Model-Based Design of Time-Triggered Real-time Embedded Systems for Industrial Automation

This paper presents a novel Model-Based Design (MBD) approach and associated tool-chain for the Time-Triggered Real-time Embedded (TTRE)(1) systems. Our tool-chain automatically synthesizes software for manufacturing TTRE systems. A Software-In-the-Loop Simulation (SILS) framework integrated into our tool-chain helps to reduce the design iterations. Using a manufacturing robot-arm use-case, we validate our tool-chain and demonstrate a 39x improvement in the Quality-of-Control (QoC) when compared to the state-of-the-art approach [3]. Our auto generated scheduler meets all the hard real-time constraints (zero deadline misses) for a given TTRE system when compared to the scheduler (e.g., 145 deadline misses for a CPU utilization of 95%) presented in [1], [25]. Moreover, compared to the traditional MBD approach for the TTRE systems where many design iterations are required [4], our approach and tool-chain can generate high quality and accurate tasks with an associated scheduler in a single design iteration.