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Composing domain-specific physical models with general-purpose software modules in embedded control software

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Abstract

A considerable portion of software systems today are adopted in the embedded control domain. Embedded control software deals with controlling a physical system, and as such models of physical characteristics become part of the embedded control software. In current practices, usually general-purpose languages (GPL), such as C/C++ are used for embedded systems development. Although a GPL is suitable for expressing general-purpose computation, it falls short in expressing the models of physical characteristics as desired. This reduces not only the readability of the code but also hampers reuse due to the lack of dedicated abstractions and composition operators. Moreover, domain-specific static and dynamic checks may not be applied effectively. There exist domain-specific modeling languages (DSML) and tools to specify models of physical characteristics. Although they are commonly used for simulation and documentation of physical systems, they are often not used to implement embedded control software. This is due to the fact that these DSMLs are not suitable to express the general-purpose computation and they cannot be easily composed with other software modules that are implemented in GPL. This paper presents a novel approach to combine a DSML to model physical characteristics and a GPL to implement general-purpose computation. The composition filters model is used to compose models specified in the DSML with modules specified in the GPL at the abstraction level of both languages. As such, this approach combines the benefits of using a DSML to model physical characteristics with the freedom of a GPL to implement general-purpose computation. The approach is illustrated using two industrial case studies from the printing systems domain.

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Notes

  1. There are some small differences with the execution semantics of physical models in the 20-Sim simulation tooling. These differences are discussed in Sect. 9.5.

  2. See also Appendix A for more information about the Composition Filters model.

  3. See also Appendix A.

  4. The word ‘constant’ refers in this case to a fixed value in the physical relationship for one specific design. Therefore, if the design changes, the value of constants can also change.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been carried out as part of the OCTOPUS project under the responsibility of the Embedded Systems Institute. This project is partially supported by the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs under the Embedded Systems Institute program. We thank Jacques Verriet from ESI for reviewing this paper and providing useful feedback.

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  1. Software Engineering group, CS Department, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Arjan de Roo & Mehmet Akşit

  2. Computer Science Department, Özyeğin University, İstanbul, Turkey

    Hasan Sözer

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  1. Arjan de Roo
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Correspondence to Arjan de Roo.

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Communicated by Dr. Jeff Gray, Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, and Matti Rossi.

Appendix A: Background: the composition filters model

Appendix A: Background: the composition filters model

In this appendix we give a short introduction in the Composition Filters modeland the Compose* language that implements the Composition Filters model. For further information on the Composition Filters modeland the Compose* language, we refer to [40, 48, 52, 53].

1.1 A.1 Introduction into the composition filters model

A key design goal of the Composition Filters model is to improve the composability of programs written in object-based programming languages. The Composition Filters modelhas evolved from the first (published) version of the Sina language in the late 1980s [4, 5], to a version that supports language independent composition of crosscutting concerns [12, 53].

The Composition Filters modelcan be applied to object-based systems. In such a system, objects can send messages between each other, e.g., in the form of method calls or events. In the Composition Filters model, these messages can be filtered using a set of filters, as shown in Fig. 11.

Fig. 11
figure 11

Overview of the Composition Filters model

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Each filter has a filter type, which defines the behavior that should be executed if the filter accepts the message and the behavior that should be executed if the filter rejects the message. The matching behavior of a filter is specified by filter expressions, which offer a simple declarative language for state and message matching. Filters defining related functionality are grouped in so-called filter modules. Such filter modules can also encapsulate some internal state or share state with other objects.

To indicate which filter modules should be applied (superimposed) to which objects, we use superimposition selectors. A superimposition selector selects a set of classes using a Prolog-based selector language. A specified filter module is applied to this selected set of classes. The result is that all messages sent to and received by all instances of those selected classes, have to pass through the filters within the filter module.

The Composition Filters modelcan be applied to many different languages, and we have done so e.g., to SmallTalk [21], Java [55] and C++ [28]. The most recent implementation of the Composition Filters modelis the Compose* language and toolset, which not only supports .NET, but also Java and C. The next subsection introduces the Compose* language.

1.2 A.2 The compose* language

This section introduces the Compose* language using an example in which the Composition Filters modelis applied to implement scoring functionality in a Pacman game.

Figure 12 shows the class diagram of part of a Pacman implementation. The diagram contains the classes Game and Level, which manage respectively the game and the levels in the game. Game contains method gameStart, which initializes a new game, and method nextLevel, which initializes a new level after a previous level has been completed. The class Level contains methods eatFood, eatVitamin and eatGhost, which manage, respectively, Pacman eating a piece of food, Pacman eating a vitamin and Pacman eating a ghost.

Fig. 12
figure 12

Some classes in a Pacman game

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The game includes an option to maintain a score. The class Settings contains a flag that indicates whether a score should be maintained. Scores are given for various actions of Pacman: eating a piece of food, eating a vitamin, eating a ghost and finishing a level. Furthermore, scoring should be initialized/reset at the start of a new game. The class Score contains a method to initialize scoring (initScore()) and methods to add a score when a certain action has happened (scoreLevelComplete(), scoreFood(), scoreVitamin() and scoreGhost()). Because of the crosscutting nature of scoring functionality with the classes Game and Level, composition filters are used to compose Score with these classes.

Listing 12 shows the composition filters specification that composes the scoring functionality with the Pacman game. The listing shows the definition of the concern ScoringConcern. This concern consists of one filter module definition and one superimposition definition.

figure a12

Filter Module Definition Lines 2 to 19 show the definition of the filtermodule scoring. Two external objects, score and settings, are referenced in the definition of the externals on Lines 3 to 5. Line 7 defines a condition, which is used in the filter specification. The filter module defines one filter, on Lines 9 to 18. The filter consists of several different parts, as indicated below:

$$ \begin{aligned} \overbrace{scoreF}^{identifier}:\overbrace{After}^{filter\,type}&= \overbrace{(enabled\, \& \,selector==\text{``}gameStart\text{''})}^{matching\,part}\\&\overbrace{\{target=score; selector= \text{``}initScore\text{''}\}}^{substitution\,part}\\&cor\,\overbrace{(\ldots )\,\{\ldots \}}^{filter\,element} \\&\ldots \\ \end{aligned}$$

The identifier is the name of the filter in the filter module. The filter type specifies the type of the filter. In this example, the type is After, which means that an additional message is sent after the original message has been further processed. In this way behavior can be added after the original behavior. In the example, this behavior is to perform scoring. Examples of other filter types are Dispatch, which performs a dispatch of the message to a given target instead of the original target, and Logging, which performs logging of the given message.

Filters contain one or more filter elements. The filter scoreF contains five filter elements. Filter elements define message matching and substitution. The five filter elements in the example are composed with a conditional-or (cor) operator, meaning that if a filter element accepts, the filter accepts without evaluating the next filter elements. If a filter element rejects, the next filter element is processed.

A filter elements consists of a matching part and a substition part. The matching part defines a matching condition on the messages. Only if the matching condition is satisfied, the filter element accepts and the substitution part is executed. The substitution part changes certain properties of the message. When a filter element accepts a message, the filter of which the filter element is part accepts the message, and the behavior corresponding to the filter type is executed.

The example filter on Lines 9 to 18 of Listing 12 show five filter elements. Each of these filter elements only match when the condition enabled is true. Furthermore, each of these filter elements match a different selector (i.e., method call) and specifies a different selector in score to which a message is sent after the execution of the original message. For example, when a message with selector “eatVitamin” is processed, first Level.eatVitamin executes, followed by a call to the method scoreVitamin in Score (as shown on Lines 13 and 14), to apply the scoring that corresponds to eating a vitamin.

Superimposition Definition Lines 21 to 26 show the superimposition definition. A superimposition definition specifies which filter modules are placed (i.e., superimposed) on which artifacts (e.g., classes). The given superimposition definition places the filter module scoring on classes Game and Level.

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de Roo, A., Sözer, H. & Akşit, M. Composing domain-specific physical models with general-purpose software modules in embedded control software. Softw Syst Model 13, 55–81 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-012-0283-7

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