Model-Based Development of Fault-Tolerant Embedded Software

Model based development has become the state of the art in software engineering. Unfortunately there are only few model-based tools available for the design of fault- tolerant embedded software: while there exist many different code generators for application code, the generation of system aspects like process management, communication in a distributed system and fault-tolerance mechanisms is very complex due to the heterogeneity of the embedded systems. We think that the design of an all-embracing code generator, that supports a priori all platforms (the combination of hardware, operating system and programming language) is impossible. Rather it is necessary to concentrate on a code generator architecture that allows an easy extension of the code generation ability. In this paper we present one possible solution: generating the code on the basis of templates, that solve different recurring aspects of safety-critical embedded software. By the use of a technique similar to preprocessor macros, these templates can be implemented in an application independent fashion. The code generator can then adapt these templates to the application by extracting the necessary information out of the model provided by the application developer. A first realization of this approach is also mentioned in this paper.