Metamodeling for Medical Devices: Code Generation, Model-debugging and Run-time Synchronization

Metamodels can be used to specify languages that capture the concepts and constraints of an area of interest. We describe a case and experiences on applying metamodeling for the development of medical devices. Metamodels are used to define Domain-Specific Modeling languages raising the level of abstraction in models close to the problem domain and producing formal specifications. Generators then read the models and produce executable code running in medical devices. The novel part of our approach, and particularly useful for device development, is extending the generation approach to model debugging and synchronization between a state of a model and a state of a program executed in a target runtime-system. This enables quick iterative feedback from the running code back to models, supports verification of the developed control logic, and helps to optimize the use of hardware resources.