A unifying flow to ease smart systems integration

This paper proposes a meet-in-the-middle approach for the modeling and simulation of heterogeneous systems. The starting point is a set of heterogeneous models, developed by adopting the designer's favorite design language and formalism. The methodology exploits automatic translation, abstraction and integration flows to generate a single homogeneous system-level description, that allows fast system simulation. The approach is supported by two novel design domain/abstraction level taxonomies, that generalize a state-of the art taxonomy to identify what characteristics would allow efficient system-level simulation, together with the transformations that must be applied to the starting model to achieve them. The advantage of the approach on system design and prototyping is particularly evident on any kind of highly heterogeneous systems, such as smart systems. The overall automatic flow has been implemented and applied to an open-source case study to measure the performance of each identified abstraction level, and the impact of the proposed methodology.