A model-driven framework for the generation of gateways in distributed real-time systems

As part of the DECOS architecture, this paper presents a generic framework for gateways, which enable message exchanges across application subsystem boundaries in order to exploit redundancy and to coordinate the behavior of application subsystems. In the DECOS architecture, networks of different application subsystem can exhibit property mismatches, such as different protocols (e.g., CAN protocol vs. time-triggered communication), divergent syntax, and incoherent naming. Gateways provide a systematic solution for resolving these property mismatches. Within a gateway, a real-time database separates the application subsystems and stores temporally accurate real-time images. Controlled by a formal gateway specification based on an extension of timed automata, a gateway acquires messages from one gateway side to update these real-time images and recombines the real-time images into messages for the other gateway sides. In a prototype implementation, development tools use such a formal gateway specification expressed as a UML model as an input and automatically generate a configuration module for the parameterization of a generic architectural gateway service to a specific application.