Section: Application Domains

Panorama

Results obtained in Team S4 apply to the design of real-time systems consisting of a distributed hardware architecture, and software to be deployed over that architecture. A particular emphasis is put on embedded systems (automotive, avionics, production systems, etc.), and also, to a lesser extent, telecommunication and production systems.

Our work on contract-based modular reasoning has found applications in embedded system design, by supporting and controlling concurrent design activities in aeronautics.

Our work on heterogeneous reactive systems facilitates the mapping of pure synchronous designs onto a distributed architecture where communication is done by non-instantaneous message passing. These architectures can be usual asynchronous distributed systems or, more interestingly, loosely time-triggered architectures (LTTA), such as those found on board of recent Airbus aircrafts. In the latter, communication is done by periodically reading or writing (according to local inaccurate real-time clocks) distributed shared variables, without any means of synchronizing these operations. The consequence is that values may be lost or duplicated, and software designed for such specific architectures must resist losses or duplications of messages. In the context of the IST European network of excellence Artist we have developed a theoretical and methodological framework in which the correct mapping of synchronous designs to such particular distributed architectures can be best understood, at a high level of abstraction.