Device utilization analysis for IEC 61499 systems in early stages of development

Model-driven and component-based approaches, such as the IEC 61499 standard, allow us to apply analysis to systems in early stages of development. When applied to embedded systems, early analysis can help guide the development process of both the software and the hardware platform, and thus reduce the time and cost of the development. In this paper we present a method for early analysis of device utilization for IEC 61499 systems. The method is based on determining device-specific worst-case execution time of each activity in the application. For this, we use timing information for individual algorithms together with IEC 61499 software and platform models. We provide a prototype implementation integrated in an open-source development environment.