Towards a model-driven engineering approach for developing embedded hard real-time software

  • Authors:
  • Fabiano Cruz;Raimundo Barreto;Lucas Cordeiro

  • Affiliations:
  • Universidade Federal do Amazonas;Universidade Federal do Amazonas;Universidade Federal do Amazonas

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) has been advocated as an effective way to deal with today's software complexity. MDE can be seen as an integrative approach combining existing techniques such as Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSML) and Transformation Engines. This paper presents the ezRealtime, an MDE-based tool that relies on the Time Petri Net (TPN) formalism and defines a DSML to provide an easy-to-use environment for specifying Embedded Hard Real-Time (EHRT) system and for synthesizing timely and predictable scheduled C code. The ezRealtime adopts the universal XML-based transfer syntax for Petri nets, named as PNML. The main idea of this work is to propose a generative programming method and tool to boost code quality and improve developer productivity with automated software synthesis. The ezRealtime tool reads and automatically translates the specification to a time Petri net model through composition of building blocks with the purpose of providing a complete model of all tasks in the system. Therefore, this model is used to find a feasible schedule by applying a depth-first search algorithm. Finally, the scheduled code is generated by traversing the feasible schedule, and replacing transition's instances by the respective code segments. We also present the application of the proposed method in a case study.