Leveraging analysis-aided design decision knowledge in UML-based development of embedded systems

Many important works have been carried out to provide modeling languages (e.g., UML, SDL) with expressiveness to support embedded system design, validation and verification. A fundamental shortcoming in current model-driven approaches is the inability to explicitly capture design decisions and trade-offs between different non-functional parameters, among which timeliness, memory usage, and power consumption are of primary interest. This paper highlights technical limitations in UML to specify complex non-functional evaluation scenarios of candidate architectures, and outlines our current work to provide straightforward solutions.