Model-Based Development of Distributed Embedded Systems by the Example of the Scicos/SynDEx Framework

摘要

The embedded systems engineering industry faces increasing demands for morefunctionality, rapidly evolving components, and shrinking schedules. Abilitiesto quickly adapt to changes, develop products with safe design, minimizeproject costs, and deliver timely are needed. Model-based development (MBD)follows a separation of concerns by abstracting systems with an appropriateintensity. MBD promises higher comprehension by modeling on severalabstraction-levels, formal verification, and automated code generation. Thisthesis demonstrates MBD with the Scicos/SynDEx framework on a distributedembedded system. Scicos is a modeling and simulation environment for hybridsystems. SynDEx is a rapid prototyping integrated development environment fordistributed systems. Performed examples implement well-known control algorithmson a target system containing several networked microcontrollers, sensors, andactuators. The addressed research question tackles the feasibility of MBD formedium-sized embedded systems. In the case of single-processor applicationsexperiments show that the comforts of tool-provided simulation, verification,and code-generation have to be weighed against an additional memory consumptionin dynamic and static memory compared to a hand-written approach. Establishinga near-seamless modeling-framework with Scicos/SynDEx is expensive. Anincreased development effort indicates a high price for developing singleapplications, but might pay off for product families. A further drawback wasthat the distributed code generated with SynDEx could not be adapted tomicrocontrollers without a significant alteration of the scheduling tables. TheScicos/SynDEx framework forms a valuable tool set that, however, still needsmany improvements. Therefore, its usage is only recommended for experimentalpurposes.