Why time-triggered architectures will succeed in large hard real-time systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a number of design principles that should be supported by any architecture for large hard real-time systems: the possibility to partition the design into encapsulated subsystems protected by temporal firewalls, a sparse time base, and the maintenance of replica determinism. It then introduces the principles of operation of time-triggered architectures and the time-triggered communication protocol TTP. In the final section it is argued that only time-triggered architectures support the properties that are required for the design of large real-time systems.