Elevate embedded real-time programming with a synchronous language
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Abstract
Product development at companies such as Bosch requires systems engineering for digital hardware and mechatronic components as well as software engineering for resource-constrained real-time applications cooperating with distributed server applications. While many of the involved engineering disciplines greatly benefit from model-based approaches and from advances in software infrastructures, deeply embedded software still is written in C since the seventies and runs on platforms designed in the nineties (e.g. OSEK). Simulation tools like Simulink or Modelica are used to test discrete code against continuous plant models or to generate code for certain aspects, but they do not really provide modern implementation technologies to address software architecture and qualities or to make embedded programming "attractive" for software professionals.
We regard synchronous languages as suitable to solve many of the issues in the integration (causality) and synchronisation (clocks) of time-triggered and event-triggered embedded functions that exhibit their behaviour over time steps and are coordinated according to their mode-switching in a structured synchronous control flow. Searching for an imperative synchronous language (with deterministic concurrent composition, and synchronous control flow), equipped with features for encapsulation and composition (objects, packages, separate compilation) and supporting programming parallel tasks deployed to separate cores (clock refinement and deterministic inter-task communication), we ended up in designing our own language, suitable for resource-constrained, real-time applications running on multi-core controllers.
We will explain the main requirements and features of this language, how they integrate with the principles of a synchronous language, how they can be applied to typical everyday problems in embedded development, and how such locally synchronous services may integrate in a globally asynchronous service architecture.
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Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
September 2017
192 pages
ISBN:9781450350938
DOI:10.1145/3127041
- General Chair:
- Jean-Pierre Talpin,
- Program Chairs:
- Patricia Derler,
- Klaus Schneider
Copyright © 2017 Owner/Author.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
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Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 29 September 2017
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- Invited-talk
Conference
MEMOCODE '17: 15th ACM-IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for System Design
September 29 - October 2, 2017
Vienna, Austria
Acceptance Rates
MEMOCODE '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 22 of 48 submissions, 46%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 34 of 82 submissions, 41%
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