An Overview of RealTimeTalk, a Design Framework for Real-time Systems

RealTimeTalk (RTT) is a design framework for developing distributed real-time applications with both hard and soft requirements. The frame-work supports design via hierarchical decomposition. We believe that object-orientation is the best way to go about struc-turing a problem, hence the RTT language is based on Smalltalk with an analysis frontend to infer type information for run-time safety, and to yield more precise estimations of execution times. Unlike most real-time systems, RTT does not force the designer to embed constructs for timing requirements, communication, and synchro-nization in the code. Rather, such information is specified on a higher level of abstraction using graphical tools. This not only keeps the code “clean ” but also simplifies timing analysis and resource allocation. A comparison with other real-time systems concludes the paper.