Automatic configuration of real-time operating systems and real-time communication systems for distributed embedded applications

摘要

The design of distributed software for embedded systems in products like automobiles, trains, airplanes, ships, automatic manufacturing lines, robots, telecommunication systems, etc. becomes incredibly complex due to the huge amount of parallel working and interconnected microprocessors.Exactly their mutual in/out-dependencies and, therefore, their implemented communications make them very complex.It is hard to analyse and predict their behaviour.But for hard real-time control the guarantee of a special behaviour is indispensable.Especially, the operating systems, which are often required to provide the communication functions, introduce a lot of overhead and non-determinism into the systems.In this thesis we develop a methodology to generate the operating systems and the communication system for a distributed embedded real-time application.The operating systems for each node of the network and the communication system is thereby generated from a customisable library operating system construction kit.The operating systems for each microprocessor and the communication system are assembled from tuneable components of a library.This is done by a new configuration approach named Puppet Configuration.The final systems are highly adapted to the requirements of the application.Thus, not required functions are excluded and the remaining functions are optimally configured to serve the given use case.Additionally, the behaviour of the finally configured distributed system is analysed in order to ensure a temporal correct behaviour.A new Time-triggered Event Scheduling scheme is used to attain this information before the system is targeted and implemented.Bottlenecks, overload conditions, bursts, and also idle phases are detected.The configuration phase and the analysis phase are embedded into a contemporary design methodology.The configuration has impacts on the analysis and the analysis influences the configuration.Both phases are executed alternately until a valid and working configuration is found (or another configuration cannot be generated).This innovative design approach of using configuration and prediction of its behaviour reveals a lot of potential for shortening the design time and, therefore, the time-to-market of a new embedded real-time system for a distributed controlled product.