UML-based development of embedded software systems

Model-driven development, using the UML, has become the most dominant development paradigm, particularly in business and web application engineering, due to their many advantages over traditional procedural approaches. However, Model-driven and UML-based development methods are still inferior to conventional software development approaches when it comes to embedded and real-time system development. Most such methods provide only weak systematic and methodological support for system development in the embedded domain. The most fundamental problems in this domain stem from the fact that individual techniques for embedded system development only acknowledge and address the particularities of object and component technologies insufficiently, and more importantly, that individual technologies are mostly treated in isolation. One important aspect is the heterogeneity of embedded systems, containing both, hardware and software components. A systematic approach for the model-driven development therefore has to address this fact by providing a uniform but systematic way for modeling hardware and software parts of the system. This paper discusses how software and hardware components of an embedded system can be uniformly described with the UML, and it presents a small case-study.