UML Profiles for Real-Time Systems and their Applications

Real-time systems (RTS) have strict timing constraints and limited resources. The satisfaction of RTS timing constraints is required for their correction. In order to reduce the cost due to late discovery of design flaws and/or violations of timing constraints of RTS as well as to speed up their development to cope with time-to-market requirements, it is important to validate, at early stages of the development process, the functional and nonfunctional properties of RTS. In addition, RTS complexity is continuously increasing which makes their design very challenging. UML, a graphical object-oriented modeling language, is suitable to deal with this complexity. UML also supports predictive, quantitative analysis through its real-time profiles. The objective of this paper is to review the most important UML profiles for real-time from the academia, the industry and/or standard organizations; and the research activity that revolves around these profiles.