CSR---EHS: SysWeaver: A Holistic Model-Based Design and Development Environment for Distributed Real-Time Systems

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Embedded real-time systems span a wide range of application domains including consumer electronics, motion and transportation control, automotive systems, building control, process control, industrial automation, aerospace and defense, and network elements. For example, a modern automobile has tens of microcontrollers, which must coordinate and control actuators in real-time. Failure to act on time can lead to damage to property and even loss of life. Hence, these systems must often satisfy multiple requirements: timeliness, jitter, fault-tolerance, safety, security and dynamic modalities. However, the bulk of the development of these systems continues to be at a low level of abstraction. Policies dealing with concurrency, end-to-end timing requirements, jitter constraints, exception-handling, failure management, safety issues and security concerns are hardwired into the architecture. Subsequently, the system implementation is directly coupled with the details of underlying run-time environments including OS interfaces, communication protocols adopted and programming languages used. The end-result is the creation of stove-pipe architectures and implementations that are very hard, a posteriori, to understand, analyze, validate, modify and maintain. Model-based development of embedded real-time systems is aimed at elevating the level of abstraction at which these systems are designed, analyzed, validated, coded and tested. The use of a holistic and coherent multi-dimensional model across all behaviors enables model-based design to generate systems that are correct by construction. It thus offers the promise of representing necessary functional and para-functional (sometimes called non-functional) behaviors at a level that is easy to understand, reuse, analyze formally, validate rigorously, and significantly easier to modify and maintain. This project is developing a model-based design and development toolset called SysWeaver that (i) models in an integrated fashion functional and para-functional concerns along with hardware configurations of distributed real-time systems, (ii) validates functional and para-functional behaviors at the modeling level, (iii) generates complete runtime code for these systems, (iv) helps collect run-time measurements to provide richer annotations of the models required for (say) worst-case timing analysis. The software tools are made available for free download and use.