Building blocks for embedded control systems

Developing embedded control systems using a building-block approach at all the parts enables an efficient and fast design process. Main reasons are the real\ud plug-and-play capabilities of the blocks. Furthermore, due the simulatability of the designs, parts of the system can already be tested before the other parts are available.\ud We have applied an object-oriented approach for modeling all three parts of embedded control systems: compositional programming for the embedded software parts; VHDL for the specific I/O computer hardware parts; and bond graphs\ud for the appliance (i.e. the device to be controlled).\ud Due to the simulatability, our building-block method is suitable for a concurrent engineering design approach, and thus supporting hardware-software co-design.\ud Currently, our research focuses on the software description part. The appliance description part has been worked on, while we just use VHDL descriptions for the computer hardware. This is the reason why the emphasis in this text\ud is on the building blocks for the embedded software part