Contributions to the development of real-time programming techniques and technologies

Abstract

In the last two decades there has been an accelerated growth in the complexity of real-time appiications. This growth leads to the evolution of the real-time programming. Thus, if in early age of real-time programming both functionality and timing were expressed in the same programming language, nowadays real-time programming requires separation of timing from the functionality. Thus in the last few years there has been a great interest in developing new programming constructs for specifying temporal behavior of an appiication. The work in this thesis is based on Hierarchical Timing Language, which is a language for specifying timing and interactions between sets of periodic tasks. After HTL language is presented (Chapter 2), there are described two possible implementations of this language (Chapter 3 and Chapter 4). An experimental as well as an analytical comparison of the two implementations is presented in the last part of Chapter 4. In Chapter 5 it is described a real-time control appiication for the Three Tanks System implemented in HTL. Chapter 6 presents an implementation of HTL for Exotask; Exotask is a new programming construct that uses Java. The HTL implementation for Exotask has been tested by developing a real-time appiication for a quad-rotor helicopter, named JAviator. In Chapter 7 it is presented an implementation of HTL that targets a microcontroller, implementation has been tested through a control appiication for JAviator, a detailed analysis of the performance is also presented. In Chapter 8 it is discussed a solution for modeling an HTL description in Simulink. Thesis ends with a short summary of the obtained results.