Enhancing O-O Middleware to Become Time-Aware

The general trend in middleware movestowards object-orientation. Implementation hiding, inheritance, andpolymorphism are concepts, that have turned out to be well suited for thestructuring of new complex distributed applications as well as for theintegration of legacy systems. The existence of CORBA as a vendor-independentstandard for object-oriented middleware has added another momentumto this development. Regarding real-time requirement, however,there exists an obvious trade-off. While implementation hidingisolates module implementations and eases their integration asit allows to simply match interfaces, it ignores the fact thatin the real-time domain implementation does matter. To solvethis problem, we need a system that is capable to adapt in apredictable manner to dynamic, unpredictable changes in its environment.In this paper we present our approach for an adaptive real-timesystem. It provides a run-time support system comprising run-timemonitoring and on-line, fault-tolerant scheduling as its keycomponents. It can be used to enhance emerging object-orientedde facto standards like CORBA with adequate features to integratethem as ``time-aware'' components.