Modeling and simulation-driven development of embedded real-time systems

The design and development of embedded hard real-time (RT) systems is one of the complex development practices, because of the requirements of criticality and timeliness of these systems. One critical aspect of RT systems is the production of output before specified deadline. Formal methods are promising in dealing with the design issues of these applications, although they do not scale well for complex systems. Instead, Modeling and Simulation (M&S) provides a cost-effective approach to verify the design and implementation details of very Complex RT applications. M&S methods provide dynamic and risk-free testing environments to verify different scenarios, and they are used for feasibility analysis and verification of such systems. Nevertheless, the simulation models are usually discarded in the later phases of the development. We present the application of an M&S-based method referred to as DEVSRT (Discrete EVent System Specifications in Real-Time) to solve the discontinuity between the simulation models and the final embedded application, in this paper. DEVSRT defines explicit deadline notation for DEVS transitions, draws a clear mapping between DEVS transitions and real-time tasks and provides a formal method and tool for integration of simulation models with the associated hardware components. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.