Specification tooling for embedded software components (EES.5141)

Component technologies such as DCOM, CORBA and Java Beans are being used in an increasing number of industrial embedded systems. In Philips, for example, component technology is already being used in the development of medical imaging systems and various other new product developments in the professional as well as consumer domain. The recently defined standard for interoperability of Audio/Video equipment (HAVi) is heavily based on interface standards.

In component technology, interfaces play a key role; one component can have more interfaces. Components deliver and use services through explicit interfaces only. Proper interface specifications are a prerequisite in assuring the interoperability of components within a system. This is particularly important in the context of upgradable embedded systems and embedded system families, where different versions of components and components from different development groups and vendors have to cooperate in often unanticipated combinations. The basis for making this work is the availability of explicit interface specifications, which can be seen as the contracts between the providers and the clients of services.

Current main-stream CASE tools provide considerable support for specifying the syntactic aspects of interfaces (IDL), for visualizing various aspects of interfaces and components (UML), and for generating code frames. There is hardly any support for dealing with the semantic (behavioural) aspects of interfaces, nor support for handling aspects that are essential in an embedded context, such as multithreading, asynchrony, distribution, real-time and resource usage.

The aim of the project is to take a main-stream extensible CASE tool supporting UML-based object-oriented modelling techniques (e.g. Rational Rose), and customize it in such a way that it provides optimal support for developing and deploying interface specifications for embedded software components. The customization is methodology-driven in that it relies on the ISpec interface specification methodology currently being developed and already being used in practice by the industrial partner(s). The formal underpinning of this template-based methodology, involving semantics for UML, ISpec and plug-in component decriptions for ISpec templates, is one of the challenges of this project.

For results, see http://www.win.tue.nl/~ella/.

Three companies and one other univesity are involved in this project.