A software architecture for maintaining temporal consistency in a distributed real-time environment

Control applications constitute an important class of real-time systems. Such applications have specific temporal requirements that have to be taken into account during the system design. One such requirement is data temporary consistency. This paper gives an overview of the temporal consistency problem and addresses implementation issues for a distributed real-time system that is configured according to a producer/consumer communication model. Solutions are proposed that provide simple mechanisms for maintaining temporal consistency. Finally, a software architecture consisting of temporally homogeneous buffers is presented