Fault tolerant data flow modeling using the generic modeling environment

Designing embedded software jar safety-critical, real-time feedback control applications is a complex and error prone task. Fault tolerance is an important aspect of safety. In general, fault tolerance is achieved by duplicating hardware components, a solution that is often more expensive than needed. In applications such as automotive electronics, a bset of the functionalities has to be guaranteed while others are not crucial to the safety of the operation of the vehicle. In this case, we must make sure that this subset is operational under the potential faults of the architecture. A model of computaion called Fault-Tolerant Data Flow (FTDF) was recently introduced to describe at the highest level of abstraction of the design the fault tolerance requirements on the functionality of the system. Then, the problem of implementing the system efficiently on a platform consists of finding a mapping of the FTDF model on the components of the platform. A complete design flow for this kind of application requires a user-friendly graphical interface to capture the functionality of the systems with the FTDF model, algorithms for choosing an architecture optimally, (possibly automatic) code generation for the parts of the system to be implemented in software and verification tools, hi this paper, we use the Generic Modeling Environment (GME) developed at Vanderbilt University to design a graphical design capture system and to provide the infrastructure for automatic code generation. The design flow is embedded into the Metropolis environment developed at the University of California at Berkeley to provide the necessary verification and analysis framework