ASSERTS: a toolkit for real-time software design, development and evaluation

We describe a real time software engineering toolkit called ASSERTS that provides complementary analysis and simulation capabilities to assist the real time system designer. ASSERTS is configuration independent and allows users to describe the parameters of the hardware platform, interconnection and the kernel and the task system for the purpose of simulation and analysis. The simulation component of ASSERTS is quite detailed and features a number of built-in models for practical real time schedulers, interconnections and resource access protocols. Users can define the behavior of the tasks at various levels of abstraction using a fairly small set of macroinstructions. ASSERTS allows users to quickly gain an insight into the design of the software as it evolves and also allows “what if” studies to be done very easily