papagenoReQ: Generation of Embedded Systems from Application Code Requirements

Abstract

At the beginning of every embedded system is a set of requirements to its software and hardware. In the common case, these requirements change a lot throughout the development cycle and are highly dependent on the software being coded. This already hints at a major problem of the state-of-the-art system development process, in which the hardware platform is established before the software engineering starts: changes to the hardware platform are very costly not only by means of money, but also time. To counteract this problem, we propose a concept where the hardware platform can be directly generated out of a set of requirements, making an inversion of this system development process possible. Using a query language to map requirements to the system to properties of modules that are composed into system configurations, we highly improve the flexibility within embedded systems design and development. The present work uses a set of requirements as an input and generates printed circuit boards of an embedded system matching those requirements based on a developer's module library.