Abstract
The design and development of hard real-time applications is often a difficult and time-consuming task. The difficulties span the spectrum of development from the design and implementation of source-level programs to their execution and fulfillment of performance characteristics at the machine-level. This work addresses these difficulties with a holistic approach to hard real-time application development since there are issues at both the ends of the spectrum that must complement each other. Reasoning and specification of timing constraints and predictability are best handled at the source-level, while static analysis of feasibility should be done at the machine-level.This work describes the generation of an automatic tool-based approach utilizing static analysis for achieving feasibility of temporally constrained code blocks. The salient issues addressed consist of the programming paradigm for real-time applications, the specification and reasoning of temporal constraints and predictability at the source-level, estimating execution time and achieving feasibility through a data placement algorithm, which will provide feedback to the programmer concerning the program's feasibility.Various other issues associated with real-time systems are identified. These issues are mentioned in this work principally for completeness and support of our approach. We present a description of the Hard Real-Time C++ language (HRTC++) for real-time programming, which incorporates timing constraints consistent with the object-oriented concepts. A preprocessor is developed that recognizes the language extension to support the analysis of real-time programs in achieving automated feasibility determination.