Toward Preservation of Extra-Functional Properties for Model-Driven Component-Based Software Engineering of Embedded Systems

Abstract: Model-driven and component-based software engineering have been widely recognized as promising paradigms for development of a wide range of systems. Moreover, in the embedded real-time domain, their combination is believed to be helpful in handling the ever-increasing complexity of such systems design.However, in order for these paradigms and their combination to definitely break through at an industrial level for development of embedded real-time systems, both functional and extra-functional properties need to be addressed at each level of abstraction.This research focuses on the preservation of extra-functional properties. More specifically, the aim is to provide support for easing such preservation throughout the entire development process at different abstraction levels.The main outcome of the research work is a round-trip engineering approach aiding the preservation of extra-functional properties by providing code generators, supporting monitoring and analysis of code execution, and then enabling back-propagation of the results to modelling level. In this way, properties that can only be roughly estimated statically are evaluated against runtime values and this consequently allows to optimize the design models for ensuring preservation of analysed extra-functional properties.Moreover, a solution for managing evolution of computational context in which extra-functional properties are defined by means of validity analysis is provided. Such solution introduces a new language for the description of the computational context in which a given property is provided and/or computed by some analysis, enables detection of changes performed to the context description, and analyses the possible impacts on the extra-functional property values based on a precise representation of differences between previous and current version of the model.