The Hamlet Design Entry System - An overview of ADL and its environment

Exploiting parallelism for industrial real-time applications has not received much attention compared to scientific applications. The available real-time design methods do not adequately address the issue of parallelism, resulting still in a strong need for low-level tools such as debuggers and monitors. This need illustrates that developing parallel real-time applications is indeed a difficult and tedious task. In this paper we show how problems can be alleviated if an approach is followed that allows for experimentation with designs and implementations. In particular, we discuss a development system that integrates design, implementation, execution, and analysis of real-time applications, putting emphasis on exploitation of parallelism. In the paper we primarily concentrate on the support for application design, as we feel that parallelism should essentially be addressed at this level. Keywords: parallelism, real-time systems, application design, software development experimentation..