Semantics-Preserving Design of Embedded Control Software from Synchronous Models

The design of embedded controllers is experiencing a growth in complexity as embedded systems increase their functionality while they become ubiquitous in electronic appliances, cars, airplanes, etc. As requirements become more challenging, mathematical models gain importance for mastering complexity. Among the different computational models proposed, synchronous models have proved to be the most widely used for control dominated applications. While synchronous models simplify the way of dealing with concurrency by decoupling functional and timing aspects, their software implementation on multitasking and multiprocessor platforms is far from straightforward, because of the asynchronous nature of most industrial software platforms. Known solutions in the literature either restrict the solution space or focus on special cases. We present a method for preserving the synchronous semantics through buffer-based intertask communication mechanisms, grounded on an abstraction of the target platform. This allows us to deal with any task set and, most importantly, being independent of the implementation, to explore the design space effectively.