Taming the component timing: a CBD methodology for real-time embedded systems

Abstract

The growing trend towards using component based design approach in embedded system development requires addressing newer system engineering challenges. These systems are usually time critical and require timing guarantees from components. The articulation of a desirable response bounds for the components is often ad-hoc and happens late in development. In this work, we present a formal methods based methodology for an early stage design space exploration. We focus on real-time response of a component as a basis for exploration and allow the developer model it using constant values or parameters. To quantify the parameters, we propose a novel constraint synthesis technique to correlate response times of interacting components. Finally, for system integration, we introduce a new notion of timing layout to specify time-budgeting for each component. The selection of a suitable layout can be made based on system optimization criteria. We have demonstrated our methodology on an automotive Adaptive Cruise Control feature.