Scenario-Based Implementation Synthesis for Real-Time Object-Oriented Models

The demands of increasingly complicated software have led to the proliferation of object-oriented design methodologies in embedded systems. To execute a system designed with objects in target hardware, a task set should be derived from the objects, representing how many tasks reside in the system and which task processes which event arriving at an object. The derived task set greatly influences the responsiveness of the system. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to derive an optimal task set due to the discrepancy between objects and tasks. Therefore, the common method currently used by developers is to repetitively try various task sets. This paper proposes Scenario-based Implementation Synthesis Architecture (SISA) to solve this problem. SISA encompasses a method for deriving a task set from a system designed with objects as well as its supporting development tools and run-time system architecture. A system designed with SISA not only consists of the smallest possible number of tasks, but also guarantees that the response time for each event in the system is minimized. We have fully implemented SISA by extending the ResoRT development tool and applied it to an existing industrial PBX system. The experimental results show that maximum response times were reduced on average compared to when the task set was derived by the best known existing methods.