MDA for embedded systems dedicated to process control
Jean-Louis Houberdon, Jean‐Philippe Babau · 2003
The main interest of the Object Oriented (OO) approach is its ability to improve the quality of soft-ware, mainly due to modularity, extensibility, and reusability. This approach is widely acknowledgedby the industrial world and reinforced by the emergence of a standard (Unified Modeling Language[UML01]). Moreover, the MDA approach (Model Driven Architecture [MDA03]) has been defined bythe OMG (Object Management Group) in order to improve the development of systems. This approachis based on models and model transformations.In a classical software life cycle (V shaped, waterfall, incremental, ...), development is definedas a set of consecutive phases. So, according to the MDA approach, each phase produces a model.Each model is used as starting point for the next phase. In MDA, a phase corresponds to a modeltransformation.MDA is recent and is not widely used for the development of embedded real-time systems. Thedomain of this paper deals with applications of process control. In such applications, a physical event(interrupt, physical expiration) triggers an action which produces a command, with some associatedreal-time constraints like deadlines.This paper aims to propose a modeling approach for development of embedded real-time processcontrol systems while following the MDA approach. This approach aims to conform to the MDA ap-proach. In the first section, the MDA approach and the associated modeling approaches are described.Then in a second section, after the context has been described, we identify and describe the set of theneeded models and the set of the associated transformations. Finally we conclude with some applicationsand perspectives of this work.