Automatic High-Level Code Generation for Multi-Core Processors in Embedded Systems

The low-code approach is an important area of research being developed to improve the rapid creation and performance of software applications. This approach allows developers and users to easily create software applications through an interactive interface. Existing research shows that the low-code approach accelerates the development process in innovative ways, saves effort and time, and reduces code complexity. This study analyses and compares automatic code generation and transformation techniques in low-code platforms. The study analyses the contributions of automatic code generation and transformation to software engineering processes and evaluates the impact of these techniques on software product quality and development speed. The importance of the Model-Based Development (MBD) approach in automated code generation processes is highlighted. It is stated that MBD provides benefits such as speeding up the software development process and reducing errors by enabling automatic code generation from high-level abstract models. In the study, various literature studies were evaluated to examine the impact of automatic code generation and transformation techniques on the application development process. These studies have shown how automatic code generation and transformation techniques are applied, what results are achieved and what contributions these techniques make to the software development process. The results of the study show that automatic code generation and transformation techniques have a great impact on the application development process. In particular, the acceleration of the software development process, the reduction of errors and the ability to produce more effective and efficient software products are important benefits of these techniques. In addition, it has been found that this approach increases the success of software projects by enabling software developers to produce fast and accurate solutions in complex systems. In this context, the importance of automatic code generation and transformation techniques plays an important role in software development processes.

Automatic code generation for production automotive powertrain applications introduces many challenges for the tool vendor. Resource efficiency, reliability, and product process development issues need to be addressed. Automatic code generation used for rapid prototyping systems usually will not satisfy the requirements necessary for production oriented code generation. Some of the requirements critical to automatic code generation are not immediately obvious to a tool vendor who is not active in the user's industry. The purpose of this paper is to address some of the most common requirements for production automotive powertrain code generation.

In this paper a software engineering concept is described which permits the automatic solution of a nonlinear set of network equations. The power flow equation set can be seen as a defined subset of a network equation set. The automated solution process is the numerical Newton-Raphson solution process of the power flow equations where the key code parts are the numeric mismatch and the numeric Jacobian term computation. It is shown that both the Jacobian and the mismatch term source code can be automatically generated in a conventional language such as Fortran or C. Thereby one starts from a high level, symbolic language with automatic differentiation and code generation facilities. As a result of this software engineering process an efficient, very high duality Newton-Raphson solution code is generated which allows easier implementation of network equation model enhancements and easier code maintenance as compared to hand-coded Fortran or C code.

Basically, aircraft engines can be divided into a control embedded system and a controlled system with its environment. The behaviour of the controlled system is given a priori, while the control system still needs to be designed in a way guaranteeing the correct overall behaviour under all operational conditions depending on the flight domain. A large quantity of functions in control systems can be described by a formal system expressed in block diagrams and state-based representations. These representations can be translated to formal based tools relying on the synchronous languages Signal and Statecharts. SACRES is a tool set supporting the design of safety-critical embedded control systems. It integrates the tools and specification techniques Statemate, Sildex, and Timing Diagrams with tool components for automatic code generation, formal verification based on model checking techniques, and an innovative approach for automatic code validation for target code generated from DC+. Technical achievements are The main benefits of the SACRES approach are reduced risks for design errors and decreased design times and costs for the development of dependable (safety critical) embedded systems. SACRES is an attempt to avoid unpredictability (particularly that arising from late feedback from testing) associated with development of safety critical systems, through the use of the maximum degree of automation, especially in respect of code generation and verification. An outstanding property of SACRES is the combination of specification styles and specification tools being applied in practice with automatic tools to establish provable correctness with respect to required properties. Both dependability and productivity are increased by automatic code generation from high-level specifications such that the generated code can be validated against higher levels by rigorous proofs. These techniques allow traditional tests by sampling to be replaced by rigorous checking techniques which correspond to 100% coverage of test cases. In order to address a global innovative approach in the near future which match the whole software configuration, the SACRES tool set should be interfaced with asynchronous techniques matching the operating system development. This raises an open question in the software development future new process.

The model-based approach has been widely applied to the design of software. However, most of these approaches depend on simulation and manual code implementation, which reduces the efficiency and quality of software. In this paper, we present a new model-based approach, which automatically generates the executable C++ code running on the popular Robot Operation System (ROS). Our approach consists of three phases: modeling, verification, and automatic code generation. In the modeling phase, the internal interaction behaviors of robot systems are modeled as a network of timed automata. In the verification phase, the safety requirements are formalized and verified. In the code generation phase, a code generation tool can generate executable C++ code from the verified timed automata model. It bridges the gap between the formal model and the error-prone system implementation. Compared with existing method, the code generator provides the abstractions and mapping of ROS instructions, which realize the seamless connection between the generated code and ROS. The tool also supports most of the complex structures and advanced features of timed automata such as timer, committed location, and synchronous action. For evaluation, a real-industrial robot application of grasping a cup is conducted using our model-based design method, and the generated code can be directly deployed and successfully accomplishes the grasping task.

Model-Based Design with automatic flight code generation is used to develop a variety of aerospace electronic systems including integrated avionics, jet engine controls, and flight control systems. The software deployed in these systems undergoes rigorous verification and validation because the consequences of software failure are severe. New code checking and analysis tools have recently emerged with tight integrations to the modeling and code generation environment provided by Simulink.

In emergency response environments, variant entities with specific behaviors and interaction between them form a complex system that can be well modeled by multi-agent systems. To build such complex systems, instead of writing the code from scratch, one can follow the model-driven development approach, which aims to generate software from design models automatically. To achieve this goal, two important prerequisites are: a domain-specific modeling language for designing an emergency response environment model, and transformation programs for automatic code generation from a model. In addition, for modeling with the language, a modeling tool is required, and for executing the generated code there is a need to a platform. In this paper, a model-driven framework for developing multi-agent systems in emergency response environments is provided which includes several items. A domain-specific modeling language as well as a modeling tool is developed for this domain. The language and the tool are called ERE-ML and ERE-ML Tool, respectively. Using the ERE-ML Tool, a designer can model an emergency response situation and then validate the model against the predefined constraints. Furthermore, several model to code transformations are defined for automatic multi-agent system code generation from an emergency response environment model. For executing the generated code, an extension of JAMDER platform is also provided. To evaluate our framework, several case studies including the Victorian bushfire disaster are modeled to show the ability of the framework in modeling real-world situations and automatic transformation of the model into the code.

Automatic code generation has been around for a long time, and the core technologies used are constantly evolving. Around application development work in the demand for high quality code generated rapidly, this paper proposes a automatic code generation method based on sequence generative adversarial network, the method adopts the adversarial learning thought, using LSTM as a generator, CNN as a discriminator, both through against each other to generate higher quality code samples. Experiment results show that this method can generate code automatically at the second level, and is significantly better than the existing methods in terms of generation rate and accuracy, which explores a new way of automatic code generation.

This paper describes the IOPT-Tools cloud-based tool-chain, offering a complete set of tools supporting design automation for embedded controller’s development, benefiting from adopting a model-driven development attitude. The tools are freely available online at http://gres.uninova.pt/IOPT-Tools/ . The tool-chain relies on IOPT nets (Input-Output Place-Transition nets) to describe the controller behavior, allowing an explicit representation of constraints on input and output signals and events, which is necessary for the development of controllers. The IOPT-Tools tool-chain includes tools for interactive graphical IOPT nets models editing, simulation and test (token-player, timing diagram, remote debugging), as well as a state-space generator, state-space visualization, and a query system for properties verification. The tool-chain also supports the automatic generation of execution code to be directly deployed in the controllers’ implementation platforms, such as FPGA boards, as well as Arduino, Raspberry, and other Linux-based boards. Most notably, it is possible to obtain C code and VHDL code to be directly deployed into the referred boards without writing/changing a line in the generated code. The tool-chain uses the PNML format for storing the models and can import PNML models generated by other frameworks, automatically generating, if necessary, an associated graphical representation. After, it is possible to add input and output signals and events to create controller models. IOPT-Tools also supports net operations, namely net addition, allowing composition of sub-models, and net splitting, which in conjunction with the use of clock domains and dedicated communication channels support the development of distributed controllers.

The emergence of Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a standard for modeling systems has encouraged the use of automated software tools that facilitate the development process from analysis through coding. The UML state machine diagram is used for modeling the dynamic aspects of systems and includes many concepts that are not present in most popular programming languages, like Java or C++. There exists a gap between high level modeling language and a programming language. This paper proposes an approach to narrow the gap between multiple UML models and an implemented system. The narrowing of gap is achieved by generating compact and efficient Java code directly from UML state machine having sequential and concurrent substates. The code generation is achieved by creating a mapping between UML behavior and the Java programming language. Our model can work as a basis for automatic code generation for object-oriented systems.

. This paper presents a multi-language and multi-environment generation of nonlinear finite element codes. The system consists of two major components. The Mathematica package AceGen is used for the symbolic derivation of formulae needed in numerical procedures and automatic code generation. The Computational Templates package is a collection of prearranged modules for the automatic creation of the interface between the finite element code and the finite element environment. The AceGen and the Computational Templates packages together enable multi-language and multi-environment generation of nonlinear finite element codes from the same symbolic description. The approach implemented in AceGen avoids the usual problem of uncontrollable growth of expressions by combining several techniques: symbolic and algebraic capabilities of Mathematica, an automatic differentiation technique, automatic code generation, simultaneous optimization of expressions; and theorem proving by stochastic evaluation of the expressions.

Analytical performance estimation during code generation on modern GPUs

To understand how people really interact with digital TV and digital video recorder (DVR) systems, 10 people were recruited, 6 with DVRs and 4 with non-DVR digital cable or satellite TV systems. Video-recording equipment was set up in their homes to record their TV viewing. The person viewing as well as the TV content being viewed were recorded as the person watched TV. Afterwards, the recordings were reviewed and analyzed by the experimenter together with the viewer, who then described his or her behavior. The results show that overall the most common way people interacted with TV was in avoiding advertisements and finding new programming to watch when the current show ended. These results can be used to find ways to improve how users experience TV systems.

The digital signal processing (DSP) processor-in-the-loop tests based on automatic code generation technology are studied. Firstly, the idea of model-based design is introduced, and the principle and method of embedded code automatic generation technology are analyzed by taking the automatic code generation of the DSP control algorithm for pulse width modulation (PWM) output as an example. Then, the control system model is established on MATLAB/Simulink. After verifying the model through simulation, the target board platform is established with DSP as the core processor, and the automatically generated code is tested by the processor-in-the-loop (PIL). The results show that the technology greatly shortens the development cycle of the project, improves the robustness and consistency of the control code, and can be widely used in the complex algorithm development process of the controller, from intelligent design and modeling to implementation.

Model-Based Development (MBD) provides an additional level of abstraction, the model, which lets engineers focus on the business aspect of the developed system. MBD permits automatic treatments of these models with dedicated tools like synthesis of system's application by automatic code generation. Real-Time and Embedded Systems (RTES) are often constrained by their environment and/or the resources they own in terms of memory, energy consumption with respect to performance requirements. Hence, an important problem to deal with in RTES development is linked to the optimization of their software part. Although automatic code generation and the use of optimizing compilers bring some answers to application optimization issue, we will show in this paper that optimization results may be enhanced by adding a new level of optimizations in the modeling process. Our arguments are illustrated with examples of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) state machines diagrams which are widely used for control aspect modeling of RTES. The well-known Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) is used for this study. The paper concludes on a proposal of two step optimization approach that allows reusing as they are, existing compiler optimizations.