CPAL: High-Level Abstractions for Safe Embedded Systems

Innovation in the field of embedded systems, and more broadly in cyber-physical systems, increasingly relies on software. The productivity gain in software development can hardly keep up with the demand for software despite the increasing adoption of Model-Driven Development (MDD). In this context, we believe that major productivity and quality improvements are still ahead of us through better programming languages and environments. CPAL, the Cyber-Physical Action Language, is a contribution in that direction with the objective to speed-up the development of embedded systems with dependability constraints. The objective of this paper is to present and illustrate the use-cases of the high-level abstractions offered to the developer in CPAL with respect to real-time scheduling, introspection mechanisms, native support of Finite State Machines (FSMs), abstracting the hardware and decoupling functional concerns from non-functional concerns.