A DSL for specifying timing requirements

The engineering of real-time distributed embedded systems becomes more and more complex today due to the amount of new functionalities, constraints applied on these functions and the diversity of hardware supporting software execution and communication. Modeling and analysis of time is a key issue for the correct development of these systems. From an engineering point of view, there is a need of a development process supporting modeling timing requirements at different abstraction levels. In this paper we present a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for specifying timing requirements at the analysis phase of the software development life-cycle. The DSL provides the following features: the modeling of different types of timing requirements, the modeling of symbolic timing expressions, i.e. able to deal with bounded or unset parameters in timing requirements, and the integration of complex concepts of distributed systems such as multi rate and multi clock systems.