Scientific publications

The timed dataflow model of computation is a useful performance analysis tool for electronic system level design automation and embedded software synthesis. Its determinism gives it strong analyzability properties. Its monotonic temporal behavior provides hard real-time guarantees on throughput and latency.

Service-oriented systems interconnect with other systems in a time critical manner, making their performance vital. For this purpose, we propose an automated performance evaluation approach for service-oriented systems which includes both performance measurement and prediction. The approach makes use of the iDSL language, a domain specific language tailored to modeling service-oriented systems, and the iDSL toolchain to evaluate iDSL models, as follows.

Unclear descriptions of software interfaces between components often lead to integration issues during development and maintenance. To address this, we have developed a framework named ComMA (Component Modeling and Analysis) that supports model-based engineering of components. ComMA is a combination of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) for the specification of interface signatures, state machines to express the allowed interaction behaviour, and constraints on data and timing.

Model-based testing is one of the promising technologies to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of software testing. This paper outlines the evolution of model-based testing based on labelled transition systems, from purely theoretical developments in the eighties to industrially applicable tools now: from canonical testers to practical testers.

The tutorial at CONCUR will provide a practical overview of work undertaken over the last six years in the Multicore Programming Group at Imperial College London, and with collaborators internationally, related to understanding and reasoning about concurrency in software designed for acceleration on GPUs.

Online scheduling of operations is essential to optimize productivity of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) where manufacturing requests arrive on the fly. An FMS processes products according to a particular flow through processing stations. This work focusses on online scheduling of re-entrant FMSs with flows using processing stations where products pass twice and with limited buffering between processing stations.

Truck platooning for which multiple trucks follow at a short distance is considered a near-Term truck automation opportunity, with the potential to reduce fuel consumption. Short following distances and increasing automation make it hard for a driver to be the backup if the system fails. The EcoTwin consortium successfully demonstrated a two truck platooning system with trucks following at 20 meters distance at the public road, in which the driver is the backup.

Accurate link quality estimation is a fundamental building block in quality aware multi hop routing. In an inherently lossy, unreliable and dynamic medium such as wireless, the task of accurate estimation becomes very challenging. Over the years ETX has been widely used as a reliable link quality estimation metric.

Image-Based control systems extract information by a camera and an image processing algorithm. The challenge of such controllers is that the sensing latency deteriorates the control performance. Multi-core technology can be used to implement the sensing algorithm in a pipelined fashion. More processing resources potentially lead to better settling time.

The development of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) with mechanical, electrical and software components requires a multi-disciplinary approach. Moreover, the use of models is important to support trade-offs and design decisions early in the development process. Since the different engineering disciplines use different modelling languages and tools, this calls for a co-simulation framework for discrete and continuous models.