Extending UML/MARTE to Support Discrete Controller Synthesis, Application to Reconfigurable Systems-on-Chip Modeling

This article presents the first framework to design and synthesize a formal controller managing dynamic reconfiguration, using a model-driven engineering methodology based on an extension of UML/MARTE. The implementation technique highlights the combination of hard configuration constraints using weights (control part)-ensured statically and fulfilled by the system at runtime-and soft constraints (decision part) that, given a set of correct and accessible configurations, choose one of them. An application model of an image processing application is presented, then transformed and synthesized to be executed on a Xilinx platform to show how the controller, executed on a Microblaze, manages the hardware reconfigurations.