Robots: A real-time systems architectural style

Abstract

This paper presents an architectural style for real-time systems, and an associated formal architectural description language, called Robots. A basic specification in Robots consists of a synchronous control task that is responsible for the dynamic reconfiguration of the system controller as a set of asynchronous observer and process tasks. The controller architecture evolves by hierarchical refinement of observers and processes into lower level control tasks each dominating a new set of observers and processes. Robots is given operational semantics by statecharts. Also, the architectural style is embedded in Robots by semantic rules that allow formal checking of the consistency and completeness of architectural specifications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1999.