UML as Front-End Language for Embedded Systems Design

Abstract

This chapter covers the use of UML as a modeling language for embedded systems design. It introduces the UML language, presenting the history of its definition, its main diagrams and characteristics. Using a case study, we show that using the standard UML with its limitations one is not able to model many important characteristics of embedded systems. For that reason, UML provides extension mechanisms that enable one to extend the language for a given domain, through the definition of profiles covering domain-specific applications. Several profiles have been proposed for the embedded systems domain, and some of those that have been standardized by OMG are presented here. A case study is also used to present MARTE, a new profile specifically proposed for the embedded system domain, enabling designers to model aspects like performance and schedulability. This chapter also presents a discussion about the effort to generate code from UML diagrams and analyses the open issues to the successful use of UML in the whole embedded system design flow.