Teaching Real-Time Systems Around a Digital Model Railroad Platform Using Ada

This paper describes a laboratory equipped for the teaching of real-time systems. The laboratory has been built around a Digital Model Railroad Platform and it allows the development of different control applications for educational purposes. Because of the platform is a limited resource and the students can not test their programs simultaneously, a railroad platform simulator has been developed. The programming language used to implement the simulator has been Ada and the design and implementation of the system is described in this work. Ada is also selected in order to allow the students to carry out their practical exercises during the course.