An Ontological Representation of the Characteristic Problems of Real-Time Systems

Software Architectural Assessment is becoming a key discipline to identify at early stages of a system synthesis the most important problems that may become relevant in operation. This matter is especially critical for those systems with real-time constraints. Special emphasis shall be made on concurrency issues. Typical RTOS mechanisms supporting concurrency, such as semaphores or monitors, usually lead to execution time penalties hard to identify, reproduce and solve. For this reason it is crucial to understand the root causes of these problems and to provide support to identify and mitigate them at early stages of the system lifecycle. The main objective of this paper is to propose a new classification of the most important problems related to real-time software systems and to provide mechanisms and guidelines to help engineers improve their architectural designs. The taxonomy has been applied to a particular architectural style (UML-PPOOA) and it is used as a reference to create a new assessment module on the PPOOA- Visio CASE tool (15) to support concurrency problems detection.

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