Putting OO to work: results from applying the object-oriented paradigm during the development of real-time applications

The paper gives an overview of some results and lessons learned from the application of object-oriented (OO) techniques to real-time systems development. These results have been obtained within the scope of a research project which investigates what advantages can be achieved applying OO issues to real-time systems development, and what improvements in the existing OO methods are needed in order to make them really usable for real-time applications. One of the case studies performed, the process control and monitoring of a package routing system, is used in a comparison of the results obtained by applying an OO approach and a 'conventional' one (functional decomposition using concurrent processes). The paper focuses mainly on aspects concerning the real-time software implementation phase.<>