Design Space Exploration and its Visualization in AUTOFOCUS3.

Abstract

Software-intensive embedded systems are characterized by an increasing number of features that implement complex safety-critical functionalities. These systems are more and more developed in a model-based fashion that has been considered as a central design approach to deal with the increase in software complexity. These kinds of embedded systems always require multiple constraints both functional and non-functional ones. AUTOFOCUS3 is a model-based development framework using tightly integrated models that enable to perform design space exploration for multi-criteria problems. Finding suitable deployments, meaning the (efficient) assignment of software components to hardware components, is one of these problems. This paper illustrates how such a Design Space Exploration approach in a model-based framework can support the system designer in a (semi-) automatic way, enabling to compare different valid design solutions, w.r.t. a set of given system requirements. We propose a visualization technique to efficiently guide the system designer through such a calculated solutions space. The presented approach has been implemented in the AutoFOCUS3 framework.