Porting Hierarchical Timing Language on a microcontroller based platform

In the last two decades there has been a lot of interest in developing new techniques and new technologies for programming real-time control applications. One of the most recent innovations in the field of real-time programming is represented by the introduction of Hierarchical Timing Language (HTL). Although HTL has many advantages, e.g., timing portability, refinement, etc., one of its major drawbacks is considered to be the overhead introduced at runtime. Nevertheless, in this paper we show that it is possible to develop real-time control applications using HTL for hardware platforms with limited resources, e.g., a microcontroller. Thus in this paper we present an implementation of HTL that targets a microcontroller and we use a quad rotor helicopter to evaluate the performance of the implementation. We also extend the concept of Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) of a task so that it considers the overhead introduces by the runtime system.