Interface and Tools to Support Integration of Hard- and Soft-Real-Time Software Components

Embedded computer systems play increasingly important roles insupporting the modern war fighter. The software on these systemstends to be organized as hierarchical layers, for which the lowestlayers have hard-real-time and demanding throughput requirements. Inthe highest software layers, the software generally needs to be highlyfunctional and flexible, but usually does not have real-timerequirements or severe memory limitations. Intermediate layers in thehierarchy tend to demand intermediate levels of performance andcompliance with less demanding levels of real-time, such assoft-real-time or firm-real-time. Between software layers, developersmust engineer interfaces that provide efficient communication andcoordination without allowing software at one layer from compromisingthe integrity of software running at other layers. This SBIR proposaladdresses issues in the design and implementation of high-performance,secure and portable interfaces between layers of hierarchicalsoftware architectures. Based on the results of this research,prototype interfaces and tools to support the verification ofcompliance with interface requirements will be designed, prototyped,and evaluated. This technology benefits all developers of mission-critical embedded systems, including traditional mil/aero markets, but also automobile control, network infrastructure control and data planes, and rail transport. These technologies areespecially valuable to the community because Ada suppliers are phasing out support for their Ada compilers, and the C and C++ languages do not scale as well to large software systems, especially systems that involve the mix of hard-real-time andsoft-real-time components.