An Environment for Design Software and Hardware Aspects of Clock Synchronization and Communication in DRTES

Complexity in Distributed Real time Embedded Systems (DRTES) is rising due to richer functionality that is enabled by more powerful hardware. Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) and Model Driven Engineering (MDE) help to capture several facets of this complexity. With these two approaches, we build on two main currents in embedded systems research: synchronization and communication. In this paper, we propose a DRTES meta-model to deal with software and hardware aspects of synchronization and communication at a model level. The elements of this meta-model will be used to describe software and hardware specifications and requirements using component as a first class artifact to build such systems. Each component type (generic component) has several instances and multiple views, principally software or hardware one with specific links. The link offers an interface to choose the map between a software and a hardware component at an even greater level using UML profiles derived from DRTES meta-model. This is to allow an automatic exploration at component instance level via Model Driven Engineering. As a proof of concept we examine a test case that has software and hardware synchronization and communication requirements: a GPS.