Embedded SW Design Exploration Using UML-based Estimation Tools

Abstract. This paper presents an approach for the estimation of memory, performance, and energy from an initial UML specification. It allows the designer to evaluate and compare different modeling solutions, thus supporting design space exploration at a very high abstraction level. An experiment demonstrates our approach, in which an application is modeled in different ways and the solutions are compared using the high-level estimates. Experimental results are presented and demonstrate the effectiveness of the estimates in an early design space exploration. These results present a very small error when software components are reused and their costs are already known, achieving errors that are smaller than 10%.