On Component-Based Development and High-Integrity Real-Time Systems

Component-based development approaches are becoming commonplace in business applications: they must therefore have some merit. In striking contrast to that, their penetration in the industrial practice of high-integrity real-time systems is virtually nil. This oddity needs explaining. In this paper we reflect on the presumed reasons of this situation and elaborate on possible systematic remedies. We contend that in order to make it in the high-integrity real-time systems domain, a component-based development approach must be constructed around four fundamental ingredients: a component model, a computational model, a programming model, and a congruent execution platform. Of those four ingredients, the computational model is key to bridging the lack of architectural concerns that afflicts the real-time workload models. We relate the component model to real-time systems theories. We illustrate how those elements could be neatly encased in a development method centred on model-driven engineering. We conclude by noting that the incorporation of component-based development methods, augmented with the cited ingredients, into model-driven engineering promises important savings in the development time and cost and also facilitates the industrial adoption of state-of-the-art techniques off real-time theory.