Scientific publications

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.

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.

Dynamic behavior of streaming applications can be effectively modeled by scenario-aware dataflow graphs (SADFs). Many streaming applications must provide timing guarantees (e.g., throughput) to assure their quality-of-service. For instance, a video decoder which is running on a mobile device is expected to deliver a video stream with a specific frame rate.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is opening up new services and is stimulating changes in industries. The lighting industry is also embracing this change by establishing an Internet of Lights (IoL). This article highlights the main benefits and the challenges to face while going towards IoL. To address these challenges and cater to the specific requirements of lighting networks, an IoL reference architecture, Open Architecture for Intelligent Solid State Lighting Systems (OpenAIS), has been proposed.

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.