DesertFD: a finite-domain constraint based tool for design space exploration

Abstract

As the complexity of computer based systems increases, designers are faced with the task of balancing a variety of design choices and parameters against conflicting optimization criteria. Design space exploration seeks to automate or partially automate the process of evaluating tradeoff decisions at design time. DesertFD is a domain-independent design space exploration tool which facilitates the representation and pruning of a design space using constraint satisfaction. DesertFD offers a formal tree-based view of a family of systems related through common structure, together with a flexible scripting language for modeling mathematical expressions governing property composition. User-specified constraints applied to the design space representation result in a pruning of the space. We discuss the reduction of the design space, property composition formulas and constraints into a constraint satisfaction problem using finite domain constraints. We examine two example design space exploration problems to evaluate DesertFD: the generation of a high level custom computer architecture for supporting H.264-based motion estimation, and the reliabilitydriven mapping of tasks to distributed embedded control units in a steer-by-wire automotive application.

Software Architecture Optimization Methods: A Systematic Literature Review

“…A summary of the solution-specific aspects that are extracted from the set of papers included in the literature Performance (84) ES(32) [32], [45], [67]-COST(1) [33], GENERAL(10) [71], [79], [86], [113], [138], [139], [145], [205], [224], [243], MAPPING(3) [5], [95], [153], MEMORY(2) [5], [153], NOT PRE-SENTED(7) [21], [36], [91], [162], [202], [219], [242], PER-FORMANCE(1) [33], STRUCTURAL(1) [150] Energy(18) ES(17) [17], [28], [67], [68], [72], [84], [116], [153], [155], [165], [188], [193], [194], [211], [212], [237], [240], GENERAL(1) [206] DT(9) [67...…”

“…[5], [33], [95], [145], [224], NMF(1) [79], NOT PRESENTED(4) [36], [91], [242], [243], SAF(10) [21], [71], [86], [113], [150], [153], [162], [202], [205], [219] ALLOCATION(7) [5], [21], [33], [95], [145], [150], [153], COMPONENT SELECTION(1) [36], GENERAL(5) [79], [138], [139], [205], [224], HARDWARE REPLICATION(1) [95], HARD-WARE SELECTION(3) [33], [145], [150], NOT PRESENTED(1) [91], OTHER PROBLEM SPECIFIC(2) [71], [113], SCHEDULING(1) [33], SERVICE COMPOSITION(2) [202], [219], SERVICE SELECTION(6) [113], [162], [202], [219], [242], …”

Enabling Self-Management by Using Model-Based Design Space Exploration

“…To overcome these limitations, a design space exploration tool named DESERT-FD was developed [15]. It contains a hybrid solver which combines the symbolic constraint satisfaction of DESERT with finite domain constraint satisfaction.…”

Model-Based Automated and Guided Configuration of Embedded Software Systems

“…Feature models, however, are not easily amenable to capturing all kinds of variabilities and hardware-software dependencies in embedded systems. Furthermore, existing configuration approaches either do not particularly focus on interactively guiding engineers or verifying partial configurations [19,6], or their notion of configuration and their underlying mechanism are different from ours, and hence, not directly applicable to our problem domain [16,14].…”