Synchronous objects with scheduling policies
Paul Caspi, Jean-Louis Colaço, Léonard Gérard, Marc Pouzet, Pascal Raymond · 2009
This paper addresses the problem of designing and implementing complex control systems for real-time embedded software. Typical applications involve different control laws corresponding to different phases or modes, e.g., take-off, full flight and landing in a fly-by-wire control system. On one hand, existing methods such as the combination of Simulink/Stateflow provide powerful but unsafe mechanisms by means of imperative updates of shared variables. On the other hand, synchronous languages and tools such as Esterel or SCADE/Lustre are too restrictive and forbid to fully separate the specification of modes from their actual instantiation with a particular control automaton.