Improving Synchronous Dataflow Analysis Supported by Petri Net Mappings

Abstract

Whereas most of the work that analyses Synchronous Dataflow (SDF) stays in the dataflow framework, this work pushes its analysis into another framework level, thereby addressing issues that are not well addressed or are even unexplored in SDF. In this manner, the paper proposes a model-driven engineering (MDE) method, combining Synchronous Dataflow (SDF) and Petri nets, to highlight and reinforce their interoperability in digital signal processing applications, cyber-physical systems, or industrial applications. Improvements regarding the settlement and exploitation of the initial conditions associated with SDF are demonstrated; this issue is crucial for every cyber-physical system, since a system’s initial conditions are crucial to ensuring the system’s liveness. The improvements outlined in this work exploit an innovating mapping in the Place/Transition (P/T) Petri net domain that is intended to reduce and predict the total amount of initial data in SDF channels. The relevance of the firing semantics engaged with the equivalent Petri net model is discussed. This paper proposes a new approach to estimate whether an SDF has a static schedule by performing simulation and property verification of the equivalent-based P/T Petri net system achieved, framed by a Petri net invariant analysis and based on the stubborn set method of Petri nets. In this way, this new approach will allow mitigating the state explosion problem. Finally, a strategy is applied to two case studies to discover all the elementary circuits (static schedules) associated with the generated model’s state-space.