DESIGN AND PROGRAMMING TOOLS FOR TIME-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS

The development of time critical applications needs specific tools abl e to cope with both functional and non-functional requirements. In thi s paper we describe a design and programming environment to assist the development of hard real-time applications. An interactive graphic in terface is provided to facilitate the design of the application accord ing to three hierarchical levels. The development model we propose is based on an iterative process in which the real-time scheduling suppor t is considered from the beginning of the design phases.Our graphic en vironment integrates several tools to analyze, test, and simulate the real-time application under development. In particular, the tools we h ave implemented are: a Design Tool, to describe the structure of the a pplication, a Schedulability Analyser Tool (SAT), to verify off-line t he feasibility of the schedule of a critical task set, a Scheduling Si mulator, to test the average behavior of the application, and a Maximu m Execution Time (MET) estimator to bound the worst case duration of e ach task.