Applications

We are witnessing a convergence of key technologies, emerging new applications, and economic forces that is revolutionizing the computing field. With the increasing reliance on digital computers in diverse military applications such as avionics, command and control, unmanned ground vehicles, and advanced data/image processing, tracking and surveillance, a new class of embedded real-time systems is emerging. Such embedded real-time systems must provide highly integrated and highly reliable collection of services while meeting stringent timeliness and fault-tolerance requirements. The increasing sophistication of military systems like Advanced AWACS, JSTARS, and Aegis-class cruisers along with the increasing awareness of cost economics make it essential to develop vendor-neutral embedded real-time applications (ERA) software on distributed/parallel computing platforms.

Sample Application





In order to develop a feel for the range and complexity of ERA requirements, let's consider this representative application which was proviced by our industry partner, Honeywell. The front-end to back-end functions have been organized in four sub-domains: Sensor Data Processing, Object Processing, Command & Decision Processing, and Effector Controls. The table below lists typical timeliness and fault-tolerance requirements in each of these sub-domains.

Subdomain

Real-Time Requirements

Fault-Tolerance Requirements
Sensor Data Processing
hard real-time
latency, period constraints
deterministic
configurable replication
function-specific forward recovery
Object Data Processing
hard-soft real-time
low latency
dynamic, non-deterministic
probabilistic guarantees
history (state) preservation
probabilistic FT properties
Command/Decision Processing
soft real-time
dynamic, non-deterministic
aperiodic processing
external, async. events
high FT requirements
full replication of certain functions
preservation of consistency of large amounts of history data
Effector Control
periodic hard real-time
control loops
high FT requirements
fault-masking for some functions


In this example application, one or more processing nodes may be assigned for the functions in each of the sub-domains. Furthermore, at each stage of the application, one can envision different needs of computation and communication, and different degrees of real-time and fault-tolerance requirements. For example, Sensor Data Processing sub-domain is characterized by intensive I/O processing, with "deterministic" hard-real-time guarantees. In contrast, Object Tracking/Processing may be characterized by computation-intensive tasks, with probabilistic guarantees.
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