Real-time system design: a temporal perspective

The design of a real-time system must not only incorporate means of tackling functional complexity, but also means to analyze and predict real-time temporal properties. Unfortunately, most design methods provide little support to a designer towards meeting the real-time performance specifications of the system. The design of a system involves many parameters which are artifacts of the system design, and for a given system may be chosen in many different ways to meet the performance requirements of a system. In this paper, I present a summary of recent research work that is aimed at developing a set of techniques that can be used by a designer in choosing design artifacts such as periodicities, deadlines, priorities, etc., so as to design a system that will predictably satisfy the performance specifications. We expect that the techniques presented in this paper will help reduce the laborious process of designing a real-time system, by bringing resource contention and schedulability aspects early into the design process.