Object-based design of embedded software: Licentiate thesis

Embedded computer systems are common in many everyday consumer products and industrial equipment. Embedded systems and especially the associated software are presently becoming more complex. Management of this complexity is one of the biggest problems in the development of embedded software. Promising results have been achieved in the development of complex information processing systems by applying object- oriented or object-based methods. However, object- oriented methods have been used only to a limited extent in the development of embedded software. The features specific to the development of embedded software, e.g. the management of concurrency and interrupts or the designing of response time requirements, are not adequately supported by object-oriented or object-based design methods which are in current use. Although there are problems which arise during the design phase, object-oriented analysis methods can be applied for the development of embedded software. This thesis demonstrates how results of object-oriented analysis for embedded software can be mapped into designs using the real-time operating system. The special features of embedded software and the main principles of the object-oriented methods are highlighted. Guidelines for an object-based design method for embedded software are presented. This design method is based on the graphical description of software taking into account the special features of embedded software. The use of the proposed design method is illustrated by some examples. By combining the most suitable features of methods currently used for developing embedded software, successful results can be obtained in the short term. This can be called as the adaptive approach. It can also be used as an intermediate phase in the progress towards a "pure" object-oriented approach.