Control composition and synthesis of distributed real-time embedded systems
Pai H. Chou, Gaetano Borriello · 1998
To combat growing complexity and decreasing time-to-market, designers of embedded systems find it necessary to design with reusable components and implement on heterogeneous distributed architectures. Components raise the level of abstraction by encapsulating functionality that is accessible only through their interfaces. Unfortunately, the success of components has been limited mainly to data-dominated systems. Control behavior is not reusable in today's component models, which make no provisions for expressing coordination protocols among components. Instead, today's models force designers to sprinkle low-level messaging code. Such components have hardwired coordination behavior and are not reusable without intrusive modifications, which make their behavior complex and unnecessarily difficult to maintain. This dissertation proposes a new approach to the specification and synthesis of heterogeneous distributed embedded systems based on the modal process model. High- level, user-definable relations, called abstract control types, provide the means for control composition by constraining control flow between processes. Modal processes enhance not only reusability, but also retargetabilty through the synthesis of distributed control according to user-defined partitioning of system functionality. Since timing is of central importance to most embedded systems, this dissertation also demonstrates the viability of this specification model for real-time systems with new scheduling techniques appropriate for that regime.