Scientific publications

Changing an established way of working can be a real headache. This is particularly true if there are high stakes involved, e.g., when changing the development process for complex systems. New design methods, such as model-based engineering (MBE) using domain-specific languages (DSLs) promise significant gains, such as cost reductions and improvements in productivity and product quality.

Cyber-physical systems consist of many hardware and software components. Over the life-cycle of these systems, components are replaced or updated. To avoid integration problems,good interface descriptions are crucial for component-based development of these systems. For new components, a Domain Specific Language (DSL) called Component Modeling & Analysis (ComMA) can be used to formally define the interface of such a component in terms of its signature, state and timing behavior.

The inherent multi-disciplinary nature of cyberphysical systems makes it difficult to get early insight in key system properties and trade-offs that have to be made. Our aim is to support system architects of such systems by facilitating the co-simulation of models from different disciplines and design space exploration.

The construction of a co-simulation for large cyberphysical systems can be very time consuming. We have defined a domain specific language called CoHLA that facilitates this construction based on the standards FMI and HLA. Scalability of this approach is investigated by the application to Internet of Things (IoT) systems.

In multicore architectures, there is potential for contention between cores when accessing shared resources, such as system memory. Such contention scenarios are challenging to accurately analyse, from a worst-case timing perspective. One way of making memory contention in multicores more amenable to timing analysis is the use of memory regulation mechanisms.

Industrial embedded platforms are often used to execute stream-processing applications, from which the results are used by actuators. On average, these stream-processing applications should at least meet the required throughput of their actuators, which poses a real-time requirement on the system. To avoid extra costs and delays, it is desired to estimate during the early design phase if a combination of an embedded platform and a stream-processing application can achieve the required throughput.

System design is a difficult process with many design-choices for which the impact may be difficult to foresee. Manufacturing system design is no exception to this. Increased use of flexible manufacturing systems which are able to perform different operations/use-cases further raises the design complexity.

This tool paper presents iDSL, a language and a fully automated toolchain for evaluating the performance of service-oriented systems. In this work, we emphasize the use of a high-level domain specific language that is tailored to be understood by system designers and domain experts, a transformation into an underlying process algebra which contains latency distribution functions based on real measurements for calibration, and the integration of analysis tools under the hood.

Performance is a critical system property of any system, in particular of data-intensive systems, such as image processing systems. We describe a performance engineering method for families of data-intensive systems that is both simple and accurate; the performance of new family members is predicted using models of existing family members.

Partial Networking, as a mechanism for moving-to-sleep and waking-up embedded systems, is beneficial for saving energy within a vehicle (or within other complex distributed systems). Even though a number of models exist which identify benefits of partial networking, they often address rather specific cases.