Comprehensive platform and component modeling of heterogeneous interconnected systems

In this paper, we propose an approach for modeling distributed embedded systems in a holistic way starting from an abstract specification of system requirements. We use the unified modeling language (UML), which is very popular in software modeling and development, for describing both the target platform and the functionality, which has to be performed on that target platform, at a high abstraction level - even at system level. Therefore, we extended the existing UML profile MARTE to meet the requirements of distributed systems. These extensions enable to associate the elements of the model semantically and hence to use UML as a common underlying data model for system representation. Based on the holistic modeling approach an executable simulation model is generated in SystemC to facilitate exploration and verification of system behavior.