National Experimental Platform for Hybrid and Embedded Systems Technology

We are developing theories, software, and computational tools for the hierarchical modeling of distributed hybrid and embedded systems by providing technologies for their composable specification, analysis, simulation, and synthesis.
We shall help survey the state-of-the-art in hybrid and embedded system technology. The Berkeley contribution to the report will focus on established research projects and major industrial R&D and standardization efforts. Specifically included in this survey will be the SystemC initiative (www.systemc.org) and other component-based
methods from the hardware design technology community, real-time Java and related languagebased efforts to provide a design framework for embedded systems, real-time CORBA and related middleware aimed at embedded real-time systems, and synchronous languages and related computational paradigms aimed at embedded systems. These will be evaluated with respect to their emphasis on effective composition of components for hybrid and embedded systems.
We will develop an architecture design and demonstration of an initial experimental prototype of an open framework for integrating hardware and software components of large-scale experiments for hybrid and embedded system research. This design and prototype will be based on the Ptolemy II framework from Berkeley (ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu), adapted to include recently developed concepts of interface definition encompassing dynamic properties of components. These interface concepts bring well-established notions of information hiding, polymorphism, and inheritance from object-oriented architectures into actor-oriented component architectures, which are better suited to hybrid and embedded system design.
We also will develop a suite of reusable components that demonstrate the concepts of deliverable 2 by showing how polymorphic interfacebased component design can lead to effective integratable component libraries. We will propose component and interface specification formats based on established syntaxes like XML and IDLs and will identify a suite of tools (such as graphical editors, visualization tools, and engineering process support tools) that form the essential framework for a national experimental platform.
Further, we will help clarify the role of challenge problems in future NEPHEST efforts by formulating the experiment that a challenge problem development performs. That is, we will help define the metrics by which positive and negative experimental outcomes will be recognized. It will not be sufficient in challenge problems for the outcome to be "it works" or "it flies." Instead, there must be some demonstrable improvement in modularity, robustness, performance, design process, or cost.