An interactive visualization tool for the analysis of multi-objective embedded systems design space exploration

The design of today’s embedded systems involves a complex Design Space Exploration (DSE) process. Typically, multiple and conflicting criteria (objectives) should be optimized simultaneously such as performance, power, cost, etc. Usually, Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) are used to explore a large design space with a finite number of design point evaluations, providing the designer a set of tradable solutions with respect to the design criteria. Analyzing how such evolutionary algorithms searched the design space, understanding the characteristics of the optimum design points, the effect of design parameters on each objective and the relationships between different criteria is of invaluable importance to the designer. To this end, this paper proposes a novel interactive visualization tool, VMODEX (Visualization of Multi-Objective Design spacE eXploration), to realize the search dynamics of a MOEA and to visualize where the optimum design points are located in the design space and what objective values they have. In our tool, we provide several interactive capabilities, which enable designers to look at the exploration data from different perspectives and provide better analysis of the search results. Keywords—Design space exploration, embedded systems, multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, visualization I