An MDA Approach for the Generation of Communication Adapters Integrating SW and FW Components from Simulink

We present the tools, metamodels and code generation techniques in use at Elettronica SpA for the development of communication adapters for software and firmware systems from heterogeneous models. The process start from a SysML system model, developed according to the platform-based design (PBD) paradigm, in which a functional model of the system is paired to a model of the execution platform. Subsystems are refined as Simulink models or hand coded in C++. In turn, Simulink models are implemented as software code or firmware on FPGA, and an automatic generation of the implementation is obtained. Based on the SysML system architecture specification, our framework drives the generation of Simulink models with consistent interfaces, allows the automatic generation of the communication code among all subsystems (including the HW-FW interface code).