Control generation for embedded systems based on composition of modal processes

Abstract

In traditional distributed embedded system designs, control information is often replicated across several processes and kept coherent by application-specific mechanisms. Consequently, processes cannot be reused in a new system without tailoring the code to deal with the new system's control information. The modal process framework provides a high-level way to specify the coherence of replicated control information independently of the behavior of the processes. Thus multiple processes can be composed without internal tailoring and without suffering from errors common in lower-level specification styles. This paper first describes a kernel-language representation for the high-level composition operators; it also presents a synthesis algorithm for the mode manager, the runtime code that maintains control information coherence within and between distributed processors.