Gaining Insight into Executable Models during Runtime: Architecture and Mappings

An extension to a seamless, model-based development approach provides an architecture for debugging models that execute on target systems or in dedicated rapid-prototyping environments. During development, the ever-increasing design complexity of embedded systems frequently comes into conflict with cost, time-to-market, and quality. This complexity results from increasing functionality, the expanding design space, the distribution of functionality to distributed control units, the optimization of power dissipation, and performance requirements. As complexity increases, the development focus shifts from electronic and pure control-based systems toward software-based systems. The embedded-software development community is increasingly accepting the object-oriented paradigm, and a growing number of graphical tools for computer-aided systems and software engineering (CASE) support it. Relevant notations include the Unified Modeling Language (UML), statecharts, and signalflow-based modeling. In this article, we briefly describe our development process for specifying software targeted at embedded systems according to different modeling domains and transforming it to an executable binary that's appropriate for rapid prototyping