The pervasiveness of embedded software is highly apparent in applications that include automotive, consumer devices and industrial controls. However, reliability and safety risks closely follow as more and more of this software is being used.

Within the WEMUCS project, a group of research institutes and commercial companies has devised a development process and a consistent tool chain that simplifies development and at the same time makes the software more dependable.

The WEMUCS project, which has been concluded successfully, pursued the objective to simplify the development process in particular with respect to multicore platforms and at the same time ensure better software quality. At the ESE congress in Sindelfingen (Germany), participating companies and institutes demonstrated a range of examples, with most of them dealing with automotive applications.

Improving software quality is a non-trivial issue: The tools that are available for developing, optimising and testing of embedded software are not exactly seamlessly integrated. Some of the products at the market do not even take into account the specific features and properties of embedded systems. A consequence of this situation is that changing the tools frequently causes errors in the software; in addition, the efforts necessary for the documentation increases. The errors are detected only late in the development process which leads to higher costs - not to mention the additional expenditure of time.

The WEMUCS project has an answer to these challenges: The participants further developed and modified existing tools for modelling, test, optimising and tracing. These tools have been intertwined and dovetailed to enable users to verify the system requirements already in an early phase and along the entire process. This, the project participants said, optimises the system. In order to interconnect the tools, the participants jointly developed specific interfaces and data exchange formats. In addition, usage methods for these interfaces and formats have been developed.

On top of these works to streamline the tool chain, the project partners developed novel methods of automatically parallelising control software, for new software at the modelling level and thus at an early stage of development as well as for existing automation software. Against the background of progressive adoption of multicore processors this creates the prerequisite to exhaust the potential of these high-performance processors.

An example for such a data exchange format is the open OT1 format that is rather popular in the automotive realm. It is used frequently to exchange system descriptions across multiple tools or to optimise task distribution schemes. Another usage for the format is safeguarding the timing behaviour of software in vehicles. At the ESE congress it is demonstrated how the software development process is optimised at the example of an anti-lock braking system. Another exhibit shows how a conveyor system software is controlled by sensors and actuators in parallel. One of the WEMCUS focus topics was the interplay of parallel software processes and to devise test criteria for parallel software.

WEMUCS has concluded during past November after two years. It was coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Embedded Systems ESK; participants were among others the universities of Erlangen and Augsburg, chipmakers Infineon and Lantiq as well as software tool vendors Gliwa GmbH, Lauterbach GmbH, Timing Architects Embedded Systems GmbH and Siemens.

By: DocMemory
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