Efficient system modeling of complex real-time industrial networks using the accord/UML methodology

Abstract

Engineers are more and more often faced to the hard problem of developing more sophisticated real-time systems in a world where time to market constraints are constantly increasing. Object oriented modelling with UML brings significant answers to these issues. However, the real-time behavior specification of an application is not yet completely satisfying. Available methods provide a good support for parallelism modelling of an application but are often poor to express realtime features like deadlines, periods and priorities. In this paper, we present a specific UML use supporting qualitative (e.g. multitasking, data sharing, etc) and quantitative (e.g. deadline, period, etc) aspects of real-time behavioral specification. For that purpose, we introduce the concept of the UML active object and present a structured way to use UML Statecharts in order to describe the behavior of an active object without losing any object properties. © 2001 by Springer Science+Business Media New York.