An Overall Specification of a Meta-Model of Computation For Model-Driven Embedded System Modeling

The prototyping of embedded systems being long and expensive, software models are often defined to be used as a behavioral reference for better exploration and evaluation of the systems properties. However, embedded systems being naturally heterogeneous, they require the coexistence of several models of computation. In software engineering, the great challenge is how to specify heterogeneous interfaces for ensuring well defined communications because various semantic properties are mixed. Therefore, some existing approaches use only a set of few models of computation to reduce this complexity. Some others can use an open set of models of computation but reduce the complexity by forbidding to use different models of computation in the same hierarchical level. This paper proposes a modeling approach based on the meta-modeling of models of computation. It allows to mix different models of computation by using a meta-model of computation which provides a common semantic description at a higher abstraction level. This makes easier to specify the interactions between models of computation.