Model-Driven Development of Component Infrastructures for Embedded Systems

Component infrastructures such as Enterprise JavaBeans, Micorosoft’s COM+ and CORBA Components have become a de-facto standard for enterprise applications. Reasons for this success are the clean separation of technical and functional concerns, COTS containers (applications servers), and the resulting well-defined programming model and standardization. To benefit from these advantages in the domain of embedded systems, the same concepts can be used, but a different implementation strategy is required: monolithic application servers are not suitable because of the limited resources regarding computing power, memory, etc. on the device. An alternative can be based on using a family of code-generated containers. The container is generated from models that specify interfaces, components, system topologies and deployments. In addition to motivating the problem and looking at related work, this paper gives general guidelines for the design and implementation of such infrastructures and describes a prototype implementation that has been implemented recently. We also look at the advantages of using such an approach for the electronic control units in vehicles and the benefits the approach could have with regards to vehicle diagnostics. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: The introduction in section 1 briefly describes embedded software development stateof-the-art and outlines some problems with this approach. Section 2 describes the solution proposed in this paper in a general fashion. The prototype implementation is descrbed in section 3, including the concrete motivation for its implementation. Section 4 describes related work, while section 5 very briefly talks about practical experience.