Early-stage performance modeling and its application for integrated embedded control software design

Abstract

Most of current embedded control software (ECSW) development techniques deal only with performance specifications during the early software design phase and delay the modeling and analysis until the detail design has been completed. In this paper, we propose a new approach to modeling and analysis of the performance of the designed ECSW without knowing the platform configuration and the software deployment. The functional model is assumed --- as is commonly the case in practice --- to be constructed by integrating existing (reusable) software components. The performance of components and connections in the model are modeled using annotated requirements and virtual resource demands. Our algorithm then computes the system performance such as end-to-end delays of transactions and workloads by traversing the model. The results can be applied to the platform design and runtime architecture generation. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method in real world applications, we present the analysis of automotive vehicle-to-vehicle control software as an example.