Programming Paradigms for Real-Time Systems

This paper is about designing and constructing real-time systems, using mechanisms that support self-organization. Objects make a popular and convenient paradigm for keeping persistent data encapsulated with the operations that act on it, but they tend to omit what is arguably the most important aspect of real-time systems, which is time. There are other mechanisms that do model time, but few of them make time the central part of the programming model. In this short position paper, we offer two alternative(but complementary) approaches to modeling time (and other resource dependencies) in real-time systems, which should lead to more effective designs, since the timing and other interactions can be modeled sooner, and in any case, provide models with a different emphasis. We also make suggestions about the expressive language that can be used for the suggested kinds of modeling, and the infrastructure that underlies the process, which provides the computational reflection that enables self-organization.