Aspects and components in real-time system development: Towards reconfigurable and reusable software

Abstract

Increasing complexity of real-time systems, and demands for enabling their configurability and reusability are strong motivations for applying new software engineering principles, such as aspect-oriented and component-based development. In this paper we introduce a novel concept of aspectual component-based real-time system development. The concept is based on a design method that assumes decomposition of real-time systems into components and aspects, and provides a real-time component model that supports the notion of time and temporal constraints, space and resource management constraints, and composability. Initial results show that the successful application of the proposed concept has a positive impact on real-time system development in enabling efficient configuration of real-time systems, improved reusability and flexibility of real-time software, and modularization of crosscutting concerns. We provide arguments for this by presenting an application of the proposed concept on the design and development of a configurable embedded real-time database, called COMET. Furthermore, using the COMET system as an example, we introduce a novel way of handling concurrency in a real-time database system, where concurrency is modeled as an aspect crosscutting the system.