D32 Code generation

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Overview

The code generation activity has been undertaken at the University of Southampton. This has been a new line of work for DEPLOY that was not identified in the original Description of Work for the project. The development of the approach, and the tools to support, it involved a number of team members at Southampton; and also at other institutions. This work draws on our recent experience with technologies such as Shared Event Decomposition [[1]], and the EMF Framework for Event-B [[2]]. There was collaboration at an early stage with Newcastle University, where we explored the commonalities between their flow plug-in [[3]] and the algorithmic structures used in our approach. Collaboration with the University of York was also established since we chose to use their Epsilon [[4]] model-to-model transformation technology.

Motivations

The decision was taken in 2009 [[5]] to include code generation as a project goal. It had been recognised that support for generation of code from refined Event-B models would be an important factor in ensuring eventual deployment of the DEPLOY approach within their organisations. This was especially true for Bosch and Space Systems Finland (SSF). After receiving more detailed requirements from Bosch and SSF, it became clear we should focus our efforts on supporting the generation of code for typical real-time embedded control software.

Choices / Decisions

During the last year we have focussed on supporting the generation of code for typical real-time embedded control software. To this end we have evolved a multi-tasking approach which is conceptually similar to that of the Ada tasking model. Individual tasks are treated as sequential programs; these tasks are modelled by an extension to Event-B, called Tasking Machines. Tasks have mutually exclusive access to state variables through the use of protected resources. The protected resources correspond to Event-B machines. For real-time control, periodic and one-shot activation is currently supported; and it is planned to support aperiodic tasks in the near future. Tasks have priorities to ensure appropriate responsiveness of the control software. For the DEPLOY project, it was regarded as sufficient to support construction of programs with a fixed number of tasks and a fixed number of shared variables – no dynamic creation of processes or objects has been accommodated.

Our main goal this year has been to devise an approach for, and provide tool support for, code generation. In accord with the resources available during the year it was decided to limit the provision of tool support to that of a demonstrator tool. The tool is a proof-of-concept only, and lacks the productivity enhancements expected in a more mature tool. Nevertheless much insight has been gained in undertaking this work; it lays a foundation for future research, and will be useful since it will allow interested parties to explore the approach.

Deliverable

The demonstrator tool was released on 30 November 2010, and is available from https://sourceforge.net/projects/codegenerationd/files as an update site or bundled Rodin package. Sources are available from https://codegenerationd.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/codegenerationd

The tool is based on a build of Rodin 1.3.1 (not Rodin 2.0.0 due to dependency conflicts).

• The Code Generation tool consists of,
  • a tasking Development Generator.
  • a tasking Development Editor (Based on an EMF Tree Editor).
  • a translator, from Tasking Development to Common Language Model (IL1).
  • a translator, from the Tasking Development to Event-B model of the implementation.
  • a pretty-printer for the Tasking Development.
  • a pretty-printer for Common Language Model, which generates Ada Source Code.

Available Documentation

pre study http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/20826/

paper http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/20824/

This paragraph shall give pointers to the available wiki pages or related publications. This documentation may contain:

   * Requirements.
   * Pre-studies (states of the art, proposals, discussions).
   * Technical details (specifications).
   * Teaching materials (tutorials).
   * User's guides. 

A distinction shall be made on the one hand between these different categories, and on the other hand between documentation written for developers and documentation written for end-users.

Planning

This paragraph shall give a timeline and current status (as of 28 Jan 2011).