Applying Model Driven Techniques to Embedded Systems: Software / Hardware Co-design

Systems Engineers are starting to use the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to model their system behavior. Now the latest version of UML, (UML 2.0), and the extensions added by the SysML provide richer expressive power for embedded systems developers to more closely model their systems. By making use of the UML extension mechanism these additions provides a more direct way for developers to define domain-specific languages based on UML. This paper proposes a model-driven approach for the generation of embedded real-time process control systems leveraging the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach. It defines a UML profile containing extensions for external devices and persistent information as well as formal transformation that generate meta-information that creates the code targeting specific devices. This approach uses to the MDA approach by defining Platform-Independent and Platform-Specific Models (PIM, PSM) and by defining transformation from PIM to PSM and PSM to code.