A MDA-based contribution for integrating web services within embedded system's design

Abstract

In recent years, we have witnessed the emerging trend in industrial informatics of joining web-services technologies in the embedded system's design. In one hand web-services turns lower the integration efforts of several technological entities through platform-independent interfaces. On the other hand it is well-known that embedded systems are everywhere, taking a great amount of research in design approaches due to their increasing complexity. Back to the first hand, the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) was proposed to provide a formal specification of business processes and protocols, being very useful in the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This formal way is generally achieved because of the immediate translation to Petri nets. Back to the second hand, the Input Output Place Transition Petri nets (IOPT) is a system-level specification language proposed to be employed within the codesign of embedded systems through the reuse of formal methods techniques. However, due to the very high level of abstraction in the first hand and the very immediate deployment facilities proposed by the second hand, a gap between the platformindependent and the platform-specific levels does not allow a natural development flow inheriting what both hands could offer. This paper proposes the immediate handshaking between these hands, filling the gap throughout the reuse of a proposed operation for model decomposition, formalized and verified as a model-to-model transformation and with a complete unification through the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) philosophy.