Modeling is an essential and challenging activity in any engineering environment. It implies some hard-to-train skills such as abstraction and communication. Teachers, project leaders, and tool vendors have a hard time teaching or training their students, co-workers, or users. Gamification refers to the exploitation of gaming mechanisms for serious purposes, like promoting behavioral changes, soliciting participation and engagement in activities, etc. We investigate the introduction of gaming mechanisms in modeling tasks with the primary goal of supporting learning/training. The result has been the realization of a gamified modeling environment named PapyGame. In this article, we present the approach adopted for PapyGame implementation, the details on the gamification elements involved, and the derived conceptual architecture required for applying gamification in any modeling environment. Moreover, to demonstrate the benefits of using PapyGame for learning/training modeling, a set of user experience evaluations have been conducted. Correspondingly, we report the obtained results together with a set of future challenges we consider as critical to make gamified modeling a more effective education/training approach.

Abstract The increasing essential complexity of software systems makes current software engineering methods and practices fall short in many occasions. Software assistants have the ability to help humans achieve a variety of tasks, including the development of software. Such assistants, which show human‐like competences such as autonomy and intelligence, help software engineers do their job by empowering them with new knowledge. This article investigates the research efforts that have been conducted on the creation of assistants for software design, construction and maintenance paying special attention to the user‐assistant interactions. To this end, we followed the standard systematic mapping study method to identify and classify relevant works in the state of the art. Out of the 7580 articles resulting from the automatic search, we identified 112 primary studies that present works which qualify as software assistants. We provide all the resources needed to reproduce our study. We report on the trends and goals of the assistants, the tasks they perform, how they interact with users, the technologies and mechanisms they exploit to embed intelligence and provide knowledge, and their level of automation. We propose a classification of software assistants based on interactions and present an analysis of the different automation patterns. As outcomes of our study, we provide a classification of software assistants dealing with the design, construction and maintenance phases of software development, we discuss the results, identify open lines of work and challenges and call for new innovative and rigorous research efforts in this field.

There are numerous domains in which information systems need to deal with uncertain information. These uncertainties may originate from different reasons such as vagueness, imprecision, incompleteness, or inconsistencies, and in many cases, they cannot be neglected. In this article, we are interested in representing and processing uncertain information in domain models, considering the stakeholders’ beliefs (opinions). We show how to associate beliefs to model elements and how to propagate and operate with their associated uncertainty so that domain experts can individually reason about their models enriched with their personal opinions. In addition, we address the challenge of combining the opinions of different domain experts on the same model elements, with the goal to come up with informed collective decisions. We provide different strategies and a methodology to optimally merge individual opinions.

Abstract Traceability is the capability to represent, understand and analyze the relationships between software artefacts. Traceability is at the core of many software engineering activities. This is a blessing in disguise as traceability research is scattered among various research subfields, which impairs a global view and integration of the different innovations around the recording, identification, evaluation and management of traces. This also limits the adoption of traceability solutions in industry. In this sense, the goal of this paper is to present a characterization of the traceability mechanism as a feature model depicting the shared and variable elements in any traceability proposal. The features in the model are derived from a survey of papers related to traceability published in the literature. We believe this feature model is useful to assess and compare different proposals and provide a common terminology and background. Beyond the feature model, the survey we conducted also help us to identify a number of challenges to be solved in order to move traceability forward, especially in a context where, due to the increasing importance of AI techniques in Software Engineering, traces are more important than ever in order to be able to reproduce and explain AI decisions.

Software is the main driver of added-value in many of the systems that surround us. While its complexity is increasing, so is the diversity of systems driven by software. To meet the challenges emerging from this combination, it is necessary to mobilize increasingly large and heterogeneous multidisciplinary teams, comprising software experts, as well as experts from various domains related to the systems driven by software. Hence, the quality of communication about software between stakeholders of different domains and with different personalities is becoming a key issue for successfully engineering software-intensive systems. The goal of this study, thus, is to investigate the effect of the representation of software design models on the communication of design decisions between stakeholders with diverse personality traits. As a result, this study finds that graphical representations of software design models are better than textual representations in enhancing the communication and increasing the productivity of stakeholders with diverse personalities.

International audience

Requirements engineering starts by requirements elicitation which consists in gathering software requirements from stakeholders.Then, the elicited requirements are usually manually recorded in a requirements specification document.In recent years, modern software projects are becoming more complex than projects of the past due to the increase in the number of requirements and stakeholders involved in a project.Thus, manually managing requirements becomes a tedious, time consuming and error-prone task.One historical strategy to manage this kind of complexity is "divide to conquer", meaning to categorize them into groups in order to breakdown the system into a set of smallest sub-systems at early stages.In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically cluster functional requirements based on their semantic similarity which is the usual strategy used by system architects to define sub-systems candidate to simplification of the original problem.First, we use word2vec, as a predictive word embedding model to compute the word-level similarity.Second, we derive the requirement-level similarity using a scoring function for text similarity.Third, we adopt hierarchical clustering to group the requirements.Experimental results performed on four open-access software projects show that our approach succeeded to improve the results of clusters identification compared with existing studies.

This paper explores the understudied field of conceptual modeling assistance.More specifically, we focused on the design and application of recommender systems as software assistants for conceptual modeling.Prior work on such systems has shown that trust plays a key role in the acceptance and exploitation of such systems.Consequently, as a starting point of our research, we applied established methods for constructing multi-criteria recommender systems (MCRS) to conceptual modeling in a way which could foster the emergence of trust.Finally, we chose supervised-learning techniques to refine and customize the recommendations generated by these systems.To help us determine the feasibility and practicality of our approach, we designed and implemented a prototype system that assists conceptual modeling with UML.Our system currently recommends class attributes when constructing UML class diagrams.A preliminary evaluation of this tool indicated a strong match between the recommendations provided by our system and personal choices made by the participants.

Abstract Context Software engineering is a social and collaborative activity. Communicating and sharing knowledge between software developers requires much effort. Hence, the quality of communication plays an important role in influencing project success. To better understand the effect of communication on project success, more in-depth empirical studies investigating this phenomenon are needed. Objective We investigate the effect of using a graphical versus textual design description on co-located software design communication. Method Therefore, we conducted a family of experiments involving a mix of 240 software engineering students from four universities. We examined how different design representations (i.e., graphical vs. textual) affect the ability to Explain, Understand, Recall, and Actively Communicate knowledge. Results We found that the graphical design description is better than the textual in promoting Active Discussion between developers and improving the Recall of design details. Furthermore, compared to its unaltered version, a well-organized and motivated textual design description–that is used for the same amount of time–enhances the recall of design details and increases the amount of active discussions at the cost of reducing the perceived quality of explaining.

To fulfill the contractual requirement of the Sweden Compact agreement, the following funding note has to be added and placed in the Funding section of the original article: Open access funding provided by University of Gothenburg .

This paper discusses the representation of Belief Uncertainty in software models. This kind of uncertainty refers to the situation in which the modeler, or any other belief agent, is uncertain about the behavior of the system, or the statements that the model expresses about it. In this work, we propose to assign a degree of belief to model statements (let they be constraints, or any other model expression), which is expressed by a probability (called credence, in statistical terms) that represents a quantification of such a subjective degree of belief. We discuss how it can be represented using current modeling notations, and how to operate with it in order to make informed decisions.

Model transformations are a key element in any model-driven engineering approach. But writing them is a time-consuming and error-prone activity that requires specific knowledge of the transformation language semantics. We propose to take advantage of the advances in Artificial Intelligence and, in particular Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks (LSTM), to automatically infer model transformations from sets of input-output model pairs. Once the transformation mappings have been learned, the LSTM system is able to autonomously transform new input models into their corresponding output models without the need of writing any transformation-specific code. We evaluate the correctness and performance of our approach and discuss its advantages and limitations.

The increased adoption of model-driven engineering (MDE) in complex industrial environments highlights the value of a company's modeling artefacts. As such, any MDE ecosystem must provide mechanisms to both, protect, and take full advantage of these valuable assets.

International audience

International audience

UML state machines and composite structure models are efficient to design the behavior and structure of architectures. In Model Driven Engineering (MDE), code can be automatically generated from the models. Nevertheless, current UML tools only produce skeleton code which is then fine-tuned by programmers. The modifications in code, which may violate the architecture correctness, must be synchronized with the model to make architecture and code consistent. However, current approaches cannot handle the synchronization when there is a significant abstraction gap between architecture and code. This paper proposes to ease synchronization between model and code, through a bidirectional mapping between code and architecture specified by UML composite structure and state machine. The proposed mapping is a means for a synchronization mechanism proposed in our previous work, which allows concurrent modifications made in model and code, and keeps them synchronized. We propose an evaluation plan for the approach and expose preliminary experimental results.

Poster based on accepted short paper

The proliferation of connected devices, wherein Sensors, Actuators and Tags (such as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID)) are able to seamlessly communicate to their environment and to each other for sharing information or to perform some actions has created the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. These devices expose their functionality via standard services and application programming interfaces (APIs). They are considered to be one of the key technology enablers to foster the vision of a smart world, comprising of smart objects, smart supply chain management, smart manufacturing (Industry 4.0), smart buildings, to name a few. In fact, today these IoT devices continuously take part in various business processes that are being executing within the boundaries of the same enterprise or in different enterprises. Thus, there is an evident need to model these processes that are associated with IoT resources in a formal and unambiguous manner. However, in context of business processes, these is a lack of formalized and explicit description for IoT resources, thus hampering their efficient modeling and management. To bridge this gap, we propose a semantic framework for developing IoT-aware business processes as follows, (i) formalizing IoT resource description w.r.t Internet of Things Architecture (IoT-A) reference model in context of business processes, (ii) formalizing IoT properties and allocation rules for optimal resource management and (iii) resolving resource conflicts based on strategies. To illustrate the feasibility of our framework, we evaluated our semantic model for coverage of concepts in IoT-A reference model along with development of a proof of concept tool for integrating the IoT resources and our semantic model during the process modeling phase.

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a development paradigm that brings the benefits of increased automation to the software development cycle. The MDE community tries to promote MDE adoption by pushing models written in diagram-based languages, supported by extensive tooling. While there is increasing evidence that MDE facilitates the design of complex software, its level of acceptance by software developers is still low. On one hand, rather than use diagram-based languages, most programmers prefer to work with their favorite textual programming language (e.g. Java and C++) and integrated development environment. On the other hand, software architects are among the early adopters and promoters of diagram-based languages. They consider such languages to be much more suitable for describing architectures compared to textual languages. Synchronizing manually written artifacts in either type of language is not simple and is often very time-consuming and error prone unless it is supported by automated methods and tools. To solve this issue, we propose a methodological pattern for model-code synchronization supported by corresponding tooling. The solution tackles a fundamental problem of round-trip engineering: synchronization between concurrently evolving artifacts. On one side we have the architecture model maintained by the software architects, while on the other, we have code written by programmers. Applying our approach for the development of an actual runtime system, we show that both parties involved, software architects and programmers, can efficiently collaborate while continuing to work in their favorite development environment.

Conference of 4th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development, MODELSWARD 2016 ; Conference Date: 19 February 2016 Through 21 February 2016; Conference Code:119693

Manufacturing processes are undergoing major challenges to achieve the Smart Factory vision such as to increase systematic processes reuse and improve understandability of complex structures. However, those challenges recall closely those of software processes which have been successfully targeted by model-driven engineering techniques such as domain-specific modeling languages, modeling abstractions based on view-points, model-based formal analysis and automated model transformations. The goal of this paper is to present a research agenda to integrate those techniques in manufacturing processes to achieve the Smart Factory vision. We first survey manufacturing approaches that are based on the ISA-95 and BPMN standards. Then, we propose model-driven solutions to complement those approaches.

UML is defined as a visual modeling language for specifying, constructing, and documenting software intensive systems. In that context, UML diagrams play a central role in the whole software engineering process, starting from early analysis, through implementation, to maintenance. Recent surveys of UML use in industry showed that software practitioners use it on a regular basis, and particularly for communication and as a mental-assist tool. However, they also pointed out the following weaknesses: the lack of context, graphical layout problems, and the language's inadequacy as a facility for communication between technical teams and their clients. In this paper, we present a general approach that addresses these problems by enhancing the effectiveness of UML models as a communication vehicle. Our approach is based on expressing stakeholder-specific viewpoints through the use of secondary notations. This involves the use of auxiliary visual variables (e.g., color, position, size) that are not formally specified in UML. To that end, we extend the traditional concept of layer found in many graphical editors to UML diagram editors. FlipLayers is an implementation of our approach. It is in the form of a plugin for the Papyrus modeling environment. One scenario with several case studies is presented in the paper to demonstrate the benefits of our approach and also to illustrate how to express viewpoints with FlipLayers.

In the Model-Driven Engineering community, the abstract syntax of modeling languages is usually defined and implemented using metamodeling techniques. However, it is not the case for the concrete syntax of graphical modeling languages. Indeed, this concern is mostly specified by informal means. This practice leaves considerable leeway in the implementation and raises several standards compliance issues. Hence, toolsmiths can only rely on their interpretation of the standard and lack of systematic way to build conforming tool support. In this context, a first normative specification of the concrete syntax of UML 2.5 has been recently released using Diagram Definition. In this paper, we propose an approach that uses those formal specifications to systematically generate modeling language tool support that guarantees compliance to standard notation. We assess the approach on a subset of the UML class diagram implemented within the open-source Papyrus tool.

The adoption of AUTOSAR and Model Driven Engineering (MDE) for the design of automotive software architectures allows an early analysis of system properties and the automatic synthesis of architecture and software implementation. To select and configure the architecture with respect to timing constraints, knowledge about the worst case execution times (WCET) of functions is required. An accurate evaluation of the WCET is only possible when reusing legacy functionality or very late in the development and procurement process. To drive the integration of SW components belonging to systems with timing constraints, automotive methodologies propose to assign WCET budgets to functions. This paper presents two solutions to assign budgets, while considering at the same time the problem of SW/HW synthesis. The first solution is a one-step algorithm. The second is an iterative improvement procedure with a staged approach that scales better to very large size systems. Both methods are evaluated on industrial systems to study their effectiveness and scalability.

The purpose of UML profile mechanism is to design domain specific languages (DSL) based on UML. It exists a wide range of UML profiles: MARTE, ROOM, SysML. Current profile design methodology only considers the syntactic part of the language and keeps informal the execution semantics description. This impairs Model Driven Engineering (MDE) promises which advocates for executable models. This paper presents a systematic approach to formalize the execution semantics of UML profiles using foundational UML (normative specification) which defines a precise semantics for a subset of UML. This approach is integrated into the reference profile design methodology. It is illustrated on a small profile to support Turing machines. It demonstrates capability to execute resulting profiled models through the defined semantics.

Synthesis of automotive architectures is a complex problem that needs an automated support. AUTOSAR, standard for the specification of automotive architectures, defines a synthesis process of software components and their connections in a set of fixed-priority OS tasks distributed over a network of ECUs. During the synthesis process software components are allocated on ECU-s. Since each component encapsulates a set of so-called runnable entities, synthesis completes by partitioning runnable entities in OS tasks with assigned fixed priorities. This paper proposes an optimization approach for the synthesis of AUTOSAR architectures based on genetic algorithms and mixed integer linear programming techniques. Optimization criteria consider end-to-end timing responses and memory consumption.

Modern development methodologies from the industry and the academia for complex real-time systems define a stage in which application functions are deployed onto an execution platform. The deployment consists of the placement of functions on a distributed network of nodes, the partitioning of functions in tasks and the scheduling of tasks and messages. None of the existing optimization techniques deal with the three stages of the deployment problem at the same time. In this paper, we present a staged approach towards the efficient deployment of real-time functions based on genetic algorithms and mixed integer linear programming techniques. Application to case studies shows the applicability of the method to industry-size systems and the quality of the obtained solutions when compared to the true optimum for small size examples.

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) encourages the use of graphical modeling tools, which facilitate the development process from modeling to coding. Such tools can be designed using the MDE approach into metamodeling environments called metaCASE tools. It turned out that current metaCASE tools still require, in most cases, manual programming to build full tool support for the modeling language, especially for users' native methodologies and representational elements and suffer from gaps in terms of reusability. In this context, we propose MID, a set of metamodels supporting the specification of modeling editors by means of reusable components and explain how representational metamodeling is carried out with it.

Time budgets represent early estimates of execution times of system functions. They are assigned based on engineers experience and serve as an input for the early stage performance or schedulability analysis. This schedulability analysis test might become irrelevant if the computed worst-case execution times of a system functions exceed corresponding time budgets. This paper presents a solution based on the reallocation of system functions among OS tasks that preserves schedulability of the system. It is adapted to the linear computation model which is representative of a large number of systems, inter alia automotive systems.

In this article, we present the ongoing efforts within the newly formed IEEE-RAS Working Group named Ontologies for Robotics and Automation. We focus in particular on one of the four subgroups that compose this working group, called the Upper Ontology/Methodology (UpOM) subgroup. As the name indicates, the aim of this subgroup is to develop an upper ontology and a methodology for ontology building and evaluation. This methodology will be used to coordinate the distributed development of domain specific ontologies by the other three subgroups, and to generate a global ontology that we hope will contribute to the standardization process of robotics and automation. This paper presents the composition, the envisioned methodology, and the future work of the UpOM subgroup. It also discusses some general aspects related to ontologies for the robotics and automation field, and to the efforts in standardizing them.

One pillar of Model-Driven Development for real-time embedded software is the separation of concerns between application model and target platform. This requires definition of model transformations realizing the mapping of the application model onto the target platform. Real-Time and Embedded Systems design means coping with different target platforms and with heterogeneous constraints related to time, synchronization and memory footprint. However, different target platforms have APIs and implementation patterns that vary significantly so that it is necessary to develop several dedicated model transformations in order to achieve portability between them. Although this is one way to achieve portability, we show in this paper that the cost of portability can be reduced by providing domain-independent model transformations while still ensuring performance requirements are satisfied.

In this paper, we present different modeling and execution frameworks that allow us to efficiently analyze, design and verify complex systems, mainly to cope with the specific concerns of the Real-time and embedded systems (RTE) domain. First we depict a UML /MARTE based methodology for executable RTE systems modeling with a framework and its underlying model transformations required to execute UML models conforming to the MARTE standard. The advantages of adopting a more generic action language with formal features are highlighted, in order to raise the level of abstraction with formal features. Then, we investigate how MARTE, with its Time Model facilities, can be made to represent faithfully AADL periodic/aperiodic tasks communicating through event or data ports, in an approach to end-to-end flow latency analysis. An analytical framework allows us to optimize port-based communication by generating a run time executive that utilizes shared data areas where appropriate, while ensuring the timing semantic assumed by the control application. An analysis of the AADL mode change protocol is also provided, exposing a translation process that takes as an input an AADL model and produces as an output a time Petri net. We show how an AADL model transformation provides a formal model for model checking activities and we suggest that model transformation provides useful support to improve the integration of formal verification in an industrial engineering process. As a case study we use an implementation of a UDP /IP protocol stack.

AUTOSAR (Automotive Open System Architecture) is enjoying increasing interest and broad acceptance in the automotive domain. AUTOSAR aims at defining an open standardized software architecture to face future challenges in automotive development including the development of time-critical systems (e.g. brake-by-wire or steer-by-wire). Mastering the development of such systems requires being able to analyze their real-time behavior. Scheduling analysis is the theory that studies how far a real-time system may satisfy its real-time requirements against its real-time properties. In this paper, we will study to what extent it is possible to apply some of those scheduling analysis techniques on real-time systems deployed on AUTOSAR-compliant architectures. The paper focuses on scheduling analysis techniques implemented in one open source tool. A concrete case study shows the feasibility of the approach and shows scheduling analysis results.

The paper extends the AUTOSAR meta-model to enable feasibility predictions on the provision of fault-tolerant support for application components. We focus on a fault-tolerant support based on software replication techniques. The meta-model is extended in order to evaluate different replication strategies, in terms of replication styles, types of faults to be tolerated, replicas placement. This extension is realized by a UML profile. A model-based approach is presented aiming at the definition of a so-called Application Replication View, in which a replication strategy is specified for safety critical application components. A separate model, called Application Timing View, defines timing constraints for system responses. The combination of the two views will enable schedulability analysis of the fault-tolerant application. Schedulability analysis considers the task set composed of application tasks and the additional tasks injected by replication. An automotive case study is presented showing the applicability of the approach.

One pillar of Model-Driven Development of real-time software is the separation of concerns between application model and target platform. This requires the definition of model transformations realizing the mapping of the application model onto the target platform. However, target platforms APIs and implementation patterns vary largely from one to the other. This requires the development of several dedicated model transformations which actually embed a given computing target platform model. Dedicated model transformations have shown their limits as soon as we want to modify target platform. In this context, a good compromise could be to extract implementation patterns from model transformation and encapsulate them in a platform model. We, therefore propose some modeling heuristics that permits to build detailed descriptions of the target execution platform, where all platform-specific implementation choices are made explicit using a small set of variation points specific to real-time multi-tasking applications. The benefit expected is a true separation of concerns enabling efficient, reusable and portable transformation processes.

Model-Based Development (MBD) provides an additional level of abstraction, the model, which lets engineers focus on the business aspect of the developed system. MBD permits automatic treatments of these models with dedicated tools like synthesis of system's application by automatic code generation. Real-Time and Embedded Systems (RTES) are often constrained by their environment and/or the resources they own in terms of memory, energy consumption with respect to performance requirements. Hence, an important problem to deal with in RTES development is linked to the optimization of their software part. Although automatic code generation and the use of optimizing compilers bring some answers to application optimization issue, we will show in this paper that optimization results may be enhanced by adding a new level of optimizations in the modeling process. Our arguments are illustrated with examples of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) state machines diagrams which are widely used for control aspect modeling of RTES. The well-known Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) is used for this study. The paper concludes on a proposal of two step optimization approach that allows reusing as they are, existing compiler optimizations.

In model based approaches for real-time systems (RTS) development, an iterative process that consists in the early stage verification of real-time constraints fulfillment according to a given design is usually performed in order to detect as early as possible unfeasible designs. Schedulability analysis allows this early verification of timing constraints according to so called Schedulability Analysis Model (SAM). This paper proposes a configurable framework for implementation synthesis of component oriented specification that is able to preserve the SAM timing properties that are validated at an early stage of the RTS design.

This paper addresses the problem of code optimization for Real-Time and Embedded Systems (RTES). Such systems are designed using Model-Based Development (MBD)approach that consists of performing three major steps: building models, generating code from them and compiling the generated code. Actually, during the code generation, an important part of the modeling language semantics which could be useful for optimization is lost, thus, making impossible some optimizations achievement. This paper shows how adding a new level of optimization at the model level results in a more compact code. It also discusses the impact of the code generation on optimization: whether this step promotes or prevents optimizations. We conclude on a proposal of a new MBD approach containing only steps that advance optimization: modeling and compiling steps.

The development of embedded Systems becomes more and more complex. Model driven engineering can help to manage this complexity by specifying real-time properties in a declarative way and automating the deployment. The UML profile MARTE is a OMG standard that allows to model real-time properties. However, there is no execution infrastructure that supports MARTE's generic component model (GCM) and the application modeling (HLAM).

Multi-threaded real-time applications run on platforms that offer services such as concurrency, timing and synchronization. In a model driven context, separation of concerns between functional specification and design choices is one of the key challenges. For that purpose, annotations defined by the MARTE sub-profile for Software Resource Modeling (SRM) provide high level abstractions of target software platforms helping to deploy the same application model on various targets. However, deployment of an application on a platform is not only characterized by the API of the targeted OS, but it is also influenced by possible design restrictions set by the programming languages and their related libraries. We examine key characteristics that exist in two widely used programming languages (C++ and Java) and their libraries to analyze how this can be handled with an MDE approach based on the use of SRM.

The UML is now the most widespread language for systems modeling. However, this language has been designed as a general purpose modeling language that may lack for modeling constructs for specific domain, as for the real-time embedded (RTE) domain. In order to fill this lack, OMG has standardized a UML extension, called MARTE. This UML profile consists of specific concepts defined to cope with the specific concerns of the RTE domain. Of course, MARTE provides support for enabling model driven engineering (MDE) of RTE systems. The MDE development paradigm makes the model the first class citizen of development processes. Models need then to be productive. To achieve this purpose, providing methodology enabling model to be executable is a real challenge. The goal of this paper is then to present, on the one hand a UML/MARTE based methodology for executable RTE systems modeling and on the other hand, a framework and its underlying model transformations required to execute UML models conforming to the MARTE standard.

A UML profile for Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded systems (MARTE) has been recently standardized by the OMG. This initiative meets the needs of several Thales divisions (e.g., aerospace, land and joint and air systems), which develop real-time and embedded systems. CEA LIST, INRIA and Thales have been the main contributors to the MARTE standard through the ProMARTE consortium. To foster the deployment of MARTE in Thales divisions, we have launched the development of a case study related to a real-time and embedded system using the MARTE adopted specification. As a first step of this study, we make use of a fictive system—the Josefil challenge—to evaluate whether the profile is applicable to the Thales current systems andsoftware engineering practices. The purpose of this paper is to report on this first stage and outline the next scheduled activities.

One promising solution for meeting the demands of constantly-evolving Real-Time Embedded (RTE) software is the model-driven development (MDD) paradigm, based on the principle of separating the description of an application from its platform-specific implementation. Existing model-driven approaches strive to achieve this separation through dedicated model transformations which actually embed a given computing platform model. This is a major impediment for MDD dissemination in an industrial context. The resulting dearth of customizable transformations hampers description of reusable generative processes. We therefore propose to explicitly describe the targeted computing platforms in the design process. The main benefit expected from explicit platform models is a true separation of concerns that enables efficient, reusable and customizable generative processes. This proposal is strongly promoted by the new OMG (Object Management Group) standard profile for Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded systems (MARTE), with its software multitasking platforms. In this paper, we first describe the MARTE feature and then propose a framework for integrating explicit platform descriptions into a model-based generative process.

The complexity of embedded automotive systems calls for a more rigorous approach to system development compared to current state of practice. A critical issue is the management of the engineering information that defines the embedded system. Development time, cost efficiency, quality and dependability all benefit from appropriate information management. System modeling based on an architecture description language is a way to keep the engineering information within one information structure. The EAST-ADL was developed in the EAST-EEA project (www.easteea.net) and is an architecture description language for automotive embedded systems. It is currently refined in the ATESSTproject (www.atesst.org). This paper gives an overview of the EAST-ADL and accounts for some recent refinements as developed in the ATESST project. Areas covered include the relation to other standardization initiatives such as UML2.0, AADL, AUTOSAR, SysML, Marte profile, requirements management and variability.

Marte (A UML Profile for Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded systems) is a new UML profile extension for real-time and embedded systems, which is going to be standardized by mid 2007 at OMG (Object Management Group). This standard has been proposed by the "ProMarte" consortium, which consists of OMG end-users, tool providers and academics. Marte defines concepts in terms of UML extensions needed to model and analyze real-time and embedded systems (RT/ES). The Marte specification provides an annex which handles its relation to AADL-based models, and the way it may represent them.. Our purpose in this paper is to describe this relation. Our constructions will be presented and illustrated through some examples.

The profile extension mechanism has permitted a rapid growth of the use of UML as a domain-specific modeling language. However, designing profiles typically falls into ad-hoc processes that often rely on domain-inappropriate primitives. One of the fundamental reasons is that profiles are specified on the same level of abstraction as the UML abstract syntax and consequently they narrow down the design space to an implementation level. In order to improvethis situation, some profile designers start from a "conceptual domain model" that states the domain ontology, and only then deal with finding out the profile extensions to support it. In spite of this, building truthfulness conceptual domain models and maintaining traceable mapping with the profile view is a bit of an art. In this paper, we propose to systematize the design of UML profiles built-upon conceptual domain models, by adopting a minimal setof framing rules. As these rules are defined on the basis of regularly occurring design patterns, domain models can be afterward checked for self-consistency and interactively transformed in stereotypes, tags and constraints

The component/container paradigm helps to reduce the complexity and enhance the scalability of software development for plain desktop or enterprise systems. However, the frameworks enabling this approach are often not suitable for systems with limited processing power and memory sizes, and are not dedicated to real-time requirements. As part of the European IST project COMPARE, we study a possible projection from a high-level component model (CORBA component model) towards a low-level RT/E platform (OSEK). Preliminary results from this study are accounted in this paper. In the first part, the main features of CCM and OSEK are examined. Then we propose execution and communication models using an API for OSEK that is as similar as possible to that in the CCM framework.

Real-time (RT) applications are designed to control systems that are inherently parallel. For easing development, abstractions are mandatory to model this concurrency. To achieve this goal, the real-time object paradigm is proposed. It is used to demonstrate how to separate functional and concurrency concerns ensuring also high-level abstraction for parallelism modeling

Moving from code-oriented to model-oriented development facilitates significantly management of increasingly complex software. As explained in [1], clear separation of concerns during application development can drastically increase maintainability, reusability and complexity management. Although existing UML-based approaches for real-time systems development do help speed up software development, they still result in models that are hard to maintain and reuse. This drawback is mainly due to a failure to apply the principles of separating concerns. This paper presents an UML-based method using Aspect Principles and dedicated to the development of real-time embedded systems. It focuses mainly on how suitable separation of concerns may ease reusability and maintainability. Specifically, it depicts how application behavior can be clearly modeled applying separation of control and computation aspects of behavior in UML.