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Send til en ven   Udskriv11/3 2009 kl. 15:53
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Effektiv modelering på systemniveau

Danske forskere engageret i EU-støttet projeket gennem ARTEMIS-programmer, som fokuserer på modeleringsteknikker på systemniveau (in english).

The ambitious European ARTEMIS programme has launched its first R&D projects. ARTEMIS addresses embedded computer systems that – while running almost unnoticed by users – improve the performance of all kinds of machines: from cars, planes and phones, to factories, washing machines and televisions. 98 % of computing devices are embedded in all kinds of electronic equipment and machines.

Computers are now present in everyday devices like mobile phones, credit cards, cars and planes or places like homes, offices and factories. Over 4 billion embedded processors were sold last year and the global market is worth € 60 billion with annual growth rates of 14 %.


In order to support the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) eight SMEs from the Nordic countries have teamed up with three recognized R&D providers in the ARTEMIS SYSMODEL project to develop system level modeling tools that can increase their design productivity by 20%.

Together with ARTEMIS and the national funding authorities in the Nordic countries (Tekes-FI, Vinnova-SE, The Research Council of Norway-NO and the Danish Agency for Science Technology and Innovation-DK) the partners will invest nearly € 5.4 million in developing the modeling tools. This week the SYSMODEL partners met in a two day workshop in Copenhagen in order to discuss the workplan for the first year of the project.

Industry is facing a crisis in the design of complex hardware/software systems. Due to the increasing complexity, the gap between the generation of a product idea and the realization of a working system is expanding rapidly. To manage complexity and to shorten design cycles, industry is forced to look at system level languages towards specification and design.

The Nordic countries are at the leading edge in wireless, multimedia, healthcare, telecom and audiology electronic systems. The increasing complexity of embedded system design must be addressed, if the SMEs should consolidate and extend this position. To realize the potential of ever-denser process technologies, embedded system designers will have to construct integrated systems consisting of multiple heterogeneous cores, massive memory, communication networks, electro-mechanical sub-systems, and smart devices, in order to build reconfigurable platforms.

Another key factor is the increase of the share of the value of embedded electronics components in the value of the final product. In the next five years, this share is expected to reach significant percentages in areas such as Industrial Automation (22%), Telecommunications (37%), Consumer Electronics and Intelligent Homes (41%) and Health/Medical Equipment (33%). Moreover, the value added to the final product by embedded software is often orders of magnitude higher than the cost of the embedded devices themselves.

The eight SMEs involved in SYSMODEL are developing applications is diverse areas like RFID, wireless systems, VoIP, healthcare and audiology applications. Embedded Systems are everywhere, built into cars, roads, bridges and tunnels, into medical instruments and surgical robots, into homes, offices and factories, into aeroplanes and airports, into mobile phones and communication and virtual reality glasses, and even into our clothes.

The SYSMODEL project will provide the SMEs with system level modeling tools for the design and implementation of time and power critical, heterogeneous systems. The vision is to allow the SMEs to build cost-efficient ambient intelligence systems with optimal performance, high confidence, reduced time to market and faster deployment.

The focus is on the development of modeling concepts, methods and tools that master system’s complexity by allowing cost-efficient mapping of applications and product variants onto an embedded platform; while respecting constraints in terms of resources (time, energy, memory, etc.), safety, security and quality of service. It is expected that high level system modeling tools could increase the design productivity by 20% in these SMEs.

The general availability of the modeling methodologies will be facilitated by the open source approach, where all tools will be made available free of charge. In other words the modeling methodologies developed will be based on open pre-existing knowledge and tools. In order to disseminate the modeling methodologies and tools to a wider group of SMEs an extensive training programme is defined including awareness as well as dedicated tools training.

SYSMODEL seeks to raise the level of abstraction for SMEs designing embedded systems by developing system-level modeling techniques. Modeling plays a central role in systems engineering. The use of models can profitably replace experimentation on actual systems with incomparable advantages such as:
- Enhanced modifiability of the model and its parameters.
- Ease of construction by integration of models of heterogeneous components.
- Generality by using genericity, abstraction, and behavioural non-determinism
- Enhanced observability and controllability, especially, avoidance of the probe effect and of
disturbances due to experimentation.
- Possibility of analysis and predictability by the application of formal methods.

Future electronic devices will be based on heterogeneous multiprocessing platforms accommodating several stand-alone applications. The network-on-chip communication and device networking combine the design challenges of conventional distributed systems and resource constrained real-time embedded systems. Interoperable design space exploration for both the application and platform development is required.

The application designer needs abstract platform models to rapidly check the feasibility of a new feature or application. The platform designer needs abstract application models for defining platform computation and communication capacities. SYSMODEL will provide high level abstraction models enabling application and platform to be modeled at several levels of abstraction, which enables early performance evaluation of the resulting system.

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