What's Ahead for Embedded Software?

ABSTRACT

Most of today's gadgets and cars use embedded software, which in many cases has taken over what mechanical and dedicated electronic systems used to do. Indeed, embedded software appears in everything from telephones and pagers to systems for medical diagnostics, climate control, and manufacturing. The author believes that research computer scientists have largely ignored embedded software because it has not been sufficiently complex or general to warrant the effort. There are many re-search questions but most center around one issue: how to reconcile a set of domainspecific requirements with the demands of interaction in the physical world. How do you adapt software abstractions designed merely to transform data to meet requirements like realtime constraints, concurrency, and stringent safety considerations? The answer to this question has given rise to some promising research angles discussed in this article, including novel ways to deal with concurrency and real time, and methods for augmenting component interfaces to promote safety and adaptability.

REFERENCES

• 1: Gul Agha, Actors: a model of concurrent computation in distributed systems, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1986
• 2: E.A. Lee and A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, "A Framework for Comparing Models of Computation," <i>IEEE Trans. CAD Integrated Circuits and Systems,</i> Dec. 1998, pp. 1217-1229.
• 3: A. Benveniste and P. Le Guernic, "Hybrid Dynamical Systems Theory and the SIGNAL Language," IEEE Trans. Automatic Control, May 1990, pp. 525-546.
• 4: Leslie Lamport, Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system, Communications of the ACM, v.21 n.7, p.558-565, July 1978 [doi>10.1145/359545.359563]
• 5: Robert Allen , David Garlan, Formalizing architectural connection, Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Software engineering, p.71-80, May 16-21, 1994, Sorrento, Italy
• 6: T. A. Henzinger, The theory of hybrid automata, Proceedings of the 11th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, p.278, July 27-30, 1996
• 7: A. Girault B. Lee and E.A. Lee, "Hierarchical Finite State Machines with Multiple Concurrency Models," <i>IEEE Trans. CAD Integrated Circuits and Systems,</i> June 1999, pp. 742-760.
• 8: David Harel , Amir Pnueli , Hagi Lachover , Amnon Naamad , Michal Politi , Rivi Sherman , Aharon Shtull-Trauring , Mark Trakhtenbrot, STATEMATE: A Working Environment for the Development of Complex Reactive Systems, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.16 n.4, p.403-414, April 1990 [doi>10.1109/32.54292]
• 9: W.T. Trotter, <i>Combinatorics and Partially Ordered Sets,</i> Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore, 1992.
• 10: P. Martin-Löf, "Constructive Mathematics and Computer Programming," in <i>Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science VI,</i> North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1980, pp. 153-175.
• 11: John K. Ousterhout, Scripting: Higher-Level Programming for the 21st Century, Computer, v.31 n.3, p.23-30, March 1998 [doi>10.1109/2.660187]
• 12: N. Abu-Ghazaleh, et al., "Orbit—A Framework for High Assurance System Design and Analysis," Tech. Report TR 211/01/98/ECECS, Univ. of Cincinnati, 1998.
• 13: Douglas Lea , Doug Lea, Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principles and Patterns, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1996
• 14: Ralph E. Johnson, Frameworks = (components + patterns), Communications of the ACM, v.40 n.10, p.39-42, Oct. 1997 [doi>10.1145/262793.262799]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Real-time and embedded systems

Additional Classification:
  A. General Literature
  A.1 INTRODUCTORY AND SURVEY

General Terms:
Management