Chapter 1 PLATFORM - INDEPENDENT DESIGN FOR EMBEDDED REAL - TIME SYSTEMS

With the increasing complexity of the emerging embedded real-time systems, traditional design approaches can not provide sufficient support for the development of these systems anymore. They especially lack the ability to trace and analyse real-time system properties. In this paper, we investigate the design difficulties for embedded real-time systems and propose several principles for coping with these difficulties, which should be incorporated by an “adequate” design approach. Several prevailing design approaches are evaluated against these principles and their merits and drawbacks are examined and illustrated by examples. Finally, a platform-independent approach (POOSL[van der Putten and Voeten, 1997], [Geilen, 2002] + rotalumis[van Bokhoven, 2002]) is introduced to remedy these design problems for embedded real-time systems. Initial ∗This research is supported by PROGRESS, the embedded systems research program of the Dutch organisation for Scientific Research NWO, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Technology Foundation STW and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research TNO.