The DASE Tool: An Environment for the Development of Real-Time Applications

In this paper we discuss some design issues related to the handling of timing constraints in embedded systems and present a tool for the analysis of timing constraints at the architectural design level. Most design tools for real-time applications do not perform any kind of real-time analysis and do not allow the definition of explicit timing constraints. Our tool is aimed at real-time schedulability and performance analysis. It guides the decomposition of the application architecture into a set of hierarchical abstractions representing the active components and the cooperation among them (messages and/or use of shared resources). Deadlines can be specified between any couple of events. The real-time schedulability analysis requires a sufficiently accurate description of the (hardware) architecture, the mapping of the software components on the application nodes and the choice of the resource management algorithms.