Section: Overall Objectives

Context and motivations

High-level embedded system design has gained prominence in the face of rising technological complexity, increasing performance requirements and shortening time to market demands for electronic equipments. Today, the installed base of intellectual property (IP) further stresses the requirements for adapting existing components with new services within complex integrated architectures, calling for appropriate mathematical models and methodological approaches to that purpose.

Over the past decade, numerous programming models, languages, tools and frameworks have been proposed to design, simulate and validate heterogeneous systems within abstract and rigorously defined mathematical models. Formal design frameworks provide well-defined mathematical models that yield a rigorous methodological support for the trusted design, automatic validation, and systematic test-case generation of systems.

However, they are usually not amenable to direct engineering use nor seem to satisfy the present industrial demand. As a matter of fact, the attention of the industry tends to shift to modeling frameworks based on general-purpose programming language variants, in response to a growing industry demand for higher abstraction-levels in the system design process and an attempt to fill the so-called productivity gap .

At present, a possibility of widening divergences between formal methods and industrial practices is perceivable. It seems that any useful methodology cannot avoid the industrial trend of using emerging programming languages. This contrasted picture calls for an effort toward the convergence between the theory of formal methods and the industrial practice and trends in system design.

Project-team Espresso aims at this convergence by considering the formal modeling framework of the Polychrony toolbox to serve as pivot formalism to import, transform, validate and export heterogeneous formalisms and languages.