Model-Driven Allocation Engineering

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) provide sophisticated functionality and are controlled by networked electronic control units (ECUs). Nowadays, software engineers use component-based development approaches to develop their software. Moreover, software components have to be allocated to an ECU to be executed. Engineers have to cope with topology-, software-, and timing-dependencies and memory-, scheduling-, and routing-constraints. Currently, engineers use linear programs to specify allocation constraints and to derive a feasible allocation automatically. However, encoding the allocation problem as a linear program is a complex and error-prone task. This paper contributes a model-driven, OCL-based allocation engineering approach for reducing the engineering effort and to avoid failures. We validate our approach with an automotive case study modeled with MechatronicUML. Our validation shows that we can specify allocation constraints with less engineering effort and are able to derive feasible allocations automatically.