Applying Model-Driven Design and Development to Distributed Time-Triggered Systems

This paper describes the experiences with a model-driven approach to design and create a time-triggered system based on FlexRay. The development and maintenance of such systems typically requires much error-prone and detailed work, such as calculating transmission and execution schedules, protocol initialization and configuration, and data transmit and receive configurations. A graphical domain-specific language allows for efficiently modeling physical and logical aspects of the system as well as quality of service requirements (QoS) by providing an abstraction over said details. A model completion step using scheduling and arbitration algorithms then derives missing information. A code generation step creates target platformand controller-specific code from the model.