Towards a Round-Trip Support for Model-Driven Engineering of Embedded Systems

In a model-driven environment aiming at generating implementation code ensuring that extra-functional properties modeled at design level are preserved at execution time, a full round-trip engineering approach is often needed. Target code is meant to be generated from design models through appropriate model transformations; once the code has been generated, quality attributes of the embedded system are evaluated by execution monitoring/analysis tools. Eventually, in order to complete a model-driven round-trip approach, provision of back-annotation of the target code analysis results to modeling level is crucial for evaluating and consequently optimizing the design models for ensuring preservation of analyzed extra-functional aspects. In this work the problem of providing such approach in terms of process and related challenges is described together with a proposed solution. Particular emphasis is put on the description of how both traceability information and code analysis results are formalized in order to enable the desired back-annotating capabilities.