Abstract

Embedded systems are getting increasingly complex due to demands for increased functionality and shorter time to market. The conventional low-level programming languages used in this area do not capture this complexity very well, and do not conform to the methods of modern software engineering. This makes embedded systems development very hard for developers trained in modern software engineering practices and languages, and this is why more attention is turning towards using modern programming languages for developing embedded systems. One such language is Java, a popular modern language with a great number of skilled developers, but with features not very well-suited for real-time or embedded systems. For real-time systems, a suitable specification of Java is required along with tools supporting this specification. Work in this area includes the real-time specification for Java (RTSJ) which adds real-time functionality to Java, and the upcoming safety-critical Java specification (SCJ) intended for hard real-time systems. Both are are steps towards using Java as a language for real-time embedded safety critical systems.

In this talk we present our approach to real-time Java: a Java framework inspired by SCJ , and the SARTS tool for schedulability analysis of systems developed using this framework. The presented framework is an event-handler-based approach with fixed priority pre-emptive scheduling and scoped memory, where the analysis consists of a translation of the program byte-code into a timed automata model using the model-checker UPPAAL for verification of schedulability.