Timing constraints and object-oriented design

The construction of computer systems that have to comply to certain strict temporal constraints has always been a difficult task. If one considers present design methods and tools, they do not offer systematic techniques to deal with time and timing constraints during the development life cycle. Although timing constraints are identifiable in the requirements phase, there is no systematic way to have them guide design decisions. Usually, satisfaction of timing constraints is verified close to the final stages of software development and during many projects constraints are not met at first by orders of magnitude. This leads to redesign cycles that span a large part of the development trajectory. In this paper we outline a framework to deal with timing constraints and performance guarantees that may remedy such shortcomings. The framework can be incorporated in UML-RT. Copyright (C) 1999 IFAC.