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. 2020 Oct 26;20(21):0.
doi: 10.3390/s20216081.

MeLa: A Programming Language for a New Multidisciplinary Oceanographic Float

Sébastien Bonnieux  1   2 , Dorian Cazau  3 , Sébastien Mosser  4 , Mireille Blay-Fornarino  2 , Yann Hello  1 , Guust Nolet  1   5
Affiliations

MeLa: A Programming Language for a New Multidisciplinary Oceanographic Float

Sébastien Bonnieux et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

At 2000 m depth in the oceans, one can hear biological, seismological, meteorological, and anthropogenic activity. Acoustic monitoring of the oceans at a global scale and over long periods of time could bring important information for various sciences. The Argo project monitors the physical properties of the oceans with autonomous floats, some of which are also equipped with a hydrophone. These have a limited transmission bandwidth requiring acoustic data to be processed on board. However, developing signal processing algorithms for these instruments requires one to be an expert in embedded software. To reduce the need of such expertise, we have developed a programming language, called MeLa. The language hides several aspects of embedded software with specialized programming concepts. It uses models to compute energy consumption, processor usage, and data transmission costs early during the development of applications; this helps to choose a strategy of data processing that has a minimum impact on performances. Simulations on a computer allow for verifying the performance of the algorithms before their deployment on the instrument. We have implemented a seismic P wave detection and a blue whales D call detection algorithm with the MeLa language to show its capabilities. These are the first efforts toward multidisciplinary monitoring of the oceans, which can extend beyond acoustic applications.

Keywords: Digital Signal Processing; Domain Specific Language; Model Based Programming; Model Driven Engineering; acoustic monitoring; embedded software; embedded system; oceanography.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Models used in MeLa.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Application example. The functions ’seisDetection’ and ’seisDiscrimination’ have been left to keep the example short, they do not exist in the language, the real algorithm for seismic detection is presented in Section 4.1.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Data packets for ContinuousAcqMode and ShortAcqMode.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Mermaid float.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Code generation mapping.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Mean parking duration in function of the mean number of ascent requests for a default parking duration of 10 d.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Development workflow with MeLa.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Analysis results given to the developers by MeLa.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Spectrogram of a blue whale D-call with low frequencies removed.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Ratio of spectrum amplitudes for each spectrogram window.
Figure 11
Figure 11
Short Term Average over Long Term Average (STA/LTA) computed from the ratio Figure 10.
Figure 12
Figure 12
Frequencies corresponding to the maximum amplitudes of the spectrogram.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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