A Framework for the Evaluation of Real-Time Specification Techniques

Abstract

Real-time and embedded software systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in everyday life. Well-defined and robust methods and methodologies are needed to support development and maintenance of such large and complex systems. Specification of a system is a critical phase of the development life cycle and has a major impact on the quality of a system. Formal specification languages and techniques are needed to be able to comprehensively and correctly define and prototype large and complex systems. The quality of a specification directly depends upon the capability of the language or technique used to express the specification. There is a need to determine language appropriateness for real-time systems. This paper establishes a real-time specification technique evaluation framework based on the features of real-time systems. The features are presented and the paper summarizes the result in terms of major features and their sub-features in a tabular form. This detailed list of features should serve not only to compare the techniques using a common framework, but also to determine the extent of real-time support that these techniques provide for specification. Application of the framework is demonstrated by testing a set of specification techniques for the specification of a real-time embedded cell phone software system.