Scalable Architecture for Real-time Applications and use of bus-monitoring

The lifecycles for industrial applications are becoming shorter, the application complexity is increasing, performance is too low, fault tolerance is required, reuse of components is desired and developers require strong verification tools to cut down the verification phase. As the problem increases with respect to longer development times and higher quality requirements from the customer, it is becoming increasingly important to examine flexible and scalable parallel processing for complex real-time systems. This is the motivation for running the research project SARA (Scalable Architecture for Real-Time Applications). The first SARA system is now running with a vision system connected to an industrial robot (an ABB robot). System buses are important resources in computer systems. Today there are no methods to monitor bus load during run-time, and in this paper we discuss a simple method to do this.