Component-Based Performance-Sensitive Real-Time Embedded Software

The software complexity is continuously increasing and the competition in the software market is becoming more intensive than ever. Therefore, it is crucial to improve the software quality, and meanwhile, minimize software development cost, and reduce software delivery time in order to gain competitive advantages. Recently, Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) was proposed and has now been applied in various industry and business applications as a possible way to achieve this goal. As verified by numerous practical applications in different fields, CBSD is able to increase software development productivity as well as improve software quality. Modern embedded real-time systems have both strict functional and non-functional requirements and they are essentially safety-critical, real-time, and embedded software-intensive systems. In particular, the crucial end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) properties should be assured in embedded systems such as timeliness and fault tolerance. Herein, I first introduce the modern component technologies and commonly used component models. Then, the middleware in distributed real-time embedded systems is discussed. Further, adaptive system resource management is elaborated upon. Finally, the prospects of a component-based approach in implementing modern embedded real-time software is discussed and future research directions are suggested.