Addressing Design Challenges of (Re)Deploying Components for Distributed Real-time and Embedded Systems

Middleware is increasingly used to develop and deploy components in large-scale distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems. A key challenge in component deployment for DRE systems is devising resource allocation and control algorithms that map application components in DRE systems onto resources available on target nodes. Designing and evaluating these algorithms in a DRE system today, however, often involves tedious, error-prone, and human-intensive programming tasks. This paper provides two contributions to R&D on middleware support for automating the deployment of components in DRE systems. First, it describes the design of a Resource Allocation and Control Engine (RACE), which is a middleware framework that integrates multiple resource management algorithms based on standard Lightweight CORBA Component Model (CCM) mechanisms for (re)deploying and (re)configuring application components in DRE systems. Second, it shows how developers of DRE systems can use RACE to decouple resource allocation and system adaptation logic from the time when this logic is applied to a system to configure the resource management algorithms