Abstract

Modern embedded computing systems tend to be heterogeneous in the sense of being composed of subsystems with very different characteristics, that communicate and interact in a variety of ways —s ynchronous or asynchronous, buffered or unbuffered, etc. Obviously, when designing such systems, a modeling language needs to reflect this heterogeneity. Today’s modeling environments usually offer a variant of what we call amorphous heterogeneity to address this problem. This paper argues that modeling systems int his manner leads to unexpected and hard-to-analyze inter-actions between the communication mechanisms and proposes a more structured approach to heterogeneity, called hierarchical heterogeneity to solve this problem. It proposes a model structure and semantic framework that support this form of heterogeneity, and discusses the issues arising from heterogeneous component interaction and the desire for component reuse. It introduces the notion of domain polymorphism as a way to address these issues.

Johan Eker, Jörn W. Janneck, Edward A. Lee, Jie Liu, Xiaojun Liu, Jozsef Ludvig, Stephen Neuendorffer, Sonia R. Sachs, Yuhong Xiong. Taming heterogeneity - the Ptolemy approach. Proceedings of the IEEE 91(1): 127-144 (2003)

  Presentation

Presentation [Presentation-AtishaRibeiro.pdf]