Systematic Test Case Instance Generation for the Assessment of System-level Design Space Exploration Approaches

Abstract

The design of embedded systems gets continually more arduous as the complexity of applications and hardware platforms advance to satisfy the increasing demands on functionality, performance, and power consumption. Mostly however, the concurrent fulfillment of those demands are impossible because quality parameters are usually conflicting with each other and cannot be guaranteed simultaneously. Thus, to find the best compromises of all possible solutions, an efficient Design Space Exploration (DSE) becomes imperative. While, in recent time, many DSE techniques to the system-level synthesis problem of embedded systems design have been proposed, a systematic approach on how to produce a viable set of variant test cases with definite similar properties is not available. In this work, we therefore propose a methodology for the test case generation for DSE techniques and present a versatile and easily expendable benchmark generator based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) that is able to produce hard synthesis problem instances. The application of the test case instance generator for an evaluation of a novel DSE approach shows that the impact on performance is negligibly small compared to the solving complexity of the generated test instances.