Scientific publications

The high-tech industry is faced with ever growing amounts of software to be maintained and extended. To keep the associated costs under control, there is a demand for more human overview and for large-scale code restructurings. Language technology such as parsing can assist in this, but classical restructuring tools are typically not flexible enough to accommodate the needs of specific cases.

Mixed-criticality multicore system design must often guarantee both safety and high performance. Memory bandwidth regulation among different cores can be a useful tool for guaranteeing safety, as it mitigates the interference when accessing main memory. The use of mode changes and system models like Vestal’s can help provide both safety, for critical functions, and scheduling performance, by efficiently utilising the platform.

Mixed-criticality (MC) multicore system design must reconcile safety guarantees and high performance. The interference among cores on shared resources in such systems leads to unpredictable temporal behaviour. Memory bandwidth regulation among different cores can be a useful tool to mitigate the interference when accessing main memory.

Software departments of companies that exist for several decades often have to deal with legacy models. Important business assets have been modelled with tools that are no longer preferred within the company. Manually remodelling these models with a new tool would be too costly. In this paper, we describe an approach to migrate from Rhapsody models to models of another tool.

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.

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.