An Architecture to Support Dynamic Service Composition in Distributed Real-Time Systems

Recently, new trends in application development for distributed platforms, such as the composable services model, attempt to provide more flexibility in system design, deployment and execution. Such trends, and particularly the referred composable services model, can also be beneficial in real-time distributed embedded systems, also providing a means to support more adaptive behaviors, reacting to the execution environment or coping with system reconfiguration. This paper explores a relatively new direction, which is the extension of the service-based model to dynamic, i.e. at run-time, composition in real-time distributed environments, in order to support the level of flexibility and adaptibility referred above. The paper proposes an architecture to support such dynamic service composition that is based on the flexible time triggered communication paradigm (FTT).To achieve the desired goal, we also redefine the concepts of service and service-based application in the concept of the FTT paradigm. Finally, we show experimental results obtained with a prototype implementation of the proposed architecture that confirm its feasibility and good temporal behavior