Time-budgeting: a component based development methodology for real-time embedded systems

The design of a complex embedded control system involves integration of large number of components. These components need to interact in a timely fashion to achieve the system level end-to-end requirements. In practice, the component level timing specification consists of design attributes like component task mapping, task period and schedule definition but often lack details on their real-time (functional) requirements. As we observe, there is no systematic methodology in place for decomposing the feature level timing requirements into component level timing requirements. This paper proposes an early stage time-budgeting methodology to bridge the above gap. A salient proposal of this methodology is to consider parameterized component timing-requirements. A key step in the methodology involves computing a set of constraints by relating component requirements with feature requirements. This enables the separation of timing constraints from functionality decomposition, and facilitates early optimization of the component time-budget for a complex component based embedded system. This paper formalizes the proposed methodology by using Parametric Temporal Logic. A case study involving two advanced features from the automotive domain, namely Adaptive Cruise Control and Collision Mitigation is given to demonstrate the methodology.