ezRealtime: A Domain-Specific Modeling Tool for Embedded Hard Real-Time Software Synthesis

In this paper, we introduce the ezRealtime project, which relies on the Time Petri Net (TPN) formalism and defines a Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) tool to provide an easy- to-use environment for specifying Embedded Hard Real-Time (EHRT) systems and for synthesizing timely and predictable scheduled C code. Therefore, this paper presents a generative programming method in order to boost code quality and improve substantially developer productivity by making use of automated software synthesis. The ezRealtime tool reads and automatically translates the system's specification to a time Petri net model through composition of building blocks with the purpose of providing a complete model of all tasks in the system. Hence, this model is used to find a feasible schedule by applying a depth-first search algorithm. Finally, the scheduled code is generated by traversing the feasible schedule, and replacing transition's instances by the respective code segments. We also present the application of the proposed method in an expressive case study.