PIs: Jagannathan, Manson, Vitek
Large-scale Distributed Real-time and Embedded (DRE) systems increasingly form the basis of mission- and safety-critical applications essential to national infrastructure and homeland security, including air traffic control, emergency response systems, and electrical power grids. A key enabler in recent successes with small- to medium-scale embedded systems has been middleware that provides platform-independent execution semantics and reusable services that coordinate how application components are composed and interoperate. Despite the success of middleware, significant technical challenges remain, particularly for large-scale DRE systems assembled out of many independently designed components.
The goal of this project is to develop tools for constructing large-scale multi-layered DRE systems customized to meet the requirements of a particular application. This requires a new paradigm for aspectual composition, configuration and adaption of component middleware which consist of the following three components: (1) A whole-system configuration language that allows to users to specify how to synthesize an application-specific DRE system out of multiple middleware components. These adaption and deployment specifications allow the customization of component behavior to quality of service and behavioral requirements of the application and execution environment. (2) An aspectual policy and adaption language which enables the non-intrusive modification of components by means of adapters that reach across layers in the middleware stack. (3) Analysis-based multi-layer policy enforcement to enforce user-specified static policies across layer boundaries in a DRE system middleware stack and provide useful feedback when the policies are violated.