ACES-MB 2014 - 7th International Workshop on Model-Based Architecting and Construction of Embedded Systems

The design of embedded systems with real-time and critical constraints raises distinctive problems throughout the development process, from high-level system engineering to low-level system designs. On the high-level engineering side, the complexity of such systems has greatly increased during the past few years, while they are becoming regularly used in industrial practice as parts of large systems-of-systems. Then the architecting of an embedded system has to take into account complex collaboration patterns and integration constraints of computational elements and physical parts.
From the system engineering perspective, many actors in the industry working on complex distributed embedded systems identified the software crisis to be often rooted in a system crisis such that model-based system engineering is becoming the norm in industry. The formalization of system engineering models and approaches is considered to be the one of the major factors for further gains in productivity, quality and time-to-market of such complex systems. Although a mature discipline, system engineering is currently renewing at high speed, driven forward by the progress of model-driven approaches and by standards such as SysML or MODELICA.
On the low-level design side, there are specific architectural choices that have to be made as early as possible in the process to streamline production. Key non-functional constraints related to, for instance, real-time deadlines and to platform parameters like energy consumption or memory footprint have to be handled. In lower-level design, the last few years have seen an increased in using model-base engineering techniques for two main reasons: (1) they provide means to capture architectural and non-functional information using precise (and often formal) domain-specific models and (2) they separate functional aspects (platform independent) from architectural and non-functional aspects (platform specific). These aspects are combined later (more or less automatically) via model transformation to obtain the final system.
This workshop is an opportunity to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in model-based engineering in order to explore innovative ideas and experiences on architecting and construction of embedded systems. We are seeking contributions at all levels of the construction of embedded systems, from high-level modeling languages and semantics to concrete application experiments, from models analysis techniques to model-based implementation and deployment. Given the criticality of the application domain, we particularly focus on model-based approaches yielding efficient and provably correct designs. Authors are invited to submit papers in the following non-exclusive list of topics:
BulletModel-based system engineering: semantics of system models, refinement of system designs into hardware/software implementations, integration and interaction of system and software design models, validation of systems.
Bullet Architecture description: position of ADLs in a model-based engineering approach, techniques for deriving architecture models from requirements and high-level design models from architecture models, verification and validation using architecture models.
Bullet Capturing and exploitation of non-function aspects: interactions among functional and non-functional aspects of the design, including but not limited to performance, quality of service, hard real-time constraints, power and resource management, security, etc.
Bullet Domain specific design and implementation languages: computation and composition models - synchronous languages and paradigms (LUSTRE/SCADE, SIGNAL/POLYCRHONY, TTA, GIOTTO, etc), scheduling-oriented models (HRT-UML, ADA RAVENSCAR) -, component languages (BIP, FRACTAL, PTOLEMY, etc.).
Bullet Model-based analysis, verification and validation techniques of the above-mentioned models.
Workshop format
This full-day workshop will consist in an introduction by the organizers, an invited presentation (name to be confirmed), presentation of accepted papers and a panel discussion on the set of topics identified by the attendees.