Component-based design of embedded software: An analysis of design issues

Widespread use of embedded systems mandates the use of industrial production methods featuring model-based design and repositories of prefabricated software components. The main problem that has to be addressed in this context is to systematically develop a software architecture (framework) for embedded applications, taking into account the true nature of embedded systems, which are predominantly real-time control and monitoring systems. There are a great number of design issues and unresolved problems with existing architectures, which have to be carefully analyzed in order to develop a viable component-based design method for embedded applications. Such an analysis is presented in this paper, which focuses on a number of key issues: specification of system structure; specification of system behaviour; component scheduling and execution; program generation vs. system configuration. The analysis has been used to formulate the guidelines used to develop COMDES - a software framework for distributed embedded applications.