A wide-spectrum language for object-based development of real-time systems.

A formal design notation is present whose underlying computational model is object-based. The object structure of the model is based on the practical, industry-strength Object Oriented structure development technique HRT-HOOD. The computational model has been specifically chosen because it leads to designs which can be analyzed for their schedulability in a distributed hard real-time execution environment. It is a wide-spectrum language supporting abstract description statements in Interval Temporal Logic (ITL) for the description of the timing, functional, and communication behavior of the proposed real-time system, and concrete Temporal Agent Model (TAM) statements with objects which can be directly executed. The semantics of these concrete statements is defined denotationally in specification-oriented style using ITL. A system specified at a high level of abstraction can be systematically transformed into an executable program by the use of sound ITL refinement rules.Funding received from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the Research Grant GR/M/0258