An Improved Coloured Petri Net Model for Software Component Allocation on Heterogeneous Embedded Systems

Abstract

We extend an approach to component allocation on heterogeneous embedded systems using Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs). We improve the CPN model for the embedded systems and outline a technique that exploits CPN Tools, a well-known CPN tool, to efficiently analyze embedded system's state space and find optimal allocations. The approach is model-based and represents an advancement towards a model-driven engineering view of the component allocation problem. We incorporate communication costs between components by extending the CPN formalism with a non-trivial technique to analyze the generated state space. We also suggest a technique to improve the state space generation time by using the branching options supported in CPN Tools. In the evaluation, we demonstrate that this technique significantly cuts down the size of the generated state space and thereby reduces the runtime of state space generation and thus the time to find an optimal allocation.