Pattern-Based Composition and Analysis of Virtually Synchronized Real-Time Distributed Systems

Designing and verifying distributed protocols in a multi-rate asynchronous system is, in general, extremely difficult when the distributed computations require consistent input views, consistent actions and synchronized state transitions. In this paper, we address this problem and introduce a formal, complexity-reducing architectural pattern, called Multi-Rate PALS system, to support virtual synchronization in multi-rate distributed computations. The pattern supports a component to be virtually synchronized with other components in different instantiations of this pattern. We present an application of a hierarchical control system to show that the composition of these instantiations can be used to achieve desired system-level properties, such as distributed consistency and distributed coordination. We verify the logical synchronization guarantee of this pattern, which holds as long as the pattern assumptions are satisfied. We also discuss the correctness analysis necessary to validate these assumptions and provide a tool support to perform this analysis automatically on the AADL models.