ACES^MB 2013
6th International Workshop on Model Based Architecting and Construction of Embedded Systems
The design of embedded and cyber-physical systems with real-time and other critical constraints raises distinctive problems throughout the design process, from high-level system engineering down to low-level design.
On the high-level engineering side, the complexity of such system has greatly increased during the past few years, and increasingly they are part of large systems-of-systems having to take into account complex collaboration patterns and integration constraints. On the low-level design side, there are specific architectural choices that have to be made as early as possible in the process to streamline production, and key non-functional constraints related to, for example, real-time deadlines and to platform parameters like energy consumption or memory footprint, have to be handled.
Models and model-based tools are nowadays instrumental in supporting these engineering processes. On the level of system engineering, after many actors in the industry, working on complex, distributed, embedded systems, identified the software crisis to be often rooted in a system crisis, model-based system engineering (MBSE) is becoming the norm in the industry. The formalization of system engineering models and approaches is considered to be one of the major factors for further gains in productivity, quality and time-to-market for such complex systems. Although a mature discipline, system engineering is currently renewing at high speed, driven forward by the maturation of model-driven approaches and by standards such as SysML or Modelica.
In lower-level design, the last few years have seen an increased interest in using model-based engineering techniques to capture dedicated architectural and non-functional information in precise domain-specific models. Model-driven engineering techniques are interesting for two main reasons: (1) they allow for capturing dedicated architectural and non-functional information in precise (and often formal) domain-specific models, and (2) they support a layered construction of systems, in which the (platform independent) functional aspects are kept separate from architectural and non-functional (platform specific) aspects, where these aspects are combined later more or less automatically via model transformations to obtain the final system. However, managing feature interactions among functional and non-functional aspects of the design, including but not limited to performance, quality of service, real-time constraints, power and resource management, security, etc remains a key issue.
Objectives
The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in model-based engineering to explore the frontiers of architecting and construction of embedded and cyber-physical systems. We are seeking contributions relating to this subject at different levels, from modelling languages and semantics to concrete application experiments, from model analysis techniques to model-based implementation and deployment. Given the criticality of the application domain, we particularly focus on model-based approaches yielding efficient and provably correct designs.
