A toolkit for design and performance analysis of real-time component-based software systems

Software tools supporting the design and analysis of complex software-intensive systems are highly desirable, since they enable earlier decision making about system realization. This paper presents a tooling environment that supports the design and performance analysis of time-critical component-based software architectures deployed on complex multiprocessor platforms. The tooling environment contains a set of integrated tools for (a) component storage and retrieval, (b) graphics-based design of software and hardware architectures, (c) performance analysis of the defined architectures and, (d) automated code generation. The cornerstone of the toolkit is a performance analyzer that provides efficient simulation of the designed architectures and enables design-time prediction of key performance properties like response time, data throughout, and usage of hardware resources (processor, memory and bus). For every architecture alternative, the performance predictions can be quickly obtained, thereby enabling a fast and yet broad design space exploration. We demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of this toolkit on a Car Radio Navigation benchmark case.