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With the rapid escalation in design complexity of real-time embedded software, application frameworks have become an almost indispensable tool because they greatly ease the work of a designer by performing tedious tasks on behalf of a designer and by reusing semicomplete application codes. To ensure code quality and reliability, computer-aided analysis is also performed for the generated application software in some frameworks. However, when the target is real-time embedded systems, the correctness of the software in terms of satisfying all user-given real-time and embedded constraints becomes a primary objective for such frameworks. To guarantee correctness, formal verification in the form of model checking is a viable solution due to its full automation capability. Nevertheless, little is known from either the existing literature or industrial experience on how formal verification can be integrated into an object-oriented application framework, whose primary purpose was previously only to design and generate application software. This work contributes to the state-of-art technology by showing how a design framework and a verification framework can be integrated. Three main issues are tackled: (i) what to verify?; (ii) when to verify?; and (iii) how to verify? As a solution to these three issues the authors propose a mapping from the object-oriented model to a formal model, a schedule-verifymap strategy and a compositional verification methodology, respectively. These have been implemented in a component-based framework and experiments performed to illustrate their feasibility. Due to the incorporation of industry de-facto standards such as real-time unified modelling language and real-time Java, in the proposed techniques it should now be possible for an engineer to gain access to theoretically proven formal verification technologies that would otherwise be considered to be inaccessible to an engineer unskilled in verification techniques.

Advancements in hardware and software technologies have made possible the design of real‐time systems and applications where stringent timing constraints are imposed on critical tasks. The design of such systems is more complex than that of temporally unrestricted systems because system correctness depends on the satisfaction of functional as well as temporal requirements. To aid users in correctly and efficiently designing systems, object‐oriented frameworks provide a useful environment for significant reuse and reduction in design effort. In contrast to other application domains, there has been relatively little work on an application framework for the design of real‐time systems. Facing the growing need for real‐time applications, we propose a novel application framework called SESAG, which consists of five components, namely Specifier, Extractor, Scheduler, Allocator, and Generator. Within SESAG, several design patterns are proposed and used for the development of real‐time applications. A new evaluation metric called relative design effort is proposed for evaluating SESAG. Experiences in using SESAG show a significant increase in design productivity through design reuse and a significant decrease in design time and effort. Two complex application examples have been developed using SESAG and evaluated using the new evaluation metric. The examples demonstrate relative design efforts of at most 18% of the design efforts required by conventional methods. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Automotive industry has been integrating growing number of buses and electrical control units (ECU) into the vehicle to cope with the stringent emission and fuel consumption regulations, and to improve driving safety and comfort. The fast evolving electronics hardware and software technologies complicate the system design effort even further. To cope with trend in integrating complex embedded software into modern vehicles, we propose an UML-based automotive system object (ASO) software environment to support the vehicle system integrator in developing their vehicle electronics system. To the specific ECU provider, ASO environment provides the vehicle system model as a whole with constituent models to support the ECU designer in assessing ECU collaboration with other components of the vehicle.