Title
MDD: A Unified Model-Driven Design Framework for Embedded Control Software
Abstract
Model-driven methods are widely used in embedded control software development. Current design tools, such as Ptolemy-II and Simulink, have strong modeling capability but their simulation and code generation functionalities are challenged by the increasing complexity of control requirements. For simulation, emulating the triggering of the actor leads to additional time overhead and speed degradation. For code generation, generating redundant content degrades the code quality. Besides, current tools do not have a unified interface, which makes it difficult to cooperation. In this article, we propose a unified model-driven design framework MDD to facilitate embedded control software development. MDD can support the unification of models built by different modeling tools for high-efficiency simulation and high-quality code generation. The MDD framework supports the expansion of more modeling tools, and also supports the expansion of more uses, such as unified testing and verification. First, it offers a model intermediate representation (MIR) and several corresponding parsers, which facilitate a unified representation and cooperation for different design tools. Then, based on data flow schedule analysis of the original MIR, intermediate code representation will be generated for optimized code synthesis. Finally, a variety of code translators will synthesize the intermediate code representation into the code of actual use, such as code for simulation and code for deployment. For evaluation, we enhance two widely used design tools in industry, Ptolemy-II and Simulink, and apply them on the implementation of several benchmark models and a real-world self-driving control software of our industrial collaborator. Using MDD can help reduce their simulation time by 98.9% and 92.6%, the generated code by 99.7% and 69.9% in the number of lines, and 94.3% and 34.3% in code execution time, respectively.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TCAD.2021.3132564
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Code generation,model simulation,model-driven design
Journal
41
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
10
0278-0070
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
18
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhuo Su111.05
Dongyan Wang200.34
Yixiao Yang3153.00
Zehong Yu400.68
Wanli Chang502.03
Wen Li610.71
Aiguo Cui700.34
Yu Jiang834656.49
Jia-guang Sun91807134.30