Model-Driven Development of Self-Describing Components for Self-Adaptive Distributed Embedded Systems

Today's distributed embedded systems comprise various fields of application. Increasingly they are deployed in complex scenarios and must be able to adapt to changing environments and internal system changes. Such self-adaptive embedded systems pose great advantages in terms of flexibility, resource utilization, energy efficiency and robustness. The realization of these systems require enhanced development methods to incorporate the adaptation in the design. We introduce a novel concept for the model-driven development of self-adaptive embedded systems. The focus of our work is the definition and transfer of the information needed for the adaptation at runtime. This is preserved as so-called self-description of the components. We present our self-x profile, a modeling extension for describing the adaptation, and the respective design flow with built-in transformations. Furthermore, we outline the applicability of our methodology in an automotive use case.