In order to successfully develop a real-time system, developers must have information about the system’s temporal properties. Although run-time measurements are useful, the knowledge they provide comes too late. Understanding timing behavior is best done early in the system’s life-cycle, during the planning stage. It is here that questions about CPU adequacy and timing must be addressed, before major design decisions are finalized.
The components of real-time systems can generally be categorized into two groups, hard and soft real-time. Because they represent different problem domains, the practical problem-solving approaches for each system tend to be different. Enea offers design and analysis tools for each of these domains.
Enea’s Advanced Scheduling Framework (ASF) is optimized for designing and analyzing cyclic (partially) hard real-time systems typically containing less than 50 processes or tasks. The ASF provides components for analyzing and synthesizing systems, can interact with running target systems, and can extract run-time process properties such as execution time profiles.
VirtualTime (from Rapita Systems Ltd.) targets complex, soft real-time systems. VirtualTime makes it easy to model and analyze complex systems containing thousands of processes, and is ideal for message-based communication systems with substantial message- or packet-based traffic.