Detailed Real-Time Software Platform Modeling

Abstract

One pillar of Model-Driven Development of real-time software is the separation of concerns between application model and target platform. This requires the definition of model transformations realizing the mapping of the application model onto the target platform. However, target platforms APIs and implementation patterns vary largely from one to the other. This requires the development of several dedicated model transformations which actually embed a given computing target platform model. Dedicated model transformations have shown their limits as soon as we want to modify target platform. In this context, a good compromise could be to extract implementation patterns from model transformation and encapsulate them in a platform model. We, therefore propose some modeling heuristics that permits to build detailed descriptions of the target execution platform, where all platform-specific implementation choices are made explicit using a small set of variation points specific to real-time multi-tasking applications. The benefit expected is a true separation of concerns enabling efficient, reusable and portable transformation processes.