Towards System-Level Analysis and Synthesis of Distributed Real-Time Systems

Distributed embedded real-time systems are rapidly increasing in complexity, and the development is done under growing cost and time to market pressure, while the requirements on e.g. safety are raising. This trend is especially challenging in the area of automotive electronics, since such systems are consumer products with very high volumes. To make the development of these systems more efficient, ideas from hardware/software codesign can be used. However, there are some fundamental problems with applying present hardware/software codesign techniques to distributed real-time systems, and these are outlined in the paper, together with a discussion of how the development can be adapted to overcome these difficulties