An embedded SW design exploration approach based on UML estimation tools

Abstract

Software engineers, when modeling an application using object-oriented concepts and the UML language, do not have an idea of the impact of their modeling decisions on issues such as performance, energy, and memory footprint for a given embedded platform. However, these are critical characteristics for embedded systems and should be taken into account in early design stages. In our approach, estimation of data and program memory, performance and energy are obtained from an initial UML specification. It allows the designer to evaluate and compare different modeling solutions, thus supporting design space exploration at a very high abstraction level. A case study is used to demonstrate our approach, in which an application is modeled in different ways and the alternative solutions are compared using the high-level estimations. Experimental results are presented and demonstrate the effectiveness of the estimates in an early design space exploration.