Architecture synthesis and partitioning of real-time systems: A comparison of three heuristic search strategies

This paper studies the problem of automatically selecting a suitable system architecture for implementing a real-time application. Given a library of hardware components, it is shown how an architecture can be synthesized with the goal of fulfilling the real-time constraints stated in the system's specification. In case the selected architecture contains several processing units, the specification is partitioned by assigning tasks to these. The use of three heuristic search techniques is investigated: genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, and tabu search; and it is described how these can be adapted to the architecture synthesis problem. It is concluded that tabu search is the most promising technique, but that simulated annealing is also applicable.