Formal Specification of Gateways in Integrated Architectures

Complex embedded computer systems can encompass multiple application subsystems, such as a multimedia, a powertrain, a comfort and a safety subsystem in the in-vehicle electronic system of a typical premium car. Information exchanges between these application subsystems are essential to realize composite services that involve more than one application subsystem and to reduce redundant computations and sensors. A major challenge is to resolve the property mismatches at the interfaces between application subsystems, such as incoherent naming, divergent syntax, or different communication protocols. Also, fault isolation capabilities are required to prevent common mode failures induced by the propagation of faults between application subsystems. The contribution of this paper is a formal specification of gateways that contain structured collections of time-sensitive variables associated with timing information (called real-time databases) in order to separate the application subsystems. The formal specification can serve as a basis for automatic code generation or formal verification.