Lightweight realization of UML ports for safety-critical real-time embedded software

UML ports are widely used in the modeling of real-time software due to their advantages in flexibility and expressiveness. When realizing UML ports in object oriented languages, using objects for each port is one option. However, this approach causes runtime overhead and renders significant amount of additional generated code. To meet the performance constraints and decrease the costs of code reviews required in development of safety-critical real-time embedded software, more efficient approaches are required. In this article, we propose an approach, which introduces relatively less runtime overhead and results in more compact source code. A structural model defined with UML ports is transformed into a model that uses associations instead of objects to efficiently implement the UML port semantics with less lines of code. Achieved improvements and validation of the proposed approach is demonstrated by a case study; the design of an existing avionics software.