Introducing MoC Drivers for the Integration of Sensor-Actuator Behaviors in Model-Based Design Flows of Embedded Systems

Abstract

Model-based design flows for embedded systems have been introduced to allow late design changes while still keeping tight time-to-market deadlines. In general, these design flows start with abstract models and refine these to a final implementation maintaining already implemented properties. However, essentially all of these design flows suffer from a deployment gap in the sense that the finally generated files are general program files which assume a particular model of computation (MoC) that may not be provided by the chosen target architecture. For this reason, the final deployment is usually a non-trivial manual design step that can break all correctness-by-construction guarantees of the previous model-based design. In this paper, we therefore introduce the idea of MoC drivers which wraps the real sensor and actuator interaction in a shell that provides the MoC of the generated software. As a particular example, we discuss in this paper how MoC drivers bridge the deployment gap between automatically generated dataflow programs and event-driven behaviors of the target architecture. The approach is illustrated with a Speedometer application on a distributed automotive embedded platform.