An effective heuristic-based approach for partitioning

As being one of the most crucial steps in the design of embedded systems,hardware/software partitioning has received more concern than ever. the performance of a system design will strongly depend on the efficiency of the partitioning. in this paper,we construct a communication graph for embedded system and describe the delay-related constraints and the cost-related objective based on the graph structure. then,we propose a heuristic based on genetic algorithm and simulated annealing to solve the problem near optimally. we note that the genetic algorithm has a strong global search capability,while the simulated annealing algorithm will fail in a local optimal solution easily. hence,we can incorporate simulated annealing algorithm in genetic algorithm. the combined algorithm will provide more accurate near-optimal solution with faster speed. experiment results show that the proposed algorithm produce more accurate partitions than the original genetic algorithm. © 2013 xibin zhao et al.