Flexibility/Cost-Tradeoffs of Platform-Based Systems

This paper provides a quantitative characterization of an embedded system's capability to implement alternative behaviors. This new objective in system-level design is termed flexibility and is most notable in the field of adaptive and reconfigurable systems, where a system may change its behavior during operation. Different behaviors are also taken into consideration while implementing platform-based systems. Based on a hierarchical graph model which permits formal modeling of flexibility and implementation cost of a system, an efficient exploration algorithm to find the optimal flexibility/cost-tradeoff-curve is proposed. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated by a case study concerning the design of a family of Set-Top boxes.