An automation-based design methodology for distributed, hard real-time systems
Carlos Puchol, Aloysius K. Mok · 1998
Despite significant progress in real-time systems design in recent years, most research has concentrated on some specific areas such as scheduling, timing analysis or specification. This thesis focuses on the proper definition of the global structure of a real-time system, what it is and how to integrate all its aspects towards obtaining a complete design that satisfies the specification. In this thesis, we consider the problem of providing a general, integrated, and highly automated framework for the design of distributed hard-real-time systems which combines and exploits analytical techniques from individual areas of research. We propose such a framework, which may be thought of as providing a design methodology for the domain of real-time systems. Our proposed methodology is based on three fundamental principles: automation, formalization and generality. We propose a specification language based on these notions and developed from insight on the semantics and experience of the Modechart language (a specification language for real-time systems), also included in this dissertation. Current practice in the design and implementation real-time systems is a largely ad hoc process of trial and error. Our design methodology, separates the concerns involved and provides an environment which allows a designer to systematically meet the design constraints. This is achieved by providing language support to capture high-level designs and to generate code automatically from them, that, together with the methodology presented and the application specific code, is designed to satisfy the real-time requirements. We present Modechart++, which supports the design methodology introduced and it is used to specify, verify, and synthesize code for distributed hard-real-time applications.