How ADLS can help in adapting the corba component model to real-time embedded software design

Coping with the increasing complexity of software in embedded and distributed real-time systems is becoming a major concern. Even if promising as far as this latter aspect is concerned, design techniques issued from the middleware components (or framework-based) approaches have until now fall short in achieving their breakthrough in the real-time and embedded community. They are usually perceived as complex, monolithic and resulting in oversized applications, and thus, as not adapted to RUE software development constraints. In an attempt to bridge this gap, we(1) aim at contributing to the adaptation of the lightweight CCM [1] to real-time and embedded systems. The originality of our approach, mainly resides in the emphasis on high-level (or design-time) issues of the development process, on the contrary to the usual focus on low-level ones: we raise QoS issues from implementation level to analysis and design level. In such a process, we have found it would be worth integrating considerations from the software architccture/ADL field in middleware components approaches. We especially claim that interactions configurability at design time is a major requirement in the class of systems we target and that, on this latter aspect, middleware components approaches could benefit from a separation of concerns between computation and interactions, as in most ADLs.