A Concept to Guide the System Engineer During the Design Space Exploration Process

Due to the increasing complexity in the development of embedded systems, it cannot be expected that capturing and formalizing the expert knowledge immediately leads to a result that meets the system engineer’s expectations and satisfies all design goals sufficiently well. Therefore, we propose the “Architecture Wizard” as an approach to support the system engineer in finding optimized solutions for the deployment of software components to hardware resources. This engineering process, called Design Space Exploration, consists of different activities, which may be supported by additional wizards. For the Architecture Wizard to be flexible and modular we model the engineering process with the Software & Systems Process Engineering Meta-Model (SPEM 2.0). This enables arbitrary process definitions and the automatic generation of process wizard skeletons. Individual activities may then be integrated into this skeleton to offer a seamless design process to guide the system engineer.