Af. Zorzo et al., Using coordinated atomic actions to design safety-critical systems: a production cell case study, SOFTW PR EX, 29(8), 1999, pp. 677-697
Coordinated Atomic actions (CA actions) are a unified approach to structuri
ng complex concurrent activities and supporting error recovery between mult
iple interacting objects in object-oriented systems. This paper explains ho
w we have used the CA action concept to design and implement a safety-criti
cal application, We have used the Production Cell model that was developed
in the Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI), Karlsruhe, Germany, to present a
realistic industry-oriented problem, where safety requirements play a sign
ificant role, Our design consists of two levels: the first level deals with
the scheduling of CA actions, and the second level deals with the interact
ions between devices. Both the scheduling mechanism and the device interact
ions are enclosed by CA actions. Exception handling and error recovery are
incorporated into CA actions in order to satisfy high safety and fault tole
rance requirements. A controlling program based on our design was developed
in the Java language and used to drive a graphical simulator provided by t
he FZI. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.