ISBN 9783843923835

978-3-8439-2383-5, Reihe Informatik

Gerd Kainz
Tool Support for Integrated Development of Component-Based Embedded Systems

170 Seiten, Dissertation Technische Universität München (2015), Softcover, A5

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

Today the development of software for embedded systems becomes more challenging, while constantly more functions are realized. Formerly unrelated applications have to communicate with each other to form so called "cyber-physical systems". In addition, embedded systems are comprised additionally from application code of platform and glue code. This requires the involvement of various experts.

As improvement, this thesis suggests a model-driven software development approach for development of component\hyp{}based embedded systems. In contrast to existing approaches, the approach does not only support application developers, but also supports platform and component developers equally. The approach clearly separates tasks of developers and automatically takes care of dependencies between them.

The suggested modeling approach is based on a multi-step process. In this process each developer group can concentrate on their tasks and the system takes care of the correct integration of the different work results. Consequently, the developers build upon the preceding developments and are guided by the approach. The approach uses a modular design principle based on instantiation and configuration.

For the transformations from input models to models used for code generation the approach provides a mechanism supporting model transformation chains containing exogenous transformations. This allows breaking down transformations into many small and modular transformations, which are easier to understand and maintain. For the creation of the model transformation chain, the developers only need to specify the differences between metamodels and the changes applied to models.

The final code generation is especially targeted to the multi-step modeling approach and allows the definition of the various system parts independently of each other. To integrate the different system parts into the final system, developers can call template functions providing the missing parts. During code generation these function calls are then resolved to the right system parts depending on the provided models.

The approach has been successfully applied to development tools for component-based embedded systems, where it clearly showed benefits compared to the prior style of development, e.g., separation of concerns, increased modularity, and reduction of effort.