Seamlessly Integrating Software & Hardware Modelling for Large-Scale Systems

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Equation-Based Object-Oriented Languages and Tools, Paphos, Cyprus, July 8, 2008

Large-scale systems increasingly consist of a mixture of co-dependent software and hardware. The differing nature of software and hardware means that they are often modelled separately and with different approaches. This can cause failures later in development during the integration of software and hardware designs, due to incompatible assumptions of software/hardware interactions. This paper proposes a method of integrating the software engineering approach, Behavior Engineering, with the mathematical modelling approach, Modelica, to address the software/hardware integration problem. The environment and hardware components are modelled in Modelica and integrated with an executable software model designed using Behavior Engineering. This allows the complete system to be simulated and interactions between software and hardware to be investigated early in development.