A computer-aided design environment for distributed realtime systems

The author presents a distributed project support environment for the design of fault-tolerant distributed realtime systems. The innovative aspects of this environment relate to the handling of realtime from the requirements phase to the detailed implementation stage and to the integration of the design tools with the evaluation of the design tools with the evaluation tools. Data refinement, function refinement, evaluation, and project management are supported by an open, but coherent tool set, shared by different computers. A uniform man-machine interface is one of the integrating factors of the whole environment. The design environment is implemented under the Unix operating system. The X-window system supports the creation of the window and icon-driven user interface of the design tools. The entire information gained and used during the design process is stored in an entity-relationship model implemented by a hybrid data-management approach that is based on a relational database system and the Unix file system.<>