This volume brings out the proceedings of the workshop “Next Generation Design
and Verification Methodologies for Distributed Embedded Control Systems” conducted by General Motors R&D, India Science Lab, Bangalore. This workshop is the first of its kind to be organised by an automotive Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) to bring together the experts in the field of embedded systems development to present state-of-the-art work, and to discuss future strategies for addressing the increasing complexity of embedded control systems. The theme of the workshop is an important focus area for the current and future automotive systems.
Embedded Control Systems are growing in complexity with the increased use of
electronics and software in high-integrity applications for automotive and aerospace domains. In these domains, they provide for enhanced safety, automation and comfort.
Such embedded control systems are distributed, fault-tolerant, real-time systems
with hybrid (discrete and continuous) behaviour. Furthermore, many of the control
functions, such as by-wire controls, have stringent performance and high-integrity
requirements.
The research community has been addressing these challenges, and over the last
few years, several design methodologies and tools for developing distributed embedded control systems have emerged. In spite of these, development of embedded control applications remains a daunting task, requiring a great degree of human skill, expertise, time, and effort. It is imperative to invest significant R&D effort in coming up with methods and tools for future embedded control applications.
We believe that future methodologies will involve three key ingredients: comprehensive model-based development, math-based formal frameworks and componentoriented and product-line based development.
Although model-based development has been adopted in system development, the
extent of its usage is rather limited to less complex systems and/or restricted to the design phase of the development cycle. We expect model-based methodologies to
permeate every aspect of embedded control systems development from requirements
to verification.
• The verification of current day systems, though consuming significant time and
effort, continues to be manual and mainly focused on run-time checking or testing.
A math-based formal framework will enable powerful static analysis and formal
verification techniques that exhaustively analyze the model space for high integrity systems.
• To reduce the cost of development of embedded systems, and to improve reliability, current industrial practice mandates that systems should be developed from an assemblage of standard and reusable off-the-shelf components. OEMs need to
conceive suitable component-based architectures that enable precise specification
of components, their usage policies, and frameworks for composing components.
• Apart from small-grained component usage, a large-grained product-line approach
would also prove to be more cost-effective and efficient in the long run. Correctby-construction approach to design of integrated systems will help in reducing verification time and improving product quality.
The workshop was held during January 5–6 2007 at the NIAS auditorium, IISc
campus, Bangalore, India. It consisted of several invited talks given by leading
experts and researchers from academic and industrial organizations. The participants included advanced graduate students, post-graduate students, faculty members from universities, and researchers from industry. The participants came from USA, Europe, Asia, and all parts of India – from Mumbai to Guwahati; Chennai to Delhi.
The workshop covered all areas of embedded systems development and in particular:
• Formal specification and verification of distributed, heterogeneous, embedded systems,
• Formal semantics of modeling languages,
• Model-based specification and testing,
• Formal approach to component-based development,
• Software product line engineering, and
• Automatic code generation for distributed, embedded systems.