SBIR-STTR Award

We shall investigate and design capabilities of a friendly and highly visual software environment called TimeWiz for designing, modeling, analyzing, integrating, documenting and visualizing the behavior of dynamic real-time and dependable systems. End-to-end system timing behavior will be analyzed using established real-time techniques such as rate-monotonic analysis (RMA). Dynamic system reconfigurability and reliability will be studied using bin-packing and probabilistic techniques respectively. Powerful visualization tools included hierarchical browsing and multi views of each lawyer will enable both beginners and experts to be comfortable with the environment. A component respository will enable existing and future COTS hardware and software component types to be defined and modeled. The architecture of TimeWiz will be open and extensible, allowing software modules with new features and analysis tools to be plugged in as plug-and-play units. Components can be exported and imported using component adapters. Automated (skeletal) code generation will enable designed systems to interface with open COTS components such as CORBA interfaces. Support for powerful middleware abstractions used in real-time and dependable systems will be provided by exposing library and infrastructure components only when needed.

We shall develop and commercialize TimeWiz» a friendly, sophisticated and integrated modeling, analysis and visualization software package which has: 1) a highly visual and interactive interface, 2) a sophisticated diagramming utility with software and hardware components and connectors, 3) a hierarchical representation scheme for unlimited levels of hardware/software abstractions, 4) a catalog facility for visual and behavioral customization, 5) a facility to bind software to hardware components automatically and/or manually, 6) extensive timing analysis capabilities using Rate-Monotonic Analysis, 7) a charting facility, 8) a reporting facility for a complete system summary, and 9) a property inspector to display properties of the selected component. A working prototype of TimeWiz was successfully built and demonstrated during our Phase I effort. We now propose to: a) add significant new analytical capabilities including end-to-end timing analysis, hardware reliability analysis, system overhead inclusion, COTS operating system support, hierarchical binding, and custom catalog of components, b) extend, complete and integrate the state-of-the-art user-interface of TimeWiz including custom report generation, custom plotting, comprehensive drag-and drop support, cut-and-paste, undo/redo, a customizable environment, and, c) validate all TimeWiz features on a host of complete case-studies. We also propose 1) a powerful simulation facility to capture all behaviors of distributed systems, 2) end-user extensibility for custom analytical techniques and, 3) an active monitoring and control facility for debugging and tuning multiple live embedded targets.