Software/Hardware Engineering with the Parallel Object-Oriented Specification Language

The complexity of designing hardware/software systems motivates research on frameworks that structure and automate the design process. Such design methodologies reduce the risk of expensive design-implementation iterations by assisting designers in constructing models. Software/hardware engineering (SHE) is a general-purpose system-level design methodology that supports analysing both functional correctness and performance properties. SHE combines the Unified Modelling Language with the parallel object-oriented specification language to specify models. The designer is assisted in constructing models using these languages and applying the analysis techniques with various guidelines and modelling patterns. A key feature of SHE is its foundation on formal methods, which ensures that the obtained analysis results are unambiguous. SHE also includes guidelines and techniques for automatic synthesis of real-time control software. This is again based on formal methods to ensure that properties in a model (including real-time properties) are preserved by the software realisation. Finally, to enable an effective and efficient application of the modelling languages as well as the analysis and synthesis techniques, SHE is accompanied with a set of user-friendly tools. This paper gives an overview of SHE, thereby briefly touching upon the underlying mathematical foundation of the analysis and synthesis techniques as well as upon some open issues that require further research.