Hardware Ports – Getting Rid of Sandboxed Modelled Software

Model-Driven Design (MDD) techniques can be used to design control software for cyber-physical systems, reducing the complexity of designing such software. Most MDD tools do not provide proper support to interact with the environment of the models, i.e. the actuators and sensors of a cyber-physical system, resulting in the models being sandboxed. So-called “Hardware Ports” are proposed in this paper to get rid of this sandboxed model issue. These hardware ports are designed in a modular way, preventing a completely separated implementation for each type of piece of hardware. Even though the concept of hardware ports is generally applicable, in this paper the TERRA MDD tool and the LUNA concurrent runtime framework are used as examples to clarify the design and implementation. The paper concludes with a reflection on the usability of the hardware ports and on the planned future work to further improve the interaction between modelled software and the hardware it controls.