Faculty:

The objective of this research is to design and implement a sample real-time application using reconfigurable software modules. This component-based software model is desirable to get a system working quickly, to keep costs down, and to reuse the most robust software from prior applications. Creating this application is the first step in experimentally validating the AFTER tool. AFTER is an interactive analysis and predictor tool for embedded systems, which helps designers to quickly identify timing problems and systematically fine-tune an embedded application during and after the implementation phase of a product's life cycle. AFTER uses raw timing data collected from an embedded system, analyzes it, and provides a temporal image of the current implementation, highlighting actual and potential problems.

We chose a car cruise control simulator as the sample real-time application. This application can also be called a hardware-in-the-loop simulator. The cruise control algorithm runs on real CPU hardware that would actually exist in the car. However, the application simulates the I/O (such as braking, acceleration, velocity, and display).