The TDL Advantage

This report compares industrial state-of-the-art products (TTTech, DaVinci and dSPACE) for development of dependable real-time applications with the methodology introduced by Giotto and refined by the Timing Definition Language (TDL). Giotto/TDL aims at a paradigm shift in the development of dependable real-time control systems by focusing on the application rather than on the platform. It represents a high level language for describing the timing behavior of real-time applications and thereby abstracts from the execution platform (we call that property software standardization), provides determinism, allows modularization of applications and the straight-forward distribution of components. A simplified brake-by-wire example is used to evaluate the various approaches and highlight their advantages and disadvantages with respect to determinism, composability and software standardization.