An Adaptive Design Methodology for Reduction of Product Development Risk

Embedded systems interaction with environment inherently complicates understanding of requirements and their correct implementation. However, product uncertainty is highest during early stages of development. Design verification is an essential step in the development of any system, especially for Embedded System. This paper introduces a novel adaptive design methodology, which incorporates step-wise prototyping and verification. With each adaptive step product-realization level is enhanced while decreasing the level of product uncertainty, thereby reducing the overall costs. The back-bone of this frame-work is the development of Domain Specific Operational (DOP) Model and the associated Verification Instrumentation for Test and Evaluation, developed based on the DOP model. Together they generate functionally valid test-sequence for carrying out prototype evaluation. With the help of a case study 'Multimode Detection Subsystem' the application of this method is sketched. The design methodologies can be compared by defining and computing a generic performance criterion like Average design-cycle Risk. For the case study, by computing Average design-cycle Risk, it is shown that the adaptive method reduces the product development risk for a small increase in the total design cycle time.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figure

Virtual Platform-Based Design Space Exploration of Power-Efficient Distributed Embedded Applications

Networked embedded systems are essential building blocks of a broad variety of distributed applications ranging from agriculture to industrial automation to healthcare and more. These often require specific energy optimizations to increase the battery lifetime or to operate using energy harvested from the environment. Since a dominant portion of power consumption is determined and managed by software, the software development process must have access to the sophisticated power management mechanisms provided by state-of-the-art hardware platforms to achieve the best tradeoff between system availability and reactivity. Furthermore, internode communications must be considered to properly assess the energy consumption. This article describes a design flow based on a SystemC virtual platform including both accurate power models of the hardware components and a fast abstract model of the wireless network. The platform allows both model-driven design of the application and the exploration of power and network management alternatives. These can be evaluated in different network scenarios, allowing one to exploit power optimization strategies without requiring expensive field trials. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated via experiments on a wireless body area network application

The business model: Theoretical roots, recent developments, and future research

The paper provides a broad and multifaceted review of the received literature on business models, in which we attempt to explore the origin of the construct and to examine the business model concept through multiple disciplinary and subject-matter lenses. The review reveals that scholars do not agree on what a business model is, and that the literature is developing largely in silos, according to the phenomena of interest to the respective researchers. However, we also found some emerging common ground among students of business models. Specifically, i) the business model is emerging as a new unit of analysis; ii) business models emphasize a system-level, holistic approach towards explaining how firms do business; iii) organizational activities play an important role in the various conceptualizations of business models that have been proposed, and iv) business models seek not only to explain the ways in which value is captured but also how it is created. These emerging themes could serve as important catalysts towards a more unified study of business models.Business model; strategy; technology management; innovation; literature review;

Application development process for GNAT, a SOC networked system

The market for smart devices was identified years ago, and yet commercial progress into this field has not made significant progress. The reason such devices are so painfully slow to market is that the gap between the technologically possible and the market capitalizable is too vast. In order for inventions to succeed commercially, they must bridge the gap to tomorrow\u27s technology with marketability today. This thesis demonstrates a design methodology that enables such commercial success for one variety of smart device, the Ambient Intelligence Node (AIN). Commercial Off-The Shelf (COTS) design tools allowing a Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) approach are combined via custom middleware to form an end-to-end design flow for rapid prototyping and commercialization. A walkthrough of this design methodology demonstrates its effectiveness in the creation of Global Network Academic Test (GNAT), a sample AIN. It is shown how designers are given the flexibility to incorporate IP Blocks available in the Global Economy to reduce Time-To-Market and cost. Finally, new kinds of products and solutions built on the higher levels of design abstraction permitted by MDA design methods are explored

System Level Performance Evaluation of Distributed Embedded Systems

In order to evaluate the feasibility of the distributed embedded systems in different application domains at an early phase, the System Level Performance Evaluation (SLPE) must provide reliable estimates of the nonfunctional properties of the system such as end-to-end delays and packet losses rate. The values of these non-functional properties depend not only on the application layer of the OSI model but also on the technologies residing at the MAC, transport and Physical layers. Therefore, the system level performance evaluation methodology must provide functionally accurate models of the protocols and technologies operating at these layers. After conducting a state of the art survey, it was found that the existing approaches for SLPE are either specialized for a particular domain of systems or apply a particular model of computation (MOC) for modeling the communication and synchronization between the different components of a distributed application. Therefore, these approaches abstract the functionalities of the data-link, Transport and MAC layers by the highly abstract message passing methods employed by the different models of computation. On the other hand, network simulators such as OMNeT++, ns-2 and Opnet do not provide the models for platform components of devices such as processors and memories and totally abstract the application processing by delays obtained via traffic generators. Therefore the system designer is not able to determine the potential impact of an application in terms of utilization of the platform used by the device. Hence, for a system level performance evaluation approach to estimate both the platform utilization and the non-functional properties which are a consequence of the lower layers of OSI models (such as end-to-end delays), it must provide the tools for automatic workload extraction of application workload models at various levels of refinement and functionally correct models of lower layers of OSI model (Transport MAC and Physical layers). Since ABSOLUT is not restricted to a particular domain and also does not depend on any MOC, therefore it was selected for the extension to a system level performance evaluation approach for distributed embedded systems. The models of data-link and Transport layer protocols and automatic workload generation of system calls was not available in ABSOLUT performance evaluation methodology. The, thesis describes the design and modelling of these OSI model layers and automatic workload generation tool for system calls. The tools and models integrated to ABSOLUT methodology were used in a number of case studies. The accuracy of the protocols was compared to network simulators and real systems. The results were 88% accurate for user space code of the application layer and provide an improvement of over 50% as compared to manual models for external libraries and system calls. The ABSOLUT physical layer models were found to be 99.8% accurate when compared to analytical models. The MAC and transport layer models were found to be 70-80% accurate when compared with the same scenarios simulated by ns-2 and OMNeT++ simulators. The bit error rates, frame error probability and packet loss rates show close correlation with the analytical methods .i.e., over 99%, 92% and 80% respectively. Therefore the results of ABSOLUT framework for application layer outperform the results of performance evaluation approaches which employ virtual systems and at the same time provide as accurate estimates of the end-to-end delays and packet loss rate as network simulators. The results of the network simulators also vary in absolute values but they follow the same trend. Therefore, the extensions made to ABSOLUT allow the system designer to identify the potential bottlenecks in the system at different OSI model layers and evaluate the non-functional properties with a high level of accuracy. Also, if the system designer wants to focus entirely on the application layer, different models of computations can be easily instantiated on top of extended ABSOLUT framework to achieve higher simulation speeds as described in the thesis

Ensuring Cyber-Security in Smart Railway Surveillance with SHIELD

Modern railways feature increasingly complex embedded computing systems for surveillance, that are moving towards fully wireless smart-sensors. Those systems are aimed at monitoring system status from a physical-security viewpoint, in order to detect intrusions and other environmental anomalies. However, the same systems used for physical-security surveillance are vulnerable to cyber-security threats, since they feature distributed hardware and software architectures often interconnected by ‘open networks’, like wireless channels and the Internet. In this paper, we show how the integrated approach to Security, Privacy and Dependability (SPD) in embedded systems provided by the SHIELD framework (developed within the EU funded pSHIELD and nSHIELD research projects) can be applied to railway surveillance systems in order to measure and improve their SPD level. SHIELD implements a layered architecture (node, network, middleware and overlay) and orchestrates SPD mechanisms based on ontology models, appropriate metrics and composability. The results of prototypical application to a real-world demonstrator show the effectiveness of SHIELD and justify its practical applicability in industrial settings