Language Engineering for Heterogeneous Collaborative Embedded Systems

Abstract

At the core of model-driven development (MDD) of collaborative embedded systems (CESs) are models that realize the different participating stakeholders’ views of the systems. For CESs, these views contain various models to represent requirements, logical functions, collaboration functions, and technical realizations. To enable automated processing, these models must conform to modeling languages. Domain-specific languages (DSLs) that leverage concepts and terminology established by the stakeholders are key to their success. The variety of domains in which CESs are applied has led to a magnitude of different DSLs. These are manually engineered, composed, and customized for different applications, a process which is costly and error-prone. We present an approach for engineering independent language components and composing these using systematic composition operators. To support structured reuse of language components, we further present a methodology for building up product lines of such language components. This fosters engineering of collaborative embedded systems with modeling techniques tailored to each application.