Conclusion

In this dossier, we present the recent MARTE standard from the Object Management Group, a UML profile for modeling and analyzing real-time embedded systems. The super-exponential increase in the complexity of this kind of system has made it necessary to move up the levels of abstraction, and MARTE is the first example of a language enabling most aspects of embedded real-time systems to be modeled with a high degree of consistency and sharing of many concepts. It is based on model-driven engineering technologies and methods that have proven their ability to manage the complexity of large-scale software.

Expectations for this language are high, and a community of users is growing and organizing around the teams at Thales, CEA and INRIA who initiated the standard. As with UML, MARTE is only a language, and many use cases exist. Each user will have to select the parts...