Usable Design Space Exploration in AutoFOCUS3

abstract

Software-intensive embedded systems are characterized by an increasing number of features that implement complex functionalities. To effectively manage this complexity, development processes in general, and model-based approaches in particular, support the development of such systems as model-based approaches have been considered a central design approach to deal with increasing complexity in software and hardware development. A valid system design and configuration, especially a safety-critical system design, has to fulfill a corresponding set of requirements describing all desired system constraints and objectives. In general, these constraints may be contradicting and correspond to different dimensions (e.g. timing, safety, energy, cost, etc.). Thus, considering all system constraints during system design is a manually unsolvable task. To support the system designer, usable Design Space Exploration methods are needed. Therefore, a proper tool implementation is needed that supports the usability. In this paper, we describe a Design Space Exploration process which aims to explore the architectural design space during system design. This process has been implemented in the open source CASE tool AutoFOCUS3 with the focus on usability.