Assured Software Composition for Real-time Systems

Research Areas:

Principal Investigator: Jan Vitek

This projects investigates fundamental issues involved in the construction of scalable, reconfigurable, real-time embedded systems. The work focuses on application of object-oriented technologies and, in particular, the Real-time Specification for Java (RTSJ) to the domain of mission critical embedded software systems. The specific outcomes of this projects are: (A) Configurable Real-Time Java Framework: The technical foundation for the project is a new framework for real-time Java execution environments called Ovm. The Ovm framework allows domain experts to configure a real-time virtual machines to the operational requirements of a particular mission, e.g. tune footprint or predictability characteristics. (B) Automatic Configuration of Component Families: Automatic techniques for adapting part of an embedded system in response to changes in its environment, such as, hotswapping bug fixes are studied. Behavior adaption is based on a combination of plugging and reflective object techniques. (C) Integrated Testing and Verification: Software composition requires strong assurance about the behavior of individual components and the system as a whole. This project includes development of compliance tests for real-time embedded systems wrt functional and non-functional aspects. These results will be validated by synthetic benchmarks and representative applications built on the NASA Mission Data System (MDS) testbed running Real-time Java.

Keywords: real-time system, object-oriented, Java, ovm, virtual machine, testing, verification