Model-Driven Configuration of Distributed Real-time and Embedded Systems

Abstract

Distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems are increasingly being constructed with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components to reduce development time and effort. The configuration of these components must ensure that real-time quality-of-service (QoS) and resource constraints are satisfied. Due to the numerous QoS constraints that must be met, manual system configuration is hard. Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is a design paradigm that incorporates models to provide visual representations of design entities. MDAs show promise for addressing many of these challenges by allowing the definition and automated enforcement of design constraints. This chapter presents MDA techniques and tools that simplify and automate the configuration of COTS components for DRE systems. First, the challenges that make manual DRE system configuration infeasible are presented. Second, the authors provide an incremental methodology for constructing modeling tools to alleviate these difficulties. Finally, the authors provide a case study describing the construction of the Ascent Modeling Platform (AMP), which is a modeling tool capable of producing near-optimal DRE system configurations.