CHaRy: the C-LAB hard real-time system to support mechatronical design

Abstract

CHaRy is a software system to support the synthesis of periodic controller applications, where hard real-time conditions must be guaranteed for software tasks. Due to complexity reasons, CHaRy decomposes the overall problem of implementing periodic controllers on parallel embedded computers to sub-problem partitioning, timing analysis, allocation and schedulability analysis. This rigorous decomposition is relatively new for hard real-time software. Since CHaRy takes into account both the embedded controller applications as well as the encompassing system, the engineering of computer based systems (ECBS) is supported. Since all these sub-problems are still of huge complexity, CHaRy provides efficient heuristics for all these subjects. Hence CHaRy supports the mapping of controller models (implemented by C code) to a number of tasks (partitioning), the extraction of their computation times (timing analysis), and their assignment to a processor network (allocation), so that all hard real-time conditions are guaranteed (schedulability analysis). The paper provides an overview of the system, supported by many examples.