Component Architecture and Modeling for Microkernel-Based Embedded System Development

Microkernel-based approach provides operating system support for developing embedded systems with high performance and safety through memory protection. This allows us to introduce architectural mechanisms that enable good separation of concerns, while still satisfy the performance, security and reliability needs of embedded systems. Organizing embedded software as interacting components with well-defined interfaces is compatible with modeling methods. The challenge issue is to seamlessly transform models and integrate tools at different levels of design, implementation and deployment. In this paper we present our solution to this issue. Our contribution is twofold: first, we device a unified model driven and component based development approach. We adopt a layered architecture to construct a tool chain, which allows flexible extension at different layers. Second, we develop a software tool suite in order to support and demonstrate our solution, which includes a UML-based modeling environment and a set of component development tools on top of a microkernel operating system.