Modern embedded systems integrate more and more complex functionalities. At the same time, the semiconductor technology advances enable to increase the amount of hardware resources on a chip for the execution. Massively parallel embedded systems specifically deal with the optimized usage of such hardware resources to efficiently execute their functionalities. The design of these systems mainly relies on the following challenging issues: first, how to deal with the parallelism in order to increase the performance; second, how to abstract their implementation details in order to manage their complexity; third, how to refine these abstract representations in order to produce efficient implementations. This article presents the Gaspard design framework for massively parallel embedded systems as a solution to the preceding issues. Gaspard uses the repetitive Model of Computation (MoC), which offers a powerful expression of the regular parallelism available in both system functionality and architecture. Embedded systems are designed at a high abstraction level with the MARTE (Modeling and Analysis of Real-time and Embedded systems) standard profile, in which our repetitive MoC is described by the so-called Repetitive Structure Modeling (RSM) package. Based on the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm, MARTE models are refined towards lower abstraction levels, which make possible the design space exploration. By combining all these capabilities, Gaspard allows the designers to automatically generate code for formal verification, simulation and hardware synthesis from high-level specifications of high-performance embedded systems. Its effectiveness is demonstrated with the design of an embedded system for a multimedia application.

Purpose -Most of the process models concentrate on who does what, when, i.e. on the description of the operational performance of tasks. The goal driven approaches try to establish a close relationship between the "whys" and the "whats". The former captures the strategic goals of the organisation whereas the latter tells us how they are achieved through tasks carried out by actors. In addition, managers do not naturally make the distinction between what to achieve (the goal) and the manner to achieve it (the strategy). This confusion often leads to the expression of manners as goals. In order to make clear the fundamental distinction between these two concerns and to master the complexity of process modelling, this paper seeks to propose a goal-perspective, the map-driven process modelling approach. Design/methodology/approach -The map representation system conforms to goal models in the fact that it recognises the concept of a goal but departs from those by introducing the concept of strategy to attain a goal. Findings -A business and its supporting system change in a concurrent way. In order to help the propagation of the intentional changes onto operational ones, we adopted the two levels hierarchical spiral process model. The intentional spiral deals with the production of the business process models using the map formalism and the operational one deals with the specifications of the supporting systems. Originality/value -A business process is defined in terms of goals and strategies of reaching these goals. The approach allows choosing an appropriate level of details when analysing and redesigning business processes.

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