The SIGNAL approach to the design of system architectures

Modeling plays a central role in system engineering. It significantly reduces costs and efforts in the design by providing developers with means for cheaper and more relevant experimentations. So, design choices can be assessed earlier. The use of a formalism, such as the synchronous language SIGNAL which relies on solid mathematical foundations for the modeling, allows validation. This is the aim of the methodology defined for the design of embedded systems where emphasis is put on formal techniques for verification, analysis, and code generation. This paper mainly focuses on the modeling of architecture components using SIGNAL. For illustration, we consider the modeling of a bounded FIFO queue, which is intended to be used for communication protocols. We bring out the capabilities of SIGNAL to allow specifications in an elegant way, and we check few elementary properties on the resulting model for correctness.