Operational mode exploration for reconfigurable systems with multiple applications

Modern embedded systems incorporate multiple applications that run on the same execution platform. However, due to limited resources and other constraints, not all the combinations of applications may run concurrently. This paper tackles the problem of determining which combinations of applications can run on a given hardware architecture without violating given constraints, thus creating feasible operational modes of the system. The architecture itself may include standard processors for software implementation of applications and dynamically (partially) reconfigurable hardware resources, which enable dynamic sharing of the resource in different operational modes. The paper describes the models, theoretical results, and the mode exploration algorithm to perform this task. Here, the specification is symbolically encoded so that the feasibility of modes can be tested by applying a SAT solver. In the experiment, we demonstrate how to apply our approach to build a self-organizing smart camera framework.