Smart sensor modeling with the UML for real-time embedded applications

Abstract

Main feature of real-time embedded (RT/E) applications is that they are closed to their environment that they have to control/command/monitor the running of physical phenomena. To achieve this goal, RT/E applications are equipped with sensors to acquire specific data representative of the environment state. One distinguishes two kinds of sensors data: exteroceptive data and proprioceptive data. Therefore, it is necessary to use intensively sensors to measure physical phenomena associated to sensors data. Integrating sensors in the application is often a tiresome task requiring high skill in both hardware and software techniques. This paper proposes a solution to make sensors interfacing easier all along RT/E applications development. The objective is to define a prototyping methodology assuming to check the validity of the behavior of the sensor starting from a high level description then to generate the sensor interface code. For that, it is necessary to define driver models based on sensors models specifications. Our proposal has to be conformant to either the IEEE 1451 standard or its equivalent OMG specification for interface specification. In the base of this constraint, we aim to define a methodology to design automatically all sensor interfaces based on networked data exchange like. We focus our approach by choosing CAN (Controller Area Network) and Ethernet networks.