42: Programmable Models of Computation for a Component-Based Approach to Heterogeneous Embedded Systems

International audienceEvery notion of a component for the development of embedded systems has to take heterogeneity into account: components may be hardware or software or OS, synchronous or asynchronous, deterministic or not, detailed w.r.t. time or not, detailed w.r.t. data or not, etc. A lot of approaches, following Ptolemy, propose to define several ``Models of Computation and Communication'' (MoCCs) to deal with heterogeneity, and a framework in which they can be combined hierarchically. This paper presents the very first design of a component model for embedded systems called 42. We aim at expressing fine-grain timing aspects and several types of concurrency as MoCCs, but we require that all the MoCCs be ``programmed'' in terms of more basic primitives. 42 is meant to be an abstract description level, intended to be translated into an existing language (e.g., Lustre) for execution and property validation purposes