Taming heterogeneity - the Ptolemy approach

TLDR

Embedded systems are increasingly heterogeneous, requiring modeling languages that capture diverse subsystem interactions. The study aims to mitigate the hard‑to‑analyze interactions caused by amorphous heterogeneity by proposing a hierarchical heterogeneity approach and domain polymorphism. The authors present a hierarchical heterogeneity model with a semantic framework and domain polymorphism to enable structured component interaction and reuse.

Abstract

Modern embedded computing systems tend to be heterogeneous in the sense of being composed of subsystems with very different characteristics, which communicate and interact in a variety of ways-synchronous or asynchronous, buffered or unbuffered, etc. Obviously, when designing such systems, a modeling language needs to reflect this heterogeneity. Today's modeling environments usually offer a variant of what we call amorphous heterogeneity to address this problem. This paper argues that modeling systems in this manner leads to unexpected and hard-to-analyze interactions between the communication mechanisms and proposes a more structured approach to heterogeneity, called hierarchical heterogeneity, to solve this problem. It proposes a model structure and semantic framework that support this form of heterogeneity, and discusses the issues arising from heterogeneous component interaction and the desire for component reuse. It introduces the notion of domain polymorphism as a way to address these issues.