A decision model for managing and communicating resource restrictions in embedded systems design

Bernhard Turban, Christian Wolff, Athanassios Tsakpinis, Markus Kucera
2008 2008 International Workshop on Intelligent Solutions in Embedded Systems  
Requirements and requirement traceability play a key role in ensuring that embedded systems meet their goals. This article deals with improving requirements and requirement traceability to design artifacts in the context of embedded design. We identify a way for capturing decisions concerning limited resources in embedded systems. This approach directly integrates decision-related information with other traceability information gathered during requirements engineering. It relies on the concept
more » ... f quantifiable budgets for structuring the decision information (decision model). Upon this model the prototype of a requirements traceability management tool has been developed reduces redundancies and inconsistencies in requirements management and lays the ground for improved collaboration and sharing of project knowledge between project members. Authorized licensed use limited to: Fachhochschule FH Regensburg. Downloaded on September 25, 2009 at 12:10 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. process from problem (requirements) to solution (design), where different modes of expression (e.g. text, diagrammatic specification languages like the unified modeling language (UML), program code) with different levels of formality are involved ([3]). Design decisions involved in this transition add to the complexity of this transition process (cf. [4], [5] for details). However, capturing decisions and their underlying rationale is difficult ([3], [6]), as capturing methods interfere with the overall design process or interrupt designers in their way of thinking ([3], [6], [4]). Keeping this in mind, a key goal of our decision model approach is to lower the barriers of making design decision explicit as much as possible: Therefore, our decision model mechanisms offer designers a simple and semiformal model as a skeletal structure to easily add basic information 1 . In the context of embedded software development for automotive applications, we have developed a prototype tool environment which allows designers and developers to add more detailed information on decisions. In [4] we presented support model for decision documentation. The process helps to relieve the know-how/rationale bearers from documentation work by shifting the effort to the rationale seekers 2 , thus also helping inexperienced rationale seekers tightening their acquired knowledge. In Chapter 2 we give a short analysis of current challenges concerning development of software-based ECUs in the automotive domain. The Automotive domain is just a typical example, but similar problems are also known for other domains. Chapter 3 deals with general problems of establishing traceability information at the transition from requirements to design phases and we briefly describe results of preliminary research ([4], [5]) important for the here introduced decision model. In Chapter 4, an additional type of decision is discussed: Making decisions about limited resources and their allocation in a design project which is a key issue for embedded applications that are extremely resource-aware (e.g. memory, bandwidth or computation resource usage). We use the concept of (resource) budgets to capture the basic rationale behind a resource-oriented design decision. An accompanying case study shows the practical relevance of this model. We assume that in comparison to other ways of modeling resource allocations, this decision model improves communication and collaboration between project members and allows for a simpler crossing of organizational boundaries in multi-party projects (ch. 5).
doi:10.1109/wises.2008.4623304 dblp:conf/wises/TurbanWTK08 fatcat:uhsal5k6mbhfjmccrj7bfokf7u