Minimizing system modification in an incremental design approach

In this paper we present an approach to mapping and scheduling of distributed embedded systems for hard real-time applications, aiming at minimizing the system modification cost. We consider an incremental design process that starts from an already existing system running a set of applications. We are interested to implement new functionality so that the already running applications are disturbed as little as possible and there is a good chance that, later new functionality can easily be added to the resulted system. The mapping and scheduling problem are considered in the context of a realistic communication model based on a TDMA protocol.