ASSIST Tool Suite

The ASSIST Tool Suite automates the design of complex and distributed control systems and adheres to the rigorous engineering principles of safety-critical systems

Design Space Exploration

Evaluate different hardware architectures or software designs for feasibility and cost-effectiveness.

  • Define variations in the hardware resources, software components and redundancy requirements
  • Define your design space with „Exploration Candidates“
  • Automatically explore the design space and quickly find feasible solutions
  • Evaluate feasible solutions with built-in and customizable metrics

Deployment & Mapping

Create an allocation for all software components (tasks or applications) to the hardware resources in the system. ASSIST automatically manages resource capacities and ensures resource compatibility.

  • Create a mapping for all software components automatically
  • Ensure satisfaction of all resource requirements and safety requirements
  • Find the best mapping by using customizable metrics to evaluate every deployment
  • Manage shared resources on multicore processor for multi-function integration

Scheduling

Create a periodic schedule for your real-time tasks and ensure a predictable and deterministic timing behavior.

  • Automatically determine the length of the hyperperiod
  • Define different task switching time to fit the timing behavior of the RTOS or hypervisor
  • Define timing relation to fix a real-time behavior
  • Allow for task slicing to increase processor utilization
  • Ensure synchronized access to shared resources

Features

E

Easy start

ASSIST can be quickly used with almost no front loading effort

Automation

ASSIST automates crucial engineering tasks with quick feedback

Data Import

ASSIST can import requirements and data from external tools and models

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Textual Specification

ASSIST features a simple and powerful specification language

Z

Correctness

ASSIST creates results which are correct „by construction“

Data Export

ASSIST can export generated results to external engineering tools

Visual Results

ASSIST allows to analyze and evaluate the results in a GUI

Customization

ASSIST can be adapted to support customer-specific requirements

Multi-Platform

ASSIST runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS

Selected Case Studies & Publications

  • Zimmermann, Armin & Maschotta, Ralph & Wichmann, Alexander & Hilbrich, Robert. (2018). Optimization of systems with nested design space. 1-8. 10.1109/SYSCON.2018.8369550. [Link]
  • Hilbrich, Robert & Behrisch, Michael. (2017). Experiences Gained From Modeling and Solving Large Mapping Problems During System Design. 10.1109/SYSCON.2017.7934795 [Link].
  • Hilbrich, Robert. (2015). Platzierung von Softwarekomponenten auf Mehrkernprozessoren. 10.1007/978-3-658-11173-1 [Link].
  • Hilbrich, Robert & Dieudonné, Laurent. (2013). Deploying Safety-Critical Applications on Complex Avionics Hardware Architectures. Journal of Software Engineering and Applications. 06. 229-235. 10.4236/jsea.2013.65028 [Link].