An Event Structuring Approach to Real-Time Design

In the development of real-time systems it is very important to be able to write down the design decisions. Such design decisions are often written in a natural language. In general this results in a voluminous and ambiguous description of the system. We believe that such informal descriptions with advantage can be formalized. The basic idea is to have a number of formal notations in which the designer stepwise can refine the given specification. For each of the formal notations more and more design decisions are made and noted down for a limited aspect of the problem. The other design decisions will then be postponed to a later stage of development where that aspect is taken into account. In this paper we will show an example of how such formal notations could be defined for the design of real-time systems. The idea behind these notations is based on an event-action model and it will therefore be most appropriate for the development of reactive systems. 1 Introduction It is our exper..