A Case Study to Evaluate Pros/Cons of Aspect- and Object-Oriented Paradigms to Model Distributed Embedded Real-Time Systems

The growing design complexity of today´s embedded real-time systems requires new techniques aiming the raising of the abstraction level since earlier stages of design in order to deal with such complexity in a suitable way. This paper reports a case study, which provides an assessment of two well-know high- level paradigms, namely aspect- (AO) and object- oriented (00) paradigms. Concepts of both paradigms were applied at modeling phase of a distributed embedded real-time system (DERTS). The handling of DERTS´ functional and non-functional requirements (at modeling level) using AO and 00 concepts is discussed. Both paradigms are compared using of a set of software engineering metrics, which were adapted to be applied at modeling level. The presented results show the suitability of each paradigm for DERTS specification in terms of reusability quality of model elements.