A development environment for hard real-time applications

In this paper, we describe an integrated environment to assist the development of hard real-time applications. It includes an interactive graphic interface which allows the user to describe the application requirements according to three hierarchical levels: the application level, the component level, and the object level. The development model we propose is based on an iterative process in which the real-time scheduling support is considered since the beginning of the design phases. Our graphic environment integrates several tools to analyse, test, and simulate the real-time application under development. In particular, the tools we have implemented are: a Design Tool, to describe the structure of the application, a Schedulability Analyser Tool (SAT), to verify off-line the feasibility of the schedule of a critical task set, a Scheduling Simulator, to test the average behaviour of the application, and a Maximum Execution Time (MET) estimator to bound the worst case duration of each task.