Enabling Model-Driven Schedulability Analysis in the Development of Distributed Component-Based Real-Time Applications

This work presents a strategy to include temporal behaviour models in deliverable software components in order to develop hard real-time component-based distributed applications, keeping the opacity and composability features that are inherent to the components paradigm. The Deployment and Configuration of Component-based Distributed Applications Specification of the OMG has been extended to include and manage the information that is required to design, analyse, and configure component-based applications with hard real-time requirements. The real-time data added to a component interface enable the application designers to validate scheduling and design decisions without any knowledge of the component internals. Besides, real-time reusable and composable analysis models, developed according to a concrete modelling methodology, are added to each implementation of the component interface. In the context of a concrete application, they are processed by tools to generate the complete real-time analysis model of the application, which is used to evaluate the configuration parameters that guarantee its schedulability. The OMG's MARTE profile provides the conceptual and semantic framework to formulate the real-time behaviour models used in this work.