MDA-based Configuration of Distributed Real-time and Embedded Systems

Distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems are increasingly being constructed with commercialoff-the-shelf (COTS) components to reduce development time and effort. The configuration of these components must ensure that real-time quality-of-service (QoS) and resource constraints are satisfied. Due to the numerous QoS constraints that must be met, manual system configuration is hard. Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is a design paradigm that incorporates models to provide visual representations of design entities. MDAs show promise for addressing many of these challenges by allowing the definition and automated enforcement of design constraints. This chapter presents MDA techniques and tools that simplify and automate the configuration of COTS components for DRE systems. First, we present the challenges that make manual DRE system configuration infeasible. Second, we provide an incremental methodology for constructing modeling tools to alleviate these difficulties. Finally, we provide a case study describing the construction of the Ascent Modeling Platform (AMP), which is a modeling tool capable of producing nearoptimal DRE system configurations.