A reactive approach to component-based design of resource-constrained embedded systems

Abstract: Embedded systems have become commonplace in today's society and the number of functions and their complexity are steadily increasing. This can be attributed to the advances in the microprocessor technology and the continuous development of more powerful and power-efficient microprocessors, which, in turn, allows more elaborate software implementations. Consequently, there is a strong interest in finding methods and tools that support flexible and efficient development of embedded software. Component-based design is an attractive approach for design of complex software systems. It reduces development time and cost and improves overall maintainability and robustness of the system. These benefits have been proven difficult to realize when designing software for embedded systems. In particular, it is a challange to manage the extra-functional properties of such systems (e.g. timing). This thesis presents a component-based software design methodology that enables constructing complex software for resource-constrained embedded systems, in particular systems with limited processing power and memory. The underlying component model is based on reactive objects, which are suitable for modeling embedded software. The component model along with the design methodology allows both functional and timing properties of a system model to be preserved during implementation process. Further, it enables the developer to offer platform-independent correctness for real-time systems, provided that the software can be scheduled on a given hardware platform. An effective use of the methodology requires tools supporting it. An integrated development environment (IDE), REKO, has been developed and is presented in this thesis. REKO supports constructing system models graphically and generating C code from the model for execution on bare metal. Using C code makes it easier to integrate REKO with existing tool chains used in industry. The thesis also includes a case study, in which REKO is used for designing a real-life system. The case study demonstrates the potential of the methodology to bridge the gap between state-of-the-art in component-based software design on the one hand, and the methods and tools currently used in the industry on the other.