A QoS registry for adaptive real-time service-oriented applications

Real-time service-oriented applications are charac- terized by Quality of Service (QoS) requirements that cannot be properly managed by using classical real-time systems methodologies. In dynamic environments the QoS management can effectively leverage adaptive techniques, that provide flexibility and do not require a complex offline analysis. In turn, such techniques make a massive use of on-line collected data regarding the application performance and the resource requirements. Moreover, a common issue for adaptive systems is the one of deciding the initial configuration of the application and/or the run-time environment at the time of service instantiation. In this paper, we propose a QoS registry for coping with these issues and supporting the configuration of proper scheduling parameters in real-time Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). The registry permits to gather QoS data related to different functional behaviors of applications, to predict the future trend based on data already collected and to permanently store such data for an effective reuse at the time of future re-instantiations. We have also built an implementation of such registry, computed its overhead costs and performed some experiments for showing the effectiveness in auto-tuning resource allocations for providing QoS guarantees in a real-time SOA

A Real-Time Service-Oriented Architecture for Industrial Automation

Industrial automation platforms are experiencing a paradigm shift. New technologies are making their way in the area, including embedded real-time systems, standard local area networks like Ethernet, Wi-Fi and ZigBee, IP-based communication protocols, standard service oriented architectures (SOAs) and Web services. An automation system will be composed of flexible autonomous components with plug & play functionality, self configuration and diagnostics, and autonomic local control that communicate through standard networking technologies. However, the introduction of these new technologies raises important problems that need to be properly solved, one of these being the need to support real-time and quality-of-service (QoS) for real-time applications. This paper describes a SOA enhanced with real-time capabilities for industrial automation. The proposed architecture allows for negotiation of the QoS requested by clients from Web services, and provides temporal encapsulation of individual activities. This way, it is possible to perform an a priori analysis of the temporal behavior of each service, and to avoid unwanted interference among them. After describing the architecture, experimental results gathered on a real implementation of the framework (which leverages a soft real-time scheduler for the Linux kernel) are presented, showing the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The experiments were performed on simple case studies designed in the context of industrial automation applications

Component Framework for supporting safe and dynamic replacement in real-time systems

[EN] In the last decades solutions have been provided for the real- time component-based systems development as a base to increase productivity and reliability of their development as well as their maintenance. Solutions are increasingly appearing that allow controlled flexibility in these systems, aiming to support dynamic execution through the component replacement at run-time. So, component models are adapted trying to minimize conflicts integrating real-time and dynamic behaviors, and achieving components replacements in a bounded time. One of the main challenges for this is to calculate the required times by the different operations needed in a component replacement. The other issue is to know the operating times of the component in the system when their implementations change along the life of the system. In this work the implementation of a component framework implementation is described providing a partial solution for these problems. A component model is provided together with the corresponding algorithms to assure that components can be loaded and replaced at run-time without interfering in their execution deadlines. The model is designed to avoid failures during component replacements. Finally a validation of the presented concepts is provided.[ES] En las últimas décadas se han aportado soluciones para el desarrollo de sistemas de tiempo real basados en componentes como base para aumentar la productividad y la fiabilidad de su desarrollo así como su posterior mantenimiento. De modo más reciente están apareciendo soluciones que permiten cierta flexibilidad en estos sistemas con miras a soportar ejecución dinámica a través de reemplazos de componentes en tiempo de ejecución. Para ello se adaptan los modelos de componentes intentando minimizar los conflictos que aparecen al integrar tiempo real y comportamiento dinámico y conseguir reemplazos de componentes en un tiempo acotado. Uno de los principales retos para esto es el cálculo de los tiempos requeridos por las diferentes operaciones necesarias para realizar un reemplazo de componente. El otro gran obstáculo es conocer los tiempos de operación de los componentes del sistema cuando la implementación de éstos puede cambiar durante la vida del sistema. En este trabajo se describe la implementación de un marco de componentes que aporta una solución parcial a estos problemas. Se proporciona un modelo de componentes junto con sus correspondientes algoritmos para asegurar que los componentes pueden ser cargados y reemplazados en tiempo de ejecución sin interferir en el cumplimiento de sus plazos de ejecución. El modelo está diseñado para evitar fallos en los reemplazos de componente. Finalmente se aporta la validación de los conceptos presentados.Cano, J.; García Valls, M.; Basanta Val, P. (2014). Marco de Componentes con soporte para reemplazo dinámico y seguro en sistemas de tiempo real. 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