Designing for schedulability: integrating schedulability analysis with object-oriented design

Abstract

There is a growing interest in using the object paradigm for developing real time software. We believe that an approach that integrates the advancements in both object modeling and design methods, and real time scheduling theory is the key to successful use of object technology for real time software. Surprisingly many past approaches to integrate the two either restrict the object models, or do not allow sophisticated schedulability analysis techniques. The authors show how schedulability analysis can be integrated with object oriented design. More specifically, they show how fixed priority scheduling theory can be applied to designs developed using UML-RT, a specialization of UML for real time software. In conjunction with automatic code generation, we believe that this will greatly streamline the design and development of real time software.