Integrating Schedulability Analysis with UML-RT
For designers of complex real-time control systems, this work provides a practical integration of scheduling theory with UML-RT, but it is incremental as it extends existing analysis to specific jitter and sporadic scenarios.
The paper integrates schedulability analysis with object-oriented design (UML-RT) for real-time control systems, developing methods to handle release jitter and sporadic activities. The approach enables timing constraint verification without restricting object models.
The use of object oriented techniques and methodologies for the design of real-time control systems appear to be necessary in order to deal with the increasing complexity of such systems. Recently many object-oriented methods have been used for the modeling and design of real-time control systems. We believe that an approach that integrates the advancements in both object modeling and design methods, and real-time scheduling theory is the key to successful use of object oriented technology for real-time software. However, past approaches to integrate the two either restrict the object models, or do not allow sophisticated schedulability analysis techniques. In this paper we show how schedulability analysis can be integrated with object-oriented design; we develop the schedulability and feasibility analysis method for the external messages that may suffer release jitter due to being dispatched by a tick driven scheduler in real-time control system, and we also develop the scheduliability method for sporadic activities, where message arrive sporadically then execute periodically for some bounded time. This method can be used to cope with timing constraints in complex real-time control systems.