From Synchronous Specifications to Statically Scheduled Hard Real-Time Implementations

Hard real-time embedded systems are often designed as automatic control systems that can include both continuous and discrete parts. The functional specification of such systems is usually done in a conditioned data-flow formalism such as Simulink or Scade. These formalisms are either quasi-synchronous or synchronous, and they go beyond the classical data-flow model by introducing a form of conditional execution allowing the description of hierarchical execution modes. Specific real-time implementation approaches have been proposed for such formalisms, which exploit the hierarchical conditions to improve the generated code. We present one such approach which takes as input data-flow synchronous specifications and uses static scheduling heuristics to automatically produce efficient distributed real-time implementations. We explain how improving the analysis of the hierarchical conditions results in better implementations.

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