End-to-end design of distributed real-time systems

This paper presents a systematic approach to the design of distributed real-time systems with system-level timing requirements. It is often extremely difficult to design such a system in a composable fashion, since temporal relationships induced by system-level timing requirements introduce complicated couplings between structurally irrelevant components. As a solution to this problem, the approach described here maps system-level timing requirements onto component-level timing constraints. More specifically, it first transforms system-level requirements into a set of non-linear intermediate constraints; and then derives task attributes such as periods, phases, and deadlines, with the objective of maximizing the chances of the system being schedulable. The final results preserve the desired timing correctness: if the final task set is schedulable, then the original system-level requirements will be satisfied. The approach is demonstrated and experimentally validated via an example of a numerical control system built on the FIP network. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.