Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

An embedded architecture is an artefact of heterogeneous constituants and at the crossing of several design viewpoints: software, embedded in hardware, interfaced with the physical world. Time takes different forms when observed from each of these viewpoints: continuous or discrete, event-based or time-triggered. Unfortunately, modelling and programming formalisms that represent software, hardware and physics significantly alter this perception of time. Moreover, time reasoning in system design is usually isolated to a specific design problem: simulation, profiling, performance, scheduling, parallelisation, simulation. All these tasks would benefit from modularity and compositionally gained by globally reasoning about time. The aim of project-team TEA is to define a conceptually unified semantic framework for time reasoning in embedded system design, and to put it to practice by revisiting common analysis and synthesis issues in real-time system design with the compositionality gained from that formalisation.