Automatic Program Generation for Embedded Systems

October 4th 2007, Salzburg, Austria

In association with GPCE 2007 and colocated with ESWEEK

Invited talk

Some issues in automatic code generation for embedded control systems

Paul Caspi, Verimag (CNRS)

In this talk I shall first browse the history of automatic code generation in embedded control, mostly in the particular field of safety critical systems and describe what is the state of the art now. Then I shall give a closer look at what seems to me important issues in this domain:

• Typing and clocking issues: most model and simulation formalisms use some kind of type and clock inference which is rather unformalised. It is therefore important to formalise these practices and to embed them within type theory.
• Deforestation: most control modelling frameworks can be seen as first order functional languages over discrete-time signals, i.e., streams of values. For the sake of efficiency, this raises a problem of deforestation in order to achieve the bounded memory goal which is very important in safety critical systems.
• Optimisation: besides this point, there is a general problem of optimisation in order to be able to compete with human coding. Among the problem that can be addressed here, we can mention register optimisation and control structure optimisation.
• Faithfulness: control models are often based on the synchronous paradigm according to which computations take no time. But computations do take time and this can introduce deviations with respect to the behaviour of the models, mostly when multi-threaded executions are considered.