Information Centric Development of Component-Based Embedded Real-Time Systems

Abstract: This thesis presents new techniques for data management of run-time data objectsin component-based embedded real-time systems. These techniques enabledata to be modeled, analyzed and structured to achieve data managementduring development, maintenance and execution.The evolution of real-time embedded systems has resulted in an increasedsystem complexity beyond what was thought possible just a few years ago.Over the years, new techniques and tools have been developed to manage softwareand communication complexity. However, as this thesis show, currenttechniques and tools for data management are not sufficient. Today, developmentof real-time embedded systems focuses on the function aspects of thesystem, in most cases disregarding data management.The lack of proper design-time data management often results in ineffectivedocumentation routines and poor overall system knowledge. Contemporarytechniques to manage run-time data do not satisfy demands on flexibility,maintainability and extensibility. Based on an industrial case-study that identifiesa number of problems within current data management techniques, bothduring design-time and run-time, it is clear that data management needs to beincorporated as an integral part of the development of the entire system architecture.As a remedy to the identified problems, we propose a design-time data entityapproach, where the importance of data in the system is elevated to beincluded in the entire design phase with proper documentation, properties, dependenciesand analysis methods to increase the overall system knowledge.Furthermore, to efficiently manage data during run-time, we introduce databaseproxies to enable the fusion between two existing techniques; ComponentBased Software Engineering (CBSE) and Real-Time Database ManagementSystems (RTDBMS). A database proxy allows components to be decoupledfrom the underlying data management strategy without violating the componentencapsulation and communication interface.