Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

The ESPRESSO project-team is interested in the model-based computer-aided design of embedded-software architectures using formal methods provided with the polychronous model of computation [8] . ESPRESSO focuses on the system-level modeling and validation of software architecture, during which formal design and validation technologies can be most benefitial to users in helping to explore key design choices and validate preliminary user requirements. The research carried out in the project team covers all the necessary aspects of system-level design by providing a framework called Polychrony. The company Geensoft (now part of Dassault Systèmes), with which we had many collaborations, has supplied a commercial implementation of Polychrony, RT-Builder, which has been deployed on large-scale applications with the avionics and automotive industries (contact: http://www.geensoft.com ).

Polychrony is a computer-aided design toolset that implements the best-suited GALS (globally asynchronous and locally synchronous) model of computation and communication to semantically capture embedded architectures. It provides a representation of this model of computation through an Eclipse environment to facilitate its use and inter-operation with the heterogeneity of languages and diagrams commonly used in the targeted application domains: aerospace and automotive. The core of Polychrony provides a wide range of analysis, transformation, verification and synthesis services to assist the engineer with the necessary tasks leading to the simulation, test, verification and code-generation for software architectures, while providing guaranteed assurance of traceability and formal correctness. The Polychrony toolset is available under EPL and GPL v2.0 license by Inria.