Reconfigurable coordination model for dynamic autonomous real-time systems

In an open environment, in addition to satisfy both temporal and functional requirements, real-time information systems are further complicated by the dynamicity of composing autonomous entities. The paper presents a real-time reconfigurable coordination model (RT-RCC) that decomposes dynamic realtime information systems based on the principle of separation of concerns, in contrast to traditional object-oriented functional decompositions. In particular, dynamic open distributed real-time systems are decomposed into two categories of active entities, namely, functional actors which are responsible for accomplishing tasks, and non-functional coordinators which are responsible for coordination among the functional actors. High level language abstractions and a framework for actors and coordinators are provided to facilitate programming with the RT-RCC model. Our initial performance evaluation of the framework in non real-time environment has shown that the overhead introduced by separating coordinators from functional entities is less than 2%, the benefit gained is the decoupling of non-functional and functional requirements and the improvement of the software modularity and reusability in both functional and non-functional domains