Adding Hard Real-time Capabilities to CORBA

Control systems are often software-intensive applications that are becoming extremely complex as new functionality is required. Complexity is a real engineering challenge and distributed object technology has proved useful for dealing with this problem. Since silicon area becomes cheaper, using CORBA in an embedded system becomes viable. One of the leading technologies in this field is the object request brokering model proposed by the CORBA specification of the Object Management Group. But, while present CORBA specifications do address real-time issues they deal only with soft real-time systems, and this is not enough for certain types of distributed systems (namely controllers). This paper presents an approach of making CORBA usable in distributed control applications where timeliness is crucial for the stability and thus dependability of the closed control loop.