A flexible tool kit for the development of real-time applications

When developing hard real time applications, one of the crucial aims of the designer(s) is to ensure a predictable time behaviour in all anticipated conditions. In particular, it would be highly desirable to verify the compliance of the application with its timing requirements in the early steps of the development, especially at the design stage; an early detection of performance bottlenecks, critical resource usage or critical timing paths is vital to properly design the allocation of the computing and the interactions among the program modules. The toolkit presented facilitates the development of complex hard real time applications and allows the user to describe the application requirements according to three hierarchical levels: the application level, the node level, and the task level. With respect to other approaches proposed in the literature (like PERTS (J.W.S. Lin et al., 1993) or IPTES (G. Leon et al., 1993)), our design cycle is based on an extended spiral metamodel in which the real time scheduling support is considered from the beginning of the design process. An advantage of this approach is to drastically reduce the number of trial and error iterations, by examining the non functional requirements of the applications in the early design phases