For systems with such characteristics, Usine Logicielle is the project labelled by the System@tic “pôle de compétitivité” which has for ambition to provide the tools and processes allowing the increase of productivity for their development, the increase of their quality and thus that will provide the response to the market pressure.
The activities lead by Usine Logicielle are established on the results of the scientific and technical communities which are segmented into three fields:

 

 

The results have shown that there is no unique existing tooling solution to deal with the design of all the types of complex systems. A generic core can be isolated but numerous specialisations of processes and tools must be made in order to answer to the needs of the different technological domains and markets.
The strong belief that the mastering of the model driven engineering and the design of systems must be treated both on the technical dimension and on the domain dimension crystallized during the constitution of the pôle de compétitivité Sys-tem@tic Paris-Région. At the heart of the pole, the Usine Logicielle project is positioned as a supplier of engineering technologies used in a generic manner and on a small number of technical application fields: for the moment Real time, Embedded and Technical Information Systems. This project plays a central role with regards to the other projects of the pole Sys-tem@tic in the sense that these technologies can be composed and specialised to deal with vertical application domains needs required by other projects of the pole: The Automobile Market, Super computers, High scale simulations etc.

 

 
The Market position of Usine Logicielle

In order to take up this challenge, three capital requirements must be met:

 

 

Thus, Usine Logicielle logically joins in its con-sortium these three types of partners.

 
Improve the competitive advantage of France, create a basis for use by other technical domains, reinforce the French economic web.

Tools for software development suitable for complex systems engineering mainly elaborates today in major DARPA’s projects in the United States and/or in other few American software editors. These tools have a generalist vocation. They only partly cover the specific needs of the embedded real time domain and of the technical information systems domain, especially from the expression of behaviour and verification perspec-tives.

Technical Objectives:
One of the objectives of Usine Logicielle is to create the conditions allowing the development of an offer more adaptable, durable -open source and /or based on proprietary solutions- of industrial quality and well documented, taking into account the main standards of the aimed domains: at first the Real Time and Embedded domains. At the end of the project, other signifi-cant standards from particular business domains of the Pole’s projects and from other national poles could be considered: Pole Aeronautique-Espace- Système Embarqués de Midi-Pyrénées or Pole Image et Réseaux de Bretagne.

Economic objectives;
This technology framework available in France and accessible to the best teams in the field must allow the development of innovating tools that the French Industries need while at the same time federating our best researchers efforts. It also allows the reinforcement of start ups and French small and medium size companies operating in the domain allowing them to develop new activities and products.

 
Supplying an open and coherent platform integrating tools for modelling, production, validation and execution of complex systems.
Experiencing industrial engineering issues to extend and validate the platform’s components.

Usine Logicielle places modelling at the central place of the development of complex software systems where the model becomes the reference for the application from which codes, documentations and tests can be generated. Usine Logicielle focuses essentially on automation, techniques of generation, full scale deployment of techniques of validation and verification but also on the capitalisation of the know how and the sharing of software reusable assets between domains. The Work Program splits into three distinct and complementary axis:

 

 

 
Usine Logicielle Architecture

 

The objective of the sub project OpenDevFactory is to supply a standard platform for integrating technological developments for modelling software tools. This sub project produces technological components on top of which domain tools (automobile, security, telecommunication, aeronautical…) can be derived at a lesser effort. That platform will be built as an interoperable federation of tools which limited parts could be deployed to make specialised IDEs meeting the particular needs of different kinds of users.
The technological bricks are organized as fol-lows:

 

 

The integration structure of OpenDevFactory is build on top of the Eclipse framework. On this structure, the generic and specific engineering components are case by case integrated depend-ing on the needs of the industrial project’s case studies.
There is a significant difference between providing an environment to support case studies and providing it in an industrial operational context. Numerous questions, issues and opportunities are raised by realising true model driven engineering. They need a deep analysis which can be realised with the help of industrial experimentations. Thanks to OpenDevFactory, the emerging themes that we can investigate are numerous. Among these, the project will focus on the following:

 

Engineering heterogeneity:
The objective is to integrate in the same engineering process various types of competing engineering disciplines. The technical domain chosen for this experimentation is real time embedded. In order to design such systems and to satisfy the constraints of volume or of resources consummation (time, memory and energy…), it is necessary to make use of several specific engineering disciplines in the context of MDE such as performance engineering, test engineering and embarcability engineering.

 

Discontinuity of engineering processes :
Some system classes need to integrate in a same design process different interdependent engineering disciplines: mechanic, physic, electronic, computers etc. These kinds of complex systems are not only software predominant because each solution element brought to the system architecture by exercising an engineering discipline impacts the nature of the problem to deal with by the other engineering disciplines.
The issue which is discussed in the project is to make the iterative process resulting of this situation seamless by bringing a formal support to the continuity of the engineering processes.

Models heterogeneity:
The support for obsolescence management does not only concern the electronic components and computers, it also includes engineering tools used by companies in their system and software IDEs. For software embedded in long life time products such as nuclear centrals or aircrafts, the durability of these tools producing these software can be less important than the products inside of which they are integrated. We are then confronted to a problem in MDE which is to transform in the most efficient way possible the model of the embedded software from the obsolescent tool into a model for the replacement tool without modifying the behaviour of the software defined by the model to be translated. Just like the issue of interoperability between engineering disciplines is sorted out, the model transformation tools of the OpenDevFactory platform eases the development of translators thus allowing the migration of the software models.

City planning of technical information sys-tems:
The technical information system “carries” the virtual product throughout the life-cycle, crossing its different temporal states (before projects are completed up to ready for retirement products) and its different views for each discipline and this, in a distributed heterogeneous and multi partners environment. The objective here is to put into place solutions allowing 1) to assure the interoperability of the different technical information systems partners and 2) to allow the transparent evolution of the technological implementation tools (E.g. The replacement of one application with another.) This objective requires the capacity to formalize the management and evolution model of the technical information and to master the conversion procedures (link with heterogeneous engineering and platform heterogeneity.)

Platforms heterogeneity:
The objective is to integrate in the same engineering process design aspects and multi platforms distributed deployment aspects. The problem is to be able to state at a lesser cost the design of a real time system on different execution platforms not necessarily offering the same quality of service nor the same programming model. In order to design systems according to this approach, it is necessary to use different engineering disciplines stated in the MDE world such as execution platform modelling, real time aspects modelling, model transformation and completion by non functional elements, failure management; this in order to satisfy the targets performances constraints.

Multi formalisms semantic correspondence:
The design of components based system on type “models of numeric algorithms” is characterised by an heterogeneity of the formalisms used for describing their behaviour. In order to study and finally validate the global consistency of a GALS system (Generally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous) built with the help of these components, it is necessary to lean on a common point of description of their properties, in particular for their real-time properties. The models built on this meta model (or semantic pivot) must be consistent and meet by construction the desired properties for the considered system. Thus for the same functional architecture, different ordering for the model execution can be defined but only a few are consistent from the real time and behavioural point of view.
The objective will be to evaluate a prototype of semantic pivot meta model, consistent with the formalisms used for this class of systems and al-lowing to separate the functional design from the model of execution.

 
A set of tests and analysis tools for models.
Integration of validation activities in an MDE process.

The MoDrival sub-project is centred on the verification of complex systems at different stages of their development from their specification and their modelling up to their acceptance. The notion of complex system is restricted here to those which complexity results in the simultaneous presence of software and hardware components whether these materials be existing processors, systems on Chip (SoCs) or Network on Chip (NoCs).
Several themes are approached in the sub pro-ject:

 

 

The first family of investigated techniques specifically concerns tests synthesis which means to calculate the input test data that allow verifying particular software or system properties. Different techniques are studied such as generating tests cases from formal requirements or from a distribution of a targeted test coverage for the software’s structure to be tested.

The second family of techniques studied in MoDrival is the static analysis by abstract interpretation. Instead of executing the testing program for a set of numeric values, a mathematic model replaces the execution of the program using symbolic values, meaning any kind of value for the input data, taking into consideration in the algorithm only what is pertinent for the class of properties to be established. Two types of properties are considered: a majoring approximation of rounded errors for numeric calculations and the verification of inexistent memory overflow during program execution.

Finally the third family of validation techniques studied in MoDrival concerns the performance evaluation of a software running on a hardware simulated by software in order to predict precisely the execution time and the spent energy. These predictions are essential when embedding software in small objects such as cellular phones or chip cards during the development phases where there are only software models of processors available.

 
A flexible components based execution platform for real-time embedded systems engineered with OpenDecFactory and MoDriVal.

The Inflexion’s sub-project objective is to define a flexible and optimised execution platform dedi-cated to embedded real-time systems. This platform will be compliant with the component/container architecture principles which allows a true separation of functional concerns (or business) and non functional concerns (or technical services). The inflexion platform will facilitate the design of systems by assembly of components and will facilitate the reuse of existing ones.
Inflexion extends the tasks already started on the theme of components based infrastructures for RTE systems by bringing the following innova-tions.

 

 

Furthermore, the design and assembly of a system running on top of Inflexion will be realised using the MDE IDE supplied by OpenDevFactory.

 

 
Inflexion’s Architecture

 

The container :
The container is the key architectural element of the component/container organisation. It isolates the components it protects from the underlying platform and provides the non functional properties which are required (temporal requirements, fault tolerance). These non functional properties are specified by the means of descriptors which allow attaching quality of Service requirements to the functional connectors of the components. As indicated on the right hand side of the above diagram, a tool for automating the generation of containers (parameterized by the descriptors of the compo-nents that they will host) is an inherent part of the environment provided services.

 

The administration service:
This environment service figuring on the left hand side of the hereunder diagram allows the display and configuration of the components and their containers then the supervision of the system and its reconfiguration in case of drifting. As a consequence, this component is highly impacted by the project’s innovations (fault tolerance and dynamic reconfiguration.)
In fact it must then support the starting, the stopping and the modification of one part of the system (and not of its entirety) while keeping a whole consistent execution. It must cope also with the partial failure of reconfiguration operations and allow their roll back. Finally, it must keep the system in a “fault tolerant” state while supervising the components state (active and passive) in collaboration with the containers that supervise them continuously.

Fault tolerance:
Fault tolerance is an extremely vast field. The first step is to define the taxonomy of faults and their management strategies that the project will address. On this basis, the model of fault tolerance for an application must be established. This model must in particular specify the criticality which applies to certain parts of the application (in most cases, dealing with the whole system at the highest degree of criticality is not realistic.) and the fault tolerance strategies (types of faults to detect, hardware faults, deadlines failure, time drifting, numerical exceptions, management strategies, redundancy, reconfiguration…) that we want to put in place.
This model is then taken into account (for use) by the administration service in collaboration with the dedicated support integrated in the containers: