Architectural abstractions for real-time software

As software systems become modular and distributed, the system architecture becomes a central design concern. Traditional environments provide poor support for crucial aspects such as configuration, interfacing to communication systems, global synchronization and scheduling. The paper identifies the basic abstractions for a complete description of a software system, possibly distributed and real-time. The proposed architectural model addresses software architecture issues to provide software engineers an integrated and coherent environment, and an architectural language to describe system components and their features. The environment is expected to support the complete life-cycle of software systems of different nature. It is accomplished by addressing each concern-design of single components, design of the system topology, set up and control system execution-as a separate issue, and by moving at design and programming level features traditionally belonging to operating systems and run-time supports of programming languages