Synthesis of embedded software using Free-Choice Petri Nets

Abstract

Software synthesis from a concurrent functional specification is a key problem in the design of embedded systems. A concurrent specification is well-suited for medium-grained partitioning. However, in order to be implemented in software, concurrent tasks need to be scheduled on a shared resource (the processor). The choice of the scheduling policy mainly depends on the specification of the system. For pure dataflow specifications, it is possible to apply a fully static scheduling technique, while for algorithms containing data-dependent control structures, like the if-then-else or while-do constructs, the dynamic behaviour of the system cannot be completely predicted at compile time and some scheduling decisions are to be made at run-time. For such applications we propose a Quasi-static scheduling (QSS) algorithm that generates a schedule in which run-time decisions are made only for data-dependent control structures. We use Free Choice Petri Nets (FCPNs), as underlying model, and define quasi-static schedulability for FCPNs. The proposed algorithm is complete, in that it can solve QSS for any FCPN that is quasi-statically schedulable. Finally, we show how to synthesize from a quasi-static schedule a C code implementation that consists of a set of concurrent tasks.