Timed Multitasking for Real-Time Embedded Software
Jie Liu and Edward A. Lee
Invited paper in IEEE Control Systems Magazine,
special issue on "Advances in Software Enabled Control,"
pp. 65-75, February 2003.
ABSTRACT
For many real-time applications, it is essential to bring the
notion of time and concurrent interaction among software components
to the programming level and develop compilers and run-time systems
that preserve both time and function properties for embedded software.
In this article, we describe an actor-oriented software architecture
and a timed multitasking programming model that embraces timing
properties at design time, so that designers can specify
when the computational results are produced to the physical world when
the software is programmed. Function and timing determinism can be
assured by a run-time system. Thus, as long as there are enough
resources, the computation will always produce predictable values at
a predictable time.
