Preface [Behavioral modeling for embedded systems and technologies: applications for design and implementation]

Abstract

[Excerpt] Embedded systems development requires integration of a variety of hardware and software components. This field, due to its multifaceted nature, has received contributions from different disciplines, namely computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, hardware-software codesign, and system modeling, not to mention mechanical engineering and materials sciences and engineering. Model-driven development techniques are gaining importance, especially in the software community, and are expected to become a mainstream engineering approach in the near future, due to the benefits that they offer. Model-driven approaches offer a higher degree of abstraction, which is a crucial characteristic to tackle the growing complexity of the modern computer-based systems. This implies that in the next couple of years the application of model-driven approaches to develop embedded systems is likely to be not only useful, but a real necessity to address the growing complexity of those systems and fight against what is commonly called as the “productivity gap” (as far as methods and tools support are evolving at a small pace than chip complexity does, according with Moore’s law). Therefore, system developers are supposed to master modeling techniques to perform their development tasks. This book is about embedded computer systems. This book is also about how to model the behavior of those systems, for design and implementation purposes. Its technical contents focus on providing a state-of-the-art overview on behavioral models currently used for developing embedded systems, emphasizing on graphical and visual notations. You can find an excellent set of chapters, written in a tutorial-like style by leading and respected researchers and industry practitioners in the field of behavioral modeling of embedded systems. The chapters of this book cover a wide range of the important topics related to modeling embedded systems and were carefully selected and reviewed to give a coherent and broad view of the field. [...]