From MDD to Full Industrial Process: Building Distributed Real-Time Embedded Systems for the High-Integrity Domain
From small and very specialized applications, real-time embedded systems are now evolving towards large distributed and interconnected systems. The construction of such systems is becoming increasingly complex, while being put under heavy pressures (econo
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ract. From small and very specialized applications, real-time embedded systems are now evolving towards large distributed and interconnected systems. The construction of such systems is becoming increasingly complex, while being put under heavy pressures (economic, mission criticality, time, etc.). We see a current trend to extend and reuse existing specification and modeling techniques for embedded systems under the “Model Driven Architecture” approach (MDA). Expected benefits range from a better control over the application life-cycle to the integration of performance, analysis or verification tools. In this paper, we take a very pragmatic position and illustrate how building Distributed Real-Time systems (DRE) for the High-Integrity domain in a Model Driven Development (MDD) process may fail to address core requirements, and why going “back to the basics” of the code and implementation is required to avoid missing the strongest requirements; and avoid a situation in which the MDD fails to deliver its promises. Our claim is that MDD provides value to the engineering of complex system, if and only if it can take full advantage of the expressive power of the models to help the user in certifying or validating its system. This includes full control of the code generation, validation and verification or testing process. In the following, we show some limits in current MDD-based DRE projects. We discuss how a careful use of a modeling language like AADL can reduce them, by separating modeling concerns from the underlying execution environment. We then introduce our work in this domain, demonstrating how both a unified modeling approach, combined with precise code generators can provide the user full control and confidence when building its own DRE systems.
1 Introduction The usage of embedded systems in our daily life is increasing with the use of many electronic appliances, most of which use a computer program inside. They usually fall into the embedded class of systems, meaning their interaction with the user and their constraints (resources, availability, etc.) differ from typical (“desktop”) applications. Besides, economic pressure implied shorter development cycle. For instance, phone suppliers should output a new device every three months. The presence of a bug has a strong economic cost. This implies the development process should follow a stringent engineering methodology. F. Kordon and O. Sokolsky (Eds.): Monterey Workshop 2006, LNCS 4888, pp. 35–52, 2007. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
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J. Hugues, L. Pautet, and B. Zalila
In the mean time, the OMG founded a set of standards to foster the construction of systems. Around the “Model Driven Architecture” (MDA) initiative [OMG03], the model becomes the implementation, backed by the UML as backbone for the modeling language, and CORBA and Object-Oriented languages for the runtime support. This approach demonstrated its pertinence to develop many business applications. Modeling tools help the developer to formalize its system; validation, model checking
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