Demo Abstract: TEMPO: Integrating Scheduling Analysis in the Industrial Design Practices

Abstract

Summary form only given. Usually, the industrial practices rely on the subjective judgment of experienced software architects and developers to predict how design decisions may impact the system timing behavior. This is however risky since eventual timing errors are only detected after implementation and integration, when the software execution can be tested on system level, under realistic conditions. At this stage, timing errors may be very costly and time consuming to correct. Therefore, to overcome this problem we need an efficient, reliable and automated timing estimation method applicable already at early design stages and continuing throughout the whole development cycle. Scheduling analysis appears to be the adequate candidate for this purpose. However, its use in the industry is conditioned by a seamless integration in the software development process. This is not always an easy task due to the semantic mismatches that usually exist between the design and the scheduling analysis models. At Thales Research & Technology, we have developed a timing framework called TEMPO that solves the semantic issues through appropriate model transformation rules, thus allowing the integration of scheduling analysis in the development process of real-time embedded software. In this demonstration paper, we present the basic building blocks and functionalities of the TEMPO framework and describe the main visible stages in the model transformations involved.