GUI based Code Generation for Embedded Systems

This paper presents a novel approach for an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for generating software for embedded systems using user friendly graphical interface. For the embedded software engineer, starting embedded application development can present a major hurdle. To develop an application for embedded systems there are many technologies and platforms available like RTOS or bare metal programing and many other tools and environment. But these things are conceptually very different. To further complicate matters, these tools are sometimes operating system specific. Embedded application development normally requires development tools that run under Linux according to their application hardware software specification. The programmer therefore needs to first learn the basics of desktop Linux and related tools and their interface subsystems under various kernel images. After all this complications, there are various choices for open source development tools each having its own methods and practices. Although the technology is very powerful, it creates a big complication as one attempts to find a learning path. Thus one should work on techniques which streamlines the whole development process and makes it easy to develop embedded software. A unique user friendly Integrated Development Environment with the help of graphics user interface can be developed for direct code generation which can directly work with targeted embedded hardware. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15057

Passive Fault-Tolerance Management in Component-Based Embedded Systems

It is imperative to accept that failures can and will occur even in meticulously designed distributed systems and to design proper measures to counter those failures. Passive replication minimizes resource consumption by only activating redundant replicas in case of failures, as typically, providing and applying state updates is less resource demanding than requesting execution. However, most existing solutions for passive fault tolerance are usually designed and configured at design time, explicitly and statically identifying the most critical components and their number of replicas, lacking the needed flexibility to handle the runtime dynamics of distributed component-based embedded systems. This paper proposes a cost-effective adaptive fault tolerance solution with a significant lower overhead compared to a strict active redundancy-based approach, achieving a high error coverage with a minimum amount of redundancy. The activation of passive replicas is coordinated through a feedback-based coordination model that reduces the complexity of the needed interactions among components until a new collective global service solution is determined, hence improving the overall maintainability and robustness of the system

Development of a toolkit for component-based automation systems

From the earliest days of mass production in the automotive industry there has been a progressive move towards the use of flexible manufacturing systems that cater for product variants that meet market demands. In recent years this market has become more demanding with pressures from legislation, globalisation and increased customer expectations. This has lead to the current trends of mass customisation in production. In order to support this manufacturing systems are not only becoming more flexible† to cope with the increased product variants, but also more agile‡ such that they may respond more rapidly to market changes. Modularisation§ is widely used to increase the agility of automation systems, such that they may be more readily reconfigured¶. Also with globalisation into India and Asia semi-automatic machines (machines that interact with human operators) are more frequently used to reduce capital outlay and increase flexibility. There is an increasing need for tools and methodologies that support this in order to improve design robustness, reduce design time and gain a competitive edge in the market. The research presented in this thesis is built upon the work from COMPAG/COMPANION (COMponent- based Paradigm for AGile automation, and COmmon Model for PArtNers in automatION), and as part of the BDA (Business Driven Automation), SOCRADES (Service Oriented Cross-layer infrastructure for Distributed smart Embedded deviceS), and IMC-AESOP (ArchitecturE for Service- Oriented Process – monitoring and control) projects conducted at Loughborough University UK. This research details the design and implementation of a toolkit for building and simulating automation systems comprising components with behaviour described using Finite State Machines (FSM). The research focus is the development of the engineering toolkit that can support the automation system lifecycle from initial design through commissioning to maintenance and reconfiguration as well as the integration of a virtual human. This is achieved using a novel data structure that supports component definitions for control, simulation, maintenance and the novel integration of a virtual human into the automation system operation

Enabling component-based design for embedded real-time software

The increasing complexity of embedded software calls for a new, more efficient design approach. A natural choice is to use well-established component-based design; however, its adoption to design of embedded software has been slow and riddled with difficulties. It can be argued that these problems are due to the following peculiarities of embedded systems. Firstly, the tight integration between hardware and software, typical for embedded systems, makes it virtually impossible to model and implement software separately from hardware. Secondly, it is difficult to express timing requirements, an intrinsic part of functionality of many embedded systems, in dataflow abstractions traditionally used in component-based design. We propose to overcome these difficulties by introducing a uniform, consistent modeling of both hardware and software and by integrating timing requirements into the model. We present a modeling framework based on the notions of reactive objects and time-constrained reactions, which enables component-based design of embedded real-time systems. Within this framework, functionality of both hardware and software components is defined in terms of reactions to discrete external events, and timing requirements are specified for each reaction relative to the event that triggered it. We also present a detailed software design methodology for embedded real-time systems based on our modeling framework.Validerad; 2009; 20090307 (jimmie)ESI