Using artificial bees to solve partitioning and scheduling problems in codesign

Partitioning and scheduling are two central issues in the design of embedded systems since they can widely influence the characteristics of the system under design. The numerous constraints imposed by the environment and/or the underlying target architecture of mixed systems (containing hardware and software parts) make these two problems hard to solve. This paper introduces an automatic approach that integrates simultaneously partitioning and scheduling. It is inspired by the collective behavior of social insects such as bees in order to find a feasible solution to partitioning, using scheduling to find the shortest execution time to the system under design.