Faber Software - Artifex

Artifex allows developers to: graphically design, model and analyze event-driven systems; build simulators and prototypes of computer-based systems; create real-time simulators of the environment which surrounds an application to automate its testing.

Artifex also enables rapid prototyping, and automatically generates the complete application in C/C++ code for embedded systems and workstation-based environments.

The Artifex solution

Artifex gives you a high-level visual language to describe your system and:

Simulation to detect flaws earlier, improve quality with early validation and provide feedback to analysis.
Automatic model’s translation into an application running on your target platform to achieve maximum productivity.
An always up-dated reference model that can be printed in documents with different viewpoints to maximize maintainability.

Quality and Productivity

Artifex allows significant reductions in system development time and enhancements in design quality through modeling, analysis and code generation capabilities.

Artifex is used to model systems graphically, with intuitive design diagrams that describe architecture, behavior and functionality.

Iterative refinement of diagrams, their execution and simulation, allow you to design systems correctly and rapidly.

Graphical Modeling

Artifex provides a graphical, object-based language which enables designers to describe a system’s behavior, functionality and structure.

The Artifex language is based on well-known formal diagrams: Petri Nets. Artifex tools allow development teams to work with an extended version of these diagrams in computer-based format. The Artifex language adds to Petri Nets the concepts of timing, structure and functionality, and is very effective in describing complex systems.

The Artifex language is easy to learn. The majority of system design elements in Artifex models, including concurrent objects, data and message flows, parallel flows of execution, time constraints, states and state transitions are developed visually. Complex concepts like concurrency and synchronization are easily described using a few graphic symbols. Simple activities may be described by means of fragments of C/C++ code embedded within the elements of a net.

Documented Models

Each element of a model can be described in natural language. Thus, Artifex models also embed documentation. Furthermore, Artifex provides capability to extract all model’s data, both textual and graphical, and generate printable documents in standard formats, like ASCII, PostScript, HTML and LaTeX. Being automatically generated, documents are always up-to-date and consistent with models, providing accurate and reliable documentation.

Simulation and Animation

Artifex offers much more than computer-based editing of graphical diagrams.

The Artifex language can be statically and dynamically analyzed in its native graphical form at any stage of development. Therefore, developers can verify that the design is logically correct at the system level before getting involved with implementation issues.

Complete visual debugging facilities help developers keep simulation under control and automatically trace a model’s execution. Artifex supports both virtual-time and real-time event-driven simulation modes.

Application Generation and partitioning

Artifex automatically translates models into a complete application running on a number of workstation-based and embedded environments.

Artifex generates full C code source files and all relevant makefiles which are directly compiled and executed. Automatically generated code can stand on its own or be easily integrated into larger systems. Legacy code can also be incorporated within the model.

According to a graphical scheme, Artifex can partition the generated application into one single process or into multiple processes, which can also be distributed over a network of computers. Artifex automatically handles inter-process communications. The resulting code is highly portable and extensively checked for errors.