Position paper: Advances in reconfigurable distributed real time embedded systems

A system is reconfigurable when it can modify its behavior or its architecture at runtime. The constant growth of the complexity in embedded systems, the variation of execution environment constraints and the evolution of user requirements make the reconfiguration more important and more difficult to achieve. The challenges concern as much the design model level as the runtime support level. These area involve widely diverse core expertise ranging from formal methods, system architecture, hardware design and software engineering. However, there is still a gap between levels involved in the development of these systems. This observation yield the following: we present the state of the art for the modeling and development of these systems through four classes of tools: component-based software engineering, technologies used to specify and configure embedded systems, frameworks and development processes.