A Comparison of the Use of Aspects and Objects for Modeling Distributed Embedded Real-Time Systems

The growing design complexity of today’s real-time systems requires new techniques aiming the raising of the abstraction level since earlier stages of design in order to deal with such complexity in a suitable way. This paper reports a case study, which provides an assessment of two well-know high-level paradigms, namely Aspect(AO) and Object-Oriented (OO) paradigms. Concepts of both paradigms were applied at modeling phase of a Distributed Embedded RealTime System (DERTS). The handling of DERTS’ functional and non-functional requirements (at modeling level) using AO and OO concepts is discussed. Both paradigms are compared using of a set of software engineering metrics, which were adapted to be applied at modeling level. The presented results show the suitability of each paradigm for DERTS specification in terms of reusability quality of model elements.