Java-prototyping of hardware/software CBS using a behavioral OO model

This paper presents a method to build software-prototypes of Computer-Based Systems (CBS) that describe and simulate parts of software and parts of hardware using a common concurrent software Behavioral Object Oriented Model (BOOM). For the hardware objects this behavioral prototyping can be viewed as a pre-stage of specification and analysis before the real physical design. The CBS prototypes are built in Java using a method called Vowels2. This method permits the development of the prototype as a concurrent application, from the user-requirements to the software programming in Java. The process of prototype description is made step by step. These steps use a subset of the UML graphical diagrams. The Java coding is deduced from these commented diagrams, using general patterns of thread-active-objects linked by customized objects: synchronous stimuli, asynchronous FIFO-queues etc. The method is illustrated by a simplified example containing parallelism synchronization: the blood-test machine