Formal system-level design space exploration

The paper focuses on the formal aspects of the DIPLODOCUS environment. DIPLODOCUS is a UML profile intended for the modeling and verification of real-time and embedded applications meant to be executed on complex Systems-on-Chip. Application tasks and architectural elements (e.g., CPUs, bus, memories) are described with a UML-based language, using an open-source toolkit named TTool. Those descriptions may be automatically transformed into a formal hardware and software specification. From that specification, model-checking techniques may be applied to evaluate several properties of the system, e.g., safety, schedulability, and performance properties. The approach is exemplified with an MPEG2 decoding application.