VM integration

Figure 3.1: The ASSERT VM integrates everything

The ASSERT Virtual Machine [8] is a key player in the inner workings of ASSERT. It is orchestrating the operation of the system as a whole, taking into account a number of parameters, such as timing and scheduling information.

As far as data modeling is concerned, the VM has a simple job to do: it acts - at runtime - as a ``router'' of messages between the orchestrated functional entities. To that end, the automatically generated runtime ``bridges'' (built from aadl2glueC) are put to use; decoding the incoming parameters (which are ASN.1 messages) and encoding the outgoing ones.

The VM itself is also automatically generated (from the system-level description). The following sections describe how the data modeling ``bridges'' are invoked at runtime from the automatically generated VM, and how this task breaks down for the two kinds of interfaces that exist in ASSERT: Synchronous and Asynchronous ones.