MDA-based development in the DECOS integrated architecture - modeling the hardware platform

Reduced time-to-market in spite of increasing the system´s functionality, reuse of software on different hardware platforms, and the demand for performing validation activities earlier in the development phase raise the need for revising the state-of-the-art development methodologies for distributed embedded systems. The model driven architecture is a design methodology addressing these emerging requirements. Developing embedded systems according to this model-based paradigm requires a platform-independent representation of the functionality of the application as well as a precise model of the targeted hardware platform. In this paper we introduce a meta-model for capturing the resources of hardware platforms realizing the DECOS architecture, which is an integrated time-triggered architecture aimed at the development of distributed embedded systems. Furthermore, we present a tool chain based on this meta-model that speeds up the modeling process and reduces the likelihood of human errors by facilitating the reuse of hardware building blocks from libraries