Resilient Computing Lab
Composition with Guarantees for High-integrity Embedded Software Components aSsembly
The development of Real-Time Embedded systems increasingly leans toward the adoption of Component- based Development and Model Driven Engineering approaches. The combination of these two approaches promises better mastery of complexity, increased reuse, and easier maintenance, thus reducing the costs and risks of development and deployment.
That very combination however also creates unique challenges for the development of high-integrity software. Two such challenges especially stand out:
- to develop components that can be certified or qualified individually for provably guaranteed delivery of the required level of service in operation;
- to preserve those guarantees in an assembly of heterogeneous software components on the target execution platform.
Current component-based run-time environments and their associated software development infrastructures (modelling languages, model transformation engines, and code generators) address the functional dimension of components, but do not address their non-functional characteristics satisfactorily.
The developer should not only consider the functional behaviour and the internal structure of components, but also their non-functional requirements (e.g., timing, input and output accuracy, robustness). Such non-functional requirements should be:
- mapped onto the architectural model;
- captured by the expression of extra-functional properties attached to components;
- and then preserved at run time.
CHESS seeks industrial-quality research solutions to problems of property-preserving component assembly in real-time and dependable embedded systems, and supports the description, verification, and preservation of non-functional properties of software components at the abstract level of component design as well as at the execution level. CHESS develops model-driven solutions, integrates them in component-based execution frameworks, assesses their applicability from the perspective of multiple domains (such as space, railways, telecommunications and automotive), and verifies their performance through the elaboration of industrial use cases.
To get more info, please visit the CHESS Website