Modeling and Designing Heterogeneous Systems

The explosive growth of embedded electronics is bringing information and control systems of increasing complexity to every aspects of our lives. The most challenging designs are safety-critical systems, such as transportation systems (e.g., airplanes, cars, and trains), industrial plants and health care monitoring. The difficulties reside in accommodating constraints both on functionality and implementation. The correct behavior must be guaranteed under diverse states of the environment and potential failures; implementation has to meet cost, size, and power consumption requirements. The design is therefore subject to extensive mathematical analysis and simulation. However, traditional models of information systems do not interface well to the continuous evolving nature of the environment in which these devices operate. Thus, in practice, different mathematical representations have to be mixed to analyze the overall behavior of the system. Hybrid systems are a particular class of mixed models that focus on the combination of discrete and continuous subsystems. There is a wealth of tools and languages that have been proposed over the years to handle hybrid systems. However, each tool makes different assumptions on the environment, resulting in somewhat different notions of hybrid system. This makes it difficult to share information among tools. Thus, the community cannot maximally leverage the substantial amount of work that has been directed to this important topic. In this paper, we review and compare hybrid system tools by highlighting their differences in terms of their underlying semantics, expressive power and mathematical mechanisms. We conclude our review with a comparative summary, which suggests the need for a unifying approach to hybrid systems design. As a step in this direction, we make the case for a semantic-aware interchange format, which would enable the use of joint techniques, make a formal comparison between different approaches possible, and facilitate exporting and importing design representations.

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“…A detailed discussion of Metropolis can be found in [26,27]. The complete definition of the metamodel is given in [160].…”

Section: Metropolis-based Abstract Semantics For Hybrid Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Languages and Tools for Hybrid Systems Design

Carloni

Passerone

Pinto

et al. 2006

FNT in Electronic Design Automation

115

109

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“…The Metropolis metamodel [3] is a formalism with precise semantics, yet general enough to support the models of computation [4] proposed so far and, at the same time, to allow the invention of new ones. A behavior can be defined as concurrent occurrences of sequences of actions.…”

Section: Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Then, the appropriate refinement maps are used to embed each specific model into the common refinement. The semantics of interaction is then the result of applying the metamodel abstract semantics (defined in terms of action automata [3]) to the instances of the models. Thus, different model interactions can be obtained by not only changing the common refinement, but also by playing with the refinement maps.…”

Section: Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The execution of a program is defined as a sequence of event vectors v = [E S , E A ] where E S (i) is the event executed by the i-th state process and E A (i) by the i-th analog process. A special event called NOP corresponds to the stalling of a process (refer to [3] for a detailed explanation of the Metropolis metamodel semantics). In this setting, an execution is valid if the transition event E S (i) from state s i to s j implies that the set of values associated with events in E A satisfies the guard conditions defined on the transition.…”

Section: The Interchange Formatmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Interchange Formats for Hybrid Systems: Review and Proposal

Pinto

Sangiovanni‐Vincentelli

Carloni

2005

Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control

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Abstract. Interchange formats have been the backbone of the EDA industry for several years. They are used as a way of helping the development of design flows that integrate foreign tools using formats with different syntax and, more importantly, different semantics. The need for integrating tools coming from different communities is even more severe for hybrid systems because of the relative immaturity of the field and the intrinsic difficulty of the mathematical underpinnings. In this paper, we provide a discussion about interchange formats for hybrid systems, we survey the approaches used by different tools for analysis (simulation and formal verification) and synthesis of hybrid systems, and we give a recommendation for an interchange format for hybrid systems based on the Metropolis metamodel. The proposed interchange format has rigorous semantics and can accommodate the translation to and from the formats of the tools we have surveyed while providing a formal reasoning framework.

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“…The Metropolis project ( [3]) has the objective of provid-2 ing a design methodology and the software infrastructure to enable the design of embedded systems. The focus of the project is in a complete design system for embedded systems from specifications to implementation using methodologies such as platform-based design, communicationbased design and successive refinement.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Techniques in Design-By-Refinement Methodologies

Burch

Sangiovanni‐Vincentelli

System Specification &Amp; Design Languages

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Embedded system design methodologies that are based on the effective use of multiple levels of abstraction hold promise for substantial productivity gains. Starting the design process at a high level of abstraction improves control over the design and facilitates verification and synthesis. In particular, if we use a rigorous approach to link the levels of abstraction, we can establish properties of lower levels from analysis at higher levels. This process goes by the name of "design by refinement". To maximize its benefit, design by refinement requires a formal semantic foundation that supports a wide range of levels of abstraction (e.g., from differential equations describing physical behaviors to high-level requirement specifications). We describe such a semantic foundation, and give examples of how it integrates several well-known models for reactive systems. The semantic foundation allows us to establish the relationships among the different levels of abstractions even when non-homogeneous models are used to describe the design. These relationships are essential to establish properties and to document assumptions about the way the models are used, preventing common errors that are difficult to detect and may otherwise require long redesign cycles.

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Modeling and Designing Heterogeneous Systems

Cited by 42 publications

References 6 publications

Languages and Tools for Hybrid Systems Design

Languages and Tools for Hybrid Systems Design

Interchange Formats for Hybrid Systems: Review and Proposal

Modeling Techniques in Design-By-Refinement Methodologies

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