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Systems architecture: the empirical way: abstract architectures to 'optimal' systems

Published: 18 September 2005 Publication History

Abstract

It is a profound dislocation to have reality replaced by models - that revolution is won, that blood spilt. The first radical changes in global companies that I have witnessed, attributable to the systems engineering and architecture Virtual System Prototype inflection point, occurred in 2004. In these instances, the whole assumed order of architecture in the engineering process was tipped upside-down by a single set of quantitatively derived results that are turning out to be critical to each company's ability to compete and win in its fiercely competitive market. These changes have accelerated in 2005. It is the most exciting time for us all to be part of the wholesale transformation of one of the fundamental engines of the last 50 years of economic growth - Embedded Software-Electronics Control Systems (Embedded SECS) design. The transformation is driven by necessity; the by-products are competitive advantage, speed of execution, quality, productivity, and ability to rapidly adapt to market and business conditions. There is no company, leader or laggard, who can afford to ignore this evidence and hope to survive. This paper addresses the quantitative development of embedded systems architectures - software, hardware, mechanical.

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Cited By

View all
  • (2009)Efficient Verification and Optimization of Real-Time Logic-Specified SystemsIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2009.7958:12(1640-1653)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2009
  • (2008)Optimizing Automotive Cyber-Physical System Specifications with Multi-Event DependenciesProceedings of the 2008 10th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing10.1109/SYNASC.2008.16(475-479)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2008
  • (2007)Engineering Automotive SoftwareProceedings of the IEEE10.1109/JPROC.2006.88838695:2(356-373)Online publication date: Feb-2007
  • Show More Cited By

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Carlos Juiz

The systems architecture of embedded software-electronics control systems (SECS) design is the focus of this paper. Since time-to-market requirements drive the development of products in this engineering area, there is no chance for companies to ignore that speed of execution, quality, productivity, and ability to adapt to business conditions are essential to survive economically. Hellestrand's writing style is colloquial and familiar, maybe too much so, but the experimentation techniques for obtaining optimal architectures are explained. The paper presents a framework for ad hoc and systematic engineering experimentation. The author claims that when ad hoc unstructured experiments are performed during the early phases of engineering, the consequences on the architecture (even in expert designs) are profound. This kind of experimentation is far from the scientific method, consisting of selecting hypotheses from structured and statistically significant experiments. Structured and systematic experiments offer a way to efficiently reduce the effort of building new optimized architectures for embedded SECS. The ability to support data-driven decision making in the engineering process requires building models of the intended system that are accurate and have a high standard of performance. The experiments that need to be performed require accurate models of successive physical systems known as virtual prototypes (VPs). Data is collected from probes inserted into hardware models and the actual software during experiments. These VPs are the foundations of empirical electronic systems architecture. Hellestrand concentrates on the empirical process underlying data-driven architectural decision making, and the capabilities enabled when quasi-optimal architecture becomes an executable model driving the remainder of the systems engineering process. The paper uses generalized industrial examples to illustrate this empirical approach. Online Computing Reviews Service

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cover image ACM Conferences
EMSOFT '05: Proceedings of the 5th ACM international conference on Embedded software
September 2005
390 pages
ISBN:1595930914
DOI:10.1145/1086228
  • Conference Chair:
  • Wayne Wolf
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 18 September 2005

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Author Tags

  1. concept driven optimization
  2. empirical system design
  3. epimorphic architecture
  4. event data driven optimization
  5. event-based objective function
  6. factor and concept based explanatory function
  7. mapping system architectures
  8. mesomorphic architecture
  9. quantitative systems architecture
  10. system design process

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Cited By

View all
  • (2009)Efficient Verification and Optimization of Real-Time Logic-Specified SystemsIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2009.7958:12(1640-1653)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2009
  • (2008)Optimizing Automotive Cyber-Physical System Specifications with Multi-Event DependenciesProceedings of the 2008 10th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing10.1109/SYNASC.2008.16(475-479)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2008
  • (2007)Engineering Automotive SoftwareProceedings of the IEEE10.1109/JPROC.2006.88838695:2(356-373)Online publication date: Feb-2007
  • (2006)Optimization of Real-Time Systems Timing SpecificationsProceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications10.1109/RTCSA.2006.48(68-76)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2006
  • (2006)Quantitative Embedded System Architecture and Performance AnalysisPlatform Based Design at the Electronic System Level10.1007/1-4020-5138-7_7(87-100)Online publication date: 2006

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