Developing Component-Based Software for Real-Time Systems

This paper discusses the principles of developing software components for real-time systems. The procedureisbased on the fundamental concept of a real-time architecture rooted in the feedback control paradigm in control engineering. Generic design patterns for real-time softwarecomponents are presented, valid for all relevant real-time architectures. Finally, a case study of an air traffic control system based on the CORBA framework is discussed. Tool support for componentbased design and implementation is presented, including industry-strength commercial off-the-shelf software. 1 Introduction Developing software components for real-time systems tends to be more difficult than for other domains, because of a unique nature of each individual real-time application. The primary difficulty lies in developing a generic software architecture and abstracting its meaningful components, which are shared among the majority, if not all, models and applications. Due to the uniqueness of realtime..