Section: Research Program

Logical Time in Model-Driven Embedded System Design

Participants : Julien Deantoni, Frédéric Mallet, Marie Agnès Peraldi Frati, Robert de Simone.

Starting from specific needs and opportunities for formal design of embedded systems as learned from our work on MoCCs (see 3.1 ), we developed a Logical Time Model as part of the official OMG UML profile MARTE for Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time Embedded systems. With this model is associated a Clock Constraint Specification Language (CCSL), which allows to provide loose or strict logical time constraints between design ingredients, be them computations, communications, or any kind of events whose repetitions can be conceived as generating a logical conceptual clock (or activation condition). The definition of CCSL is provided in [1] .

Our vision is that many (if not all) of the timing constraints generally expressed as physical prescriptions in real-time embedded design (such as periodicity, sporadicity) could be expressed in a logical setting, while actually many physical timing values are still unknown or unspecified at this stage. On the other hand, our logical view may express much more, such as loosely stated timing relations based on partial orderings or partial constraints.

So far we have used CCSL to express important phenonema as present in several formalisms: AADL (used in avionics domain), EAST-ADL2 (proposed for the AutoSar automotive electronic design approach), IP-Xact (for System-on-Chip (SoC) design). The difference here comes from the fact that these formalisms were formerly describing such issues in informal terms, while CCSL provides a dedicated formal mathematical notation. Close connections with synchronous and polychronous languages, especially Signal, were also established; so was the ability of CCSL to model dataflow process network static scheduling.

In principle the MARTE profile and its Logical Time Model can be used with any UML editor supporting profiles. In practice we focused on the Papyrus open-source editor, mainly from CEA LIST. We developed under Eclipse the TimeSquare solver and emulator for CCSL constraints (see  6.2 ), with its own graphical interface, as a stand-alone software module, while strongly coupled with MARTE and Papyrus.

While CCSL constraints may be introduced as part of the intended functionality, some may also be extracted from requirements imposed either from real-time user demands, or from the resource limitations and features from the intended execution platform. Sophisticated detailed descriptions of platform architectures are allowed using MARTE, as well as formal allocations of application operations (computations and communications) onto platform resources (processors and interconnects). This is of course of great value at a time where embedded architectures are becoming more and more heterogeneous and parallel or distributed, so that application mapping in terms of spatial allocation and temporal scheduling becomes harder and harder. This approach is extensively supported by the MARTE profile and its various models. As such it originates from the Application-Architecture-Adequation (AAA ) methodology, first proposed by Yves Sorel, member of Aoste. AAA aims at specific distributed real-time algorithmic methods, described next in 3.3 .

Of course, while logical time in design is promoted here, and our works show how many current notions used in real-time and embedded systems synthesis can naturally be phrased in this model, there will be in the end a phase of validation of the logical time assumptions (as is the case in synchronous circuits and SoC design with timing closure issues). This validation is usually conducted from Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) analysis on individual components, which are then used in further analysis techniques to establish the validity of logical time assumptions (as partial constraints) asserted during the design.