An Architecture-Based Adaptation Framework for Soft Real-Time Applications

Abstract

Real-time systems are increasingly used in dynamic changing environments with variable user needs hosting real-time applications ranging in number and nature over time. However, to the authors’ knowledge, no unified framework exists that is able to cope with those competing real-time concerns across multiple real-time application domains. This paper proposes an architecture-based framework for managing real-time components’ dependence and lifecycle in an effective and uniform way. A real-time component runtime service is proposed here to maintain the global view, control the whole lifecycle of the components, and keep existing real-time components’ promised contracts in the face of run-time changes. This framework is designed to be easily extended with other constraint resolving policies as well as dependence descriptions languages. At end of this paper, the framework is tested by a simulated control application via adaptation and performance aspects.