Section: Application Domains

Application Domains

Four main application domains can be underlined.

• In-vehicle embedded systems. A lot of work developed in TRIO is oriented towards transportation systems (cars, autonomous vehicles, etc.). They mainly cover two points. The first one is the specification of what must be modeled in such a system and how to reach a good accuracy of a model; this leads to investigate topics like Architecture Description Languages and automatic generation of models. The second point concerns the verification of dependability properties and temporal properties required by these applications and, consequently, the development of new fault tolerant on-line mechanisms to include in an application or the automatic generation of a standard middleware.

• Compilation, memory management and low-power issues for real time embedded systems. It becomes mandatory to design embedded systems that respect performances and reliability constraints while minimizing the energy consumption. Hence, TRIO is involved, on the one hand, in the definition of ad-hoc memory management at compilation time and on the other hand, in joint study of memory management strategies and tasks scheduling for real time critical systems.

• Code analyses and software visualization for embedded systems. Despite important advances, it is still impossible to develop and optimize automatically all the programs with all their variety, especially when deployment constraints are considered. Software design and implementation thus remain highly ad-hoc, poorly automated activities, with a human being in the loop. TRIO is thus involved in the design of better tools for software engineering focusing on helping the human developer understand and develop the system, thanks to powerful automated program analyses and advanced visualizations techniques.

• Quality of services (QoS) of protocols and telecommunications. In many application domains, the evaluation and, when required, the improvement of the quality of services provided by the used communication protocols is a way to ensure the respect of real time and dependability properties. In this context, we model and analyze some protocols for Internet and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and aim to define the optimal configuration of their characteristics (protocols for the QoS guarantee for multimedia applications or ambient assisted living applications). Although WSN (Wireless Sensors Network) technology is economically a very interesting solution for building CPS, unfortunately its current QoS is not sufficient for supporting such applications. Adaptive QoS seems to be an interesting approach to this problem. This could be achieved in two coordinated directions: one is to develop the on-line adaptive QoS management in network to cope with the time varying performance requirement of an application; another is to make applications to adapt to the network working condition changes if they go beyond the network QoS control range. We follow a pragmatic approach by assuming the use of the COTS components (e.g. IEEE802.15.4/Zigbee) at the lower levels. The adaptive QoS are mainly studied at the routing level with cross-layer optimization and by defining and developing a QoS middleware allowing the necessary on-line interaction between the network and the application.