TMO-based programming in COTS software/hardware platforms: a case study

Object-oriented analysis and design methodologies have become popular in development of non-real-time business data processing applications. However conventional object-oriented techniques have had minimal impact on development of real-time applications mainly because these techniques do not explicitly address key characteristics of real-time systems, in particular, timing requirements. Time-triggered message-triggered object (TMO) structuring is in our view the most natural extension of the object-oriented design and implementation techniques which allows the system designer to explicitly specify timing characteristics of data and function components of an object. To facilitate TMO-based design of real-time systems in the most cost-effective manner, we have developed middleware (named TMOSM/ORB) providing TMO execution support mechanisms on top of the Windows NT operating system and a CORBA compliant object request broker. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of CORBA-compliant TMO based system development, a defense command-control application was ported into the TMOSM/ORB environment. In this paper, first the basics of the CORBA-compliant TMO structuring scheme are presented. We then report the porting experience and its findings regarding the effectiveness of the CORBA-compliant TMO based programming in developing real-time applications.