are well understood and can be (re)used so as to accelerate the design process. This document presents a summary of the formal techniques for component-based design of embedded systems I have (co-)developed

Generating Embedded Systems Software using a Component Based Development Approach

This work examines how a predominantly graphical approach to software development, that was designed to be deployment platform agnostic, can be used to target embedded software systems. The general aim of the approach was to provide engineers with a development method that was general enough to be applied across a multitude of problem domains. The development technique employs a component centric approach, in which target platform specifics are hidden from the language design. Deployment specific mapping tools are then used to target each type of system. Embedded software systems however are probably the most demanding type of target system, due to limited resources and lack of software infrastructure support. This paper describes a method of mapping an example component based design to a target embedded system

A Petri net meta-model to develop software components for embedded systems

This paper presents a new Petri net (PN) meta-model, called shobi-PN v2.0, that can be used to specify the dynamic behaviour of concurrent systems, using object-oriented modelling concepts together with a generalised arc set capable of coping with the complexity of the current embedded systems. This new Petri net meta-model can also be used to support a component-based development approach in the design of generic and parametrisable control-oriented software components for embedded systems

Formal Compositional Semantics for Yakindu Statecharts

Many of today’s safety-critical systems are reactive, embedded systems. Their internal behavior is usually represented by state-based models. Furthermore, as the tasks carried out by such systems are getting more and more complex, there is a strong need for compositional modeling languages. Such modeling formalisms start from the component-level and use composition to build the system-level model as a collection of simple modules. There are a number of solutions supporting the model-based development of safety-critical embedded systems. One of the popular open-source tools is Yakindu, a statechart editor with a rich language and code generation capabilities. However, Yakindu so far lacks support for compositional modeling. This paper proposes a formal compositional language tailored to the semantics of Yakindu statecharts. We propose precise semantics for the composition to facilitate formal analysis and precise code generation. Based on the formal basis laid out here, we plan to build a complete tool-chain for the design and verification of component- based reactive systems

Model-based validation of CANopen systems

International audienceCANopen is an increasingly popular protocol for the design of networked embedded systems. Nonetheless, the large variety of communication and network management functionalities supported in CANopen can increase significantly systems complexity and in turn, the needs for system validation at design time. We present hereafter a rigorous method based on formal modeling and verification techniques, allowing to provide a comprehensive analysis of CANopen systems. Our method uses BIP, a formal framework for modeling, analysis and implementation of real-time, heterogeneous, component-based systems and the associated BIP tools for simulation, performance evaluation and statistical model-checking

Membrane-based design and management methodology for parallel dynamically reconfigurable embedded systems

International audiencePartial and dynamic reconfiguration provides a relevant new dimension to design efficient parallel embedded systems. However, due to the encasing complexity of such systems, ensuring the consistency and parallelism management at runtime is still a key challenge. So architecture models and design methodology are required to allow for efficient component reuse and hardware reconfiguration management.This paper presents a distributed persistence management model and its implementation for reconfigurable multiprocessor systems on dynamically reconfigurable circuits. The proposed approach is inspired from the well-known component based models used in software applications development. Our model is based on membranes wrapping the systems components. The objective is to improve design productivity and ensure consistency by managing context switching and storage using modular distributed hardware controllers. These membranes are distributed and optimized with the aim to design self-adaptive systems by allowing dynamic changes in parallelism degree and contexts migration. Simulation and synthesis results are given to show performances and effectiveness of our methodology