Forschung : Projekte : Adoorata

ADOORATA – A Distributed Object-Oriented Architecture for Real-Time Automation

German- Brazilian Cooperation

Focusing on the emerging potential of object-oriented real-time computing, a group of researchers in Brazil and in Germany proposed the ADOORATA (A Distributed Object-Oriented Architecture for Real-Time Automation) project. This project has been developed within the context of a German-Brazilian Cooperative Research Program funded by CNPq and DLR. One of the Adoorata's project goals was to define a development process which cost-effectively produces high quality industrial automation systems, i.e. systems that are more robust, maintainable, reusable, etc. than those obtained using conventional approaches.

The research group of the Industrial Automation Lab from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil, headed by Prof. Carlos Eduardo Pereira, has intensively worked in the development of tool support for the design of real-time object-oriented distributed systems. The main part of these tools derives from the SIMOO project, which is a tool with support for object-oriented modeling and discrete simulation. The SIMOO-RT environment has extended the functionalities of original SIMOO, adding features for the specification of timing constraints (e.g. deadlines, periodical activation, etc.) and allowing automatic code generation for a real-time object-oriented programming language. On the other hand, the research group on Real-Time Systems and Communication (Echtzeitsysteme und Kommunikation) in Magdeburg has a large experience in the development of monitoring and runtime strategies for real-time systems.

Objectives
The main goal of this joint work is to define a framework that enables designers to specify, verify, and execute real-time distributed object-oriented systems with end-to-end timing constraints guarantees. It aims to reduce the existing gap between design tools and runtime environments. As a first result of this cooperation an integration of the SIMOO-RT environment and MagicZoom monitoring tool was conducted.

Approach
In order to achieve these goals, a necessary first step is the specification of timing constraints at earlier design time. Precedence rules and temporal annotations should be included into specification diagrams, more specifically into classes, state machines and message sequence charts. From this information, it will be carried out an automatic mapping of the timing restrictions to a temporal description language, like e.g RTL (Real-Time Logic). This mapping will constitute the so called temporal restrictions set, and the idea is to include these specifications properties into SIMOO-RT environment. The temporal restrictions set will be used as input for the runtime environment that will be constituted by two main modules, named dynamic execution module and monitoring module. The former will keep track of the system behavior, including the application and the operating system activities. On the other hand, the execution module will be in charge of dynamically scheduling the application tasks according to the system workload and to the application timing constraints. Both modules will be developed based in the previous experience of the German research group.

Work Plan
The following work packages are going to be addressed and partially realized in a Ph.D. work jointly supervised by Prof. Nett and Prof. Pereira:

· Generation of the temporal restrictions set
· Implementation of the monitoring module
· Implementation of the execution module
· Definition and implementation of a case study
· System and results documentation

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