From UML to ANSI-C - An Eclipse-Based Code Generation Framework

Model-driven engineering has recently gained broad acceptance in the field of embedded and real-time software systems. While larger embedded and real-time systems, developed e.g. in aerospace, telecommunication, or automotive industry, are quite well supported by model-driven engineering approaches based on the UML, small embedded and real-time systems, as they can for example be found in the industrial automation industry, are still handled a bit novercal. A major reason for this is that the code generation facilities, being offered by most of the UML modeling tools on the market, do indeed support C/C++ code generation in all its particulars, but neglect the generation of plain ANSI-C code. However, this would be needed for small embedded and real-time systems, which have special characteristics in terms of hard time and space constraints. Therefore we developed a framework, which allows to generate ANSI conformant C code from UML models. It is built on top of Eclipse technology, so that it can be integrated easily with available UML modeling tools. Because flexibility and customizability are important requirements, the generation process consists of a model-to-model transformation between the UML source model and an intermediate ANSI-C model, as well as a final model-to-text generation from the intermediate ANSI-C model into C code files. This approach has several advantages compared to a direct code generation strategy.