Distributed real-time embedded (DRE) systems, including intelligent transportation, automated inventory management, command and control systems, and avionics mission computing, increasingly run in open environments, such as network-centric systems of systems. This emerging operation setting introduces new challenges for DRE system developers, such as managing the system performance under uncertain operating conditions, validating key-characteristic of the system behavior, and choosing the right design alternatives before committing to a specific platform or platform configuration. Model-based technologies help address these issues by enabling design-time analysis and providing means to automate the development, deployment, run-time adaptation, and integration of DRE systems. This presentation introduces two promising research directions focusing on model-based design technologies, namely, the development of self-managing DRE systems using automatic control and system-theoretic concepts, and the application of model-checking techniques to verify safety properties of DRE systems. Results of this work show that model-based techniques can be effectively applied to manage, predict, and verify the complex event-driven behavior of DRE systems. The presentation introduces several practical implementation of this model-based technology and discusses related future research directions.

Dr. Abdelwahed received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto, Canada, in 2002. During 2000-2001, he was a research scientist with the system diagnosis group at the Rockwell Scientific Company. Since 2001 he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University as a Research Assistant Professor. He conducts research on model-based design and analysis of self-managing computation systems. His research interests also include modeling and analysis of distributed real-time systems, automated verification, fault diagnosis techniques, and model-integrated computing. He is currently working on several DARPA, NASA, and NSF funded projects developing model-based techniques for fault-adaptive performance management of distributed real-time embedded systems. Dr. Abdelwahed has more than 60 publications and is a senior member of the IEEE..