Towards a combination of MARTE and ECOA

Through the definition of a metamodel, the ECOA (European Component Oriented Architecture) open standard offers a development framework for complex avionic systems software. Its purpose is to create and maintain architectures to achieve interoperability, sustainability and portability at both functional and software interface level. However, being a metamodel, ECOA only offers an abstract syntax and theoretical concepts to develop software and their interfaces. It therefore suffers from a lack of modeling language, tools and methods enabling real-time analysis during the development process of software. Combining the rigour of the ECOA metamodel with the potential of model-based analysis would not only allow a reduction in development time of complex software-based systems but also help improving system optimality with respect to hard real-time requirements. Translation of ECOA concepts into a formally defined and tooled modeling language is thus an avenue to explore. This paper advocates for using the UML real-time profile MARTE (Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded systems) as it offers a concrete syntax to complete the ECOA metamodel with a certain number of annotations that serve as input for analysis tools. A method will be associated to this approach. Results of a preliminary study are presented both in terms of ECOA to MARTE translation and perspectives for real-time analysis of models.