System Based Interference Analysis in Capella

By: Amin Oueslati, Philippe Cuenot, Julien Deantoni, Christophe Moreno

Abstract

In embedded systems the emergence of System on Chip (SoC) offers low cost, flexible and powerful computing architectures. These new COTS capabilities enable new applications in aerospace domain with more integration of avionic functionalities on a same hardware. The main drawback of such integration is the difficulty of mastering application’s deployment on SoC architecture, while understanding miscellaneous emerg- ing behaviors. Model Based Engineering techniques have been introduced to assist in system analysis at early stages of development process. For instance, Capella [BVNE] is a tooled language to support design of systems architecture (http://polarsys.org/capella). Capella helps to provide a consistent view of system architecture. However, Capella does is not satisfactory to understand emerging behaviors. For instance it is not useful to understand how deployment of different tasks (and their parameters) on different computing resources impacts conflicts (interferences) on interconnect between computational resources and memory. This problem is increasingly important with the integration of various functionalities. We propose to address this problem at different levels. First, we equipped Capella models with two kinds of reasoning capabilities. The first one is based on the worst case analytic evaluation of the interconnect interferences of a specific deployment (easy to compute but pessimistic). The second one is based on the (exhaustive) simulation and provides accurate interconnect interferences (more computationally intensive than the analytic methods but accurate). These reasoning capabilities help the designer considerably but he still has to explore several potential solutions by hand. To help him, we proposed a small DSL to express the exploration space from which the former reasoning can be performed automatically. We experimented with these techniques in the context of the ATIPPIC collaborative project, based on the modeling of simple but representative models in Capella.

Keywords

Models, Operational Semantics, Interference Analysis

Cite as:

Amin Oueslati, Philippe Cuenot, Julien Deantoni, Christophe Moreno, “System Based Interference Analysis in Capella”, Journal of Object Technology, Volume 18, no. 2 (July 2019), pp. 14:1-21, doi:10.5381/jot.2019.18.2.a14.

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The JOT Journal   |   ISSN 1660-1769   |   DOI 10.5381/jot   |   AITO   |   Open Access   |    Contact