UML-Based Design and Validation of Intelligent Agents-Based Reconfigurable Embedded Control Systems

The paper examines UML-based design and validation of reconfigurable embedded control systems which can have multiple software architectural configurations such that each one is designed by a set of inter-connected software components. To handle dynamic reconfiguration scenarios, the authors define a software agent which interacts with users and applies several forms of reconfiguration at different granularity levels of the system’s architecture. The agent has the ability of monitoring the system’s environment and to apply appropriate and valid reconfiguration scenarios under well-defined constraints. Three architectural levels are defined in order to consider all possible reconfiguration forms of embedded systems. The authors define a set of UML-compliant metamodels to describe the knowledge about the reconfiguration agent, the system architecture, the reconfiguration scenarios, and the reconfiguration events. Validity of reconfigurations scenarios are checked using an UML-based environment which allows evaluating architectural and reconfiguration constraints. The proposed reconfiguration approach is applied to the FESTO production system.