Model-Driven Development of Multi-Core Embedded Software

Model-driven development is worthy of further research because of its proven capabilities in increasing productivity and ensuring correctness. However it has not yet been explored for multi-core processor-based embedded systems, whose programming is even more complex and difficult that that for conventional uni-processor systems. We propose a new VERTAF/Multi-Core (VMC) framework to bridge this gap. In this work, we mainly show how VMC generates code automatically from user-specified SysML models for multi-core embedded systems. We illustrate how model-driven design based on SysML can be seamlessly integrated with Intel's threading building blocks (TBB) and the Quantum Framework middleware. We use a digital video recording system to illustrate the benefits of VMC. Our experiments show how SysML/QF/TBB make multi-core embedded system programming easy, efficient, and effortless.