A Formalized Approach to Multi-View Components for Embedded Systems Applied to Tool Integration, Run-Time Adaptivity and Architecture Exploration

Sammanfattning: Development of embedded systems poses an increasing challenge fordevelopers largely due to increasing complexity. Several factors contribute tothe complexity challenge:• the number of extra-functional properties applying to embedded systems,such as resource usage, timing effects, safety.• the functionality of embedded systems, to a larger extent than for othersoftware, involves engineers from multiple different disciplines, such asmechanical, control, software, safety, systems and electrical engineers.Themulti-disciplinarity causes the development environments to consistof separate data, models and tools.Several engineering paradigms to handle this complexity increase havebeen suggested, including methodologies focused on architecture, models andcomponents. In systems engineering, a long-standing approach has been todescribe the system in several views, each according to a certain viewpoint.By doing so, a divide-and-conquer strategy is applied to system concerns.Unfortunately, it is hard to always find completely independent concerns:there is always some semantic overlap between the different views. Modelbaseddesign (MBD) deals with building sound abstractions that can representa system under design and be used for analysis. Component-based design(CBD) focuses on how to build reusable component models with well-definedcomposition models.In this thesis, a concept of formalized multi-viewed component models (MVCM) is proposed, which integrates the three above mentioned paradigms.Principles and guidelines for MV CMs are developed. One of the main challengesfor the proposition is to provide MV CMs that produce composabilityboth along component boundaries and viewpoint boundaries. To accomplishthis, the relations between viewpoints need to be explicitly taken into account.Further, the semantic relations between these viewpoints need to be explicitlymodeled in order to efficiently ensure that the views are kept consistent. Asa main contribution, this thesis presents the formalization of the conceptsneeded to build such component models. A proper formalization of multiviewedconcerns provides several opportunities. Given suitable tool support, itwill be feasible to automate architecture analysis and architecture exploration.The thesis includes a number of case studies that provide insight andfeedback to the problem formulation and validating the results. The casestudies include a resource-aware reconfigurable middleware, a design of anarchitecture exploration methodology, and a windshield wiper system.