Master Thesis - Past Projects - Abstract

Code Generation from High-level Models of Reactive and Security Intrinsic Systems

ID: LiTH-IDA-EX-04/030--SE

Software systems can be specified in many different ways and on many different levels of abstraction. By raising the level of abstraction, complex systems can be specified more easily which in turn leads to faster development and less error-prone designs. The process of transforming a high-level specification into a conventional high-level language, e.g. C, is automated by code generation tools. At the high-tech company Sectra, an empirical study has shown that errors in their software systems are often related to reactive behaviour and changing requirements. An attempt to overcome these problems is to introduce a code generation tool. The code generation tool should be suitable for Sectra's systems and execution environments and also manage to meet security requirements on the source code for those systems. In this work different code generation approaches have been studied. A brief introduction to notations and code generation techniques in model-based development is given. It is shown that tools based on these code generation techniques fail to provide the type of functionality required by Sectra. Therefore, in order to meet Sectra's requirements, a customized code generation approach that uses the Harel statechart notation has been developed. An in-house code generation tool based on the customized code generation approach has been designed and a prototype has been implemented and evaluated. It is shown that a simple, customized code generation approach tested in a prototype implementation can fulfill Sectra's requirements where other large commercial tools fail.

Keywords: reactive systems, code generation, Harel statecharts, model-based development, security intrinsic systems

Author(s): Anders Grahn

Contact: Simin Nadjm-Tehrani