Executable Specifications for Real-Time Distributed Systems

One of the challenges in designing distributed, embedded systems is the paucity of formal, executable specification notations that provide support for both real-time and asynchronous communication. This paper describes a timed architecture design language (Timed Architecture Interaction Diagrams or TAID) that, by virtue of its formal, executable semantics, combines the benefits of synchronous specification notations with the advantages of traditional architecture description languages. In addition, TAID provides support for a variety of temporal inter-process communication (IPC) primitives as a native feature of the language, so that the encapsulated communication behavior (captured by real-time "buses" in TAID) may be re-used across designs and serve as specifications for more detailed model implementations.