Component-based performance-sensitive real-time embedded software

The software complexity is continuously increasing and the competition in the software market is becoming more intensive than ever. Therefore, it is crucial to improve the software quality, and meanwhile, minimize the software development cost, and reduce the software delivering time in order to gain competition advantages. Recently, Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) was proposed and has now been applied in various industry and business applications as a possible way to achieve this goal. As verified by numerous practical applications in different fields, CBSD is able to increase the software development productivity as well as improve the software quality. Modern embedded real-time systems have both strict functional and nonfunctional requirements and they are essentially safety-critical, real-time, and embedded software-intensive systems. In particular, the crucial end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) properties should be assured in embedded systems such as timeliness and fault tolerance. In this paper, the author first introduced the modern component technologies and the commonly used component models. Then the middleware in distributed real-time embedded systems are discussed. Furthermore, adaptive system resource management is elaborated. Finally, the prospects of component-based approach in implementing modern embedded real-time software are discussed and future research directions are suggested.