On the Conception of Executable Design Languages for Distributed Real-time Systems

The model-driven development of distributed real-time systems requires executable design languages with adequate expressiveness for system architecture, system behavior, and, in particular, real-time. Real-time expressiveness of existing design languages such as UML or SDL is strongly limited. To reduce this limitation, real-time design languages, e.g. UML-RT or SDL-RT, have been proposed. However, they are based on and have to comply with existing design languages, and therefore have to cope with conceptual decisions made earlier. In this paper, we will shed new light on the conception of executable design languages for distributed real-time systems, starting from scratch. In particular, we will work out a conceptual language framework that can be extended, and filled with concrete syntax later. We will formalize some of our conceptual decisions and illustrate them.