Embedded systems modeling, analysis and synthesis

Model-driven engineering (MDE) refers to the systematic use of models as primary engineering artifacts throughout the engineering life cycle. In this chapter we will show how executable models can be used to aid the design process of a light control subsystem of a wafer scanner. We make an explicit distinction between the model of the application logic and the platform on which it is deployed. It will be shown how the performance of this subsystem can be predicted in an early phase of the design process, before the system is implemented in terms of hardware and software components. The executable model in addition allows a prototype software implementation to be derived from it automatically in a predictable way. The executable model is expressed in POOSL, a special-purpose modeling language targeting real-time embedded systems. To allow an embedding in a future MDE-environment, an experiment is performed to express a similar model in the general-purpose modeling language UML from which the executable models can be derived through model transformations. These transformations further allow one to combine an application model created in UML with a platform model created in POOSL and analyze this combined model