A Visual Environment for the Design, Analysis and Integration of Dynamic Real-Time and Dependable Systems

We shall investigate and design capabilities of a friendly and highly visual software environment called TimeWiz for designing, modeling, analyzing, integrating, documenting and visualizing the behavior of dynamic real-time and dependable systems. End-to-end system timing behavior will be analyzed using established real-time techniques such as rate-monotonic analysis (RMA). Dynamic system reconfigurability and reliability will be studied using bin-packing and probabilistic techniques respectively. Powerful visualization tools included hierarchical browsing and multi views of each lawyer will enable both beginners and experts to be comfortable with the environment. A component respository will enable existing and future COTS hardware and software component types to be defined and modeled. The architecture of TimeWiz will be open and extensible, allowing software modules with new features and analysis tools to be plugged in as plug-and-play units. Components can be exported and imported using component adapters. Automated (skeletal) code generation will enable designed systems to interface with open COTS components such as CORBA interfaces. Support for powerful middleware abstractions used in real-time and dependable systems will be provided by exposing library and infrastructure components only when needed.