Architecture-Driven Semantic Analysis of Embedded Systems (Eds) Dagstuhl Seminar 12272

Architectural modeling of complex embedded systems is gaining prominence in recent years, both in academia and in industry. An architectural model represents components in a distributed system as boxes with well-defined interfaces, connections between ports on component interfaces, and specifies component properties that can be used in analytical reasoning about the model. Models are hierarchically organized, so that each box can contain another system inside, with its own set of boxes and connections between them. The goal of Dagstuhl Seminar 12272 “Architecture-Driven Semantic Analysis of Embedded Systems” is to bring together researchers who are interested in defining precise semantics of an architecture description language and using it for building tools that generate analytical models from architectural ones, as well as generate code and configuration scripts for the system. This report documents the program and the outcomes of the presentations and working groups held during the seminar

Incremental Latency Analysis of Heterogeneous Cyber-Physical Systems

REACTION 2014. 3rd International Workshop on Real-time and Distributed Computing in Emerging Applications. Rome, Italy. December 2nd, 2014.Cyber-Physical Systems, as used in automotive, avionics, or aerospace domains, have critical real-time require-ments. Time-related issues might have important impacts and, as these systems are becoming extremely software-reliant, validate and enforcing timing constraints is becoming difficult. Current techniques are mainly focused on validating these constraints late by using integration tests and tracing the system execution. Such methods are time-consuming and labor-intensive and, discovering timing issue late in the development process might incur significant rework efforts. In this paper, we propose an incremental model-based ap-proach to analyze and validate timing requirements of cyber-physical systems. We first capture the system functions, its related latency requirements and validate the end-to-end latency at a high level. This functional architecture is then refined into an implementation deployed on an execution platform. As system description is evolving, the latency analysis is being refined with more precise values. Such an approach provide latency analysis from a high level specification without having to implement the system, saving potential re-engineering efforts. It also helps engineers to select appropriate execution platform components or change the deployment strategy of system functions to ensure that latency requirements will be met when implementing the system.This material is based upon work funded and supported by the Department of Defense under Contract No. FA8721-05-C-0003 with Carnegie Mellon University for the operation of the Software Engineering Institute, a federally funded research and development center

Design and Analysis of Multi-Core Architecture for Cyber-Physical Systems

International audienceCyber-Physical Systems are becoming software intensive, collocating many functions on a single processor and requiring a significant processing capacity which increased over the years. In recent years, improving processing performance has been achieved by adding more processing cores on the same chip rather than increasing its frequency. This new design also introduces issues: interaction among cores may impact software performance and might also arm software isolation layers, such as the one defined in ARINC653. For that reason, software using multi-core architecture must be carefully designed and specified with hardware and software aspects. This would help to analyze the system and detect potential design issue. This paper proposes an approach to represent multi-core architectures and their association with software ar-tifacts, such as the ones used for cyber-physical systems (e.g., the ARINC653 platform). For that purpose, we use the AADL language and define specific modeling patterns with new properties

Software dependability modeling using an industry-standard architecture description language

Performing dependability evaluation along with other analyses at architectural level allows both making architectural tradeoffs and predicting the effects of architectural decisions on the dependability of an application. This paper gives guidelines for building architectural dependability models for software systems using the AADL (Architecture Analysis and Design Language). It presents reusable modeling patterns for fault-tolerant applications and shows how the presented patterns can be used in the context of a subsystem of a real-life application

SMILE/ MARVEL: Two Approaches to Knowledge-Based Programming Environments

This technical report consists of three related papers in the area of intelligent assistance for software development and maintenance. Intelligent Assistance without Artificial Intelligence describes SMILE, a software engineering environment that assists teams of programmers without using AI technology. An Architecture for Intelligent Assistance in Software Development presents an AI approach to generalizing the capabilities of SMILE. Granularity Issues in a Knowledge-Based Programming Environment briefly describes MARVEL, an intelligent assistant based on this AI approach, and compares it to SMILE

Enforcement of Quality Attributes for Net-Centric Systems through Modeling and Validation with Architecture Description Languages

International audienceIn this paper we discuss and demonstrate how to conduct validation of data quality attributes, e.g., security, data accuracy, data confidence, and temporal correctness, can be modeled and validated using an architecture description language such as AADL. We focus on security, specifically confidentiality

Intelligent Assistance for Software Development and Maintenance

This article presents an architecture for controlled automation in software development environments. Controlled automation enables environments to behave as intelligent assistants by answering questions about the software project and automatically invoking tools to further the users’ goal of producing a working software system. The discussion of the architecture focuses primarily on the programming stages of development and maintenance. An environment assists programmers by understanding the technical aspects of the evolving software system and by actively participating in the programming process. The architecture supports these capabilities by providing two kinds of knowledge representation: (1) the knowledge specific to a particular software project is represented as entities in a database and (2) the knowledge that models programming activities in general is represented as rules amenable to forward and backward chaining. These rules enable an environment to automatically carry out each activity sometime between when its conditions are satisfied and its results are required. The rules are grouped into collections called strategies. One or more specific strategies are employed according to each user’s current context and goals, and determine when forward or backward chaining should be applied and which rules are considered during chaining. This architecture has been validated through a prototype implementation that models the capabilities of an existing environment that supports automation

Preliminary Sunyaev Zel'dovich Observations of Galaxy Clusters with OCRA-p

We present 30 GHz Sunyaev Zel'dovich (SZ) observations of a sample of four galaxy clusters with a prototype of the One Centimetre Receiver Array (OCRA-p) which is mounted on the Torun 32-m telescope. The clusters (Cl0016+16, MS0451.6-0305, MS1054.4-0321 and Abell 2218) are popular SZ targets and serve as commissioning observations. All four are detected with clear significance (4-6 sigma) and values for the central temperature decrements are in good agreement with measurements reported in the literature. We believe that systematic effects are successfully suppressed by our observing strategy. The relatively short integration times required to obtain these results demonstrate the power of OCRA-p and its successors for future SZ studies.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures. Accepted by MNRAS, online earl

Performing Safety Analyses with AADL and AltaRica

AADL and AltaRica languages can be used to support the safety assessments of system architectures. These languages were defined with different concerns and this paper aims at presenting their principles and how they can be related. A translator from AADL to AltaRica is proposed and its prototype is applied to a simplified flight control system of a UAV. The resulting AltaRica model has been analyzed with the AltaRica safety tools and the experimental results are discussed