Introducing Automatic Time Stamping (ATS) with a Reference Implementation in Swift

Abstract

The need for associating a time with the arrival of data is prevalent in many applications but this is even more the case in Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) which measure quantities from the real world. One common attribute of any measured real world quantity is the time of when it was acquired. Automating the process of time stamping data upon arrival frees the programmer from having to deal with this task manually thus reducing the number of errors, shrinking the code size and making the code more readable and maintainable. This paper explores the concept of variables that are automatically time stamped by the runtime system and its impact in building real-time applications. Such time stamping support enables seamless integration of a time model that is kept updated by real-time events within well-defined synchronization time bounds. This paper discusses the design of the Automatic Time Stamping (ATS) framework and the prototype implementation of such variables using open source programming language Swift. Our results demonstrate the viability of the ATS framework for most real-time applications. In doing this work we have learned that the abstraction of time in software programming models still have much room for improvements from the operating system level all the way up to the programming languages and runtimes used by the developers.