1.10 Looking Ahead

So far, we have only touched on the defining characteristics of real-time systems and the very basic aspects of the model-based development. In the subsequent chapters of this book, we'll examine the basic concepts of the UML (Chapters 2 and 3) and apply these ideas to the process of creating real-time embedded applications. The process is broken into the overall analysis and design steps, as called out in Section 1.5.1. Analysis is subdivided into specification of external requirements and the identification of inherent classes and objects. Design is divided into three parts architectural, mechanistic, and detailed levels of abstraction. Architectural design specifies the strategic decisions for the overall organization of the system, such as the design of the processor and concurrency models. Mechanistic design is concerned with the medium level of organization the collaboration of objects to achieve common goals. Detailed design defines the internal algorithms and primitive data structures within classes. All the process steps are required to create efficient, correct designs that meet the system requirements. In the next chapter, we'll focus on using the UML to capture the structural aspects of systems.