Commanding and reactive control of peripherals in the TMO programming scheme

Although high-level real-time distributed computing objects are generally written in forms independent of execution platforms, input and output (I/O) activities involving peripherals are inherently platform-dependent. Yet, writing parts of real-time objects for controlling peripherals should be done in forms compatible with the adopted real-time object programming styles. Basic issues are discussed in the context of an object-oriented real-time programming scheme called the time-triggered message-triggered object (TMO) programming scheme. A desirable goal here is to facilitate both commanding and reactive control of peripherals in TMOs in general forms while enabling relatively easy analysis of the timing behavior of such TMOs. This paper presents several techniques to meet these requirements.