ezRealtime: A Domain-Specific Modeling Tool for Embedded Hard Real-Time Software Synthesis

In this paper, we introduce the ezRealtime project, which relies on the Time Petri Net (TPN) formalism and defines a Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) tool to provide an easy- to-use environment for specifying Embedded Hard Real-Time (EHRT) systems and for synthesizing timely and predictable scheduled C code. Therefore, this paper presents a generative programming method in order to boost code quality and improve substantially developer productivity by making use of automated software synthesis. The ezRealtime tool reads and automatically translates the system´s specification to a time Petri net model through composition of building blocks with the purpose of providing a complete model of all tasks in the system. Hence, this model is used to find a feasible schedule by applying a depth-first search algorithm. Finally, the scheduled code is generated by traversing the feasible schedule, and replacing transition´s instances by the respective code segments. We also present the application of the proposed method in an expressive case study.