Supporting communicating real-time state machines by a customisable actor kernel

This paper proposes an approach to the development of real-time systems which relies on Communicating Real-Time State Machines (CRSM's) as the specification language, and on a customisable actor kernel for prototyping, analysis and implementation of a specified system. CRSM's were chosen since they offer an intuitive and distributed specification of a system in terms of a collection of co-operating state machines interacting through timed CSP-like IO commands. On the other hand, the underlying actor framework is designed to provide a time-sensitive scheduling structure which can be tuned to CSRM's in order to support temporal validation through assertions on the recorded time-stamped event histories. The actor kernel lends itself to be easily hosted, e.g., into Java. Copyright (C) 1999 IFAC.