A Layered Software Architecture for Design and Analysis of Embedded Systems

For several years we have been working on an architecture for modelling and implementing autonomous agents [9]. This work has been recently extended in two directions: evaluating the benefits of the architecture in a real-world setting in terms of ease of design, rapid prototyping, dynamic resource management, and studying methods for formal analysis of the reactive subsystem based on the composition with models of its physical environment. This paper gives an introduction to the architecture and a flavour of the above-named extentions. 1 Introduction In this paper we describe a framework for design, implementation and analysis of hierarchical embedded systems. Organizing different types of computation in several layers is a well-known and common approach for development of intelligent autonomous systems. The work we report on here is based on such a layered software architecture developed in our group [5, 9] since 1986. The paper reports on some real-time applications developed based..